Pete’s Pick
April, 2025
The Women
Kristin Hannah
St. Martin’s Press
February 6, 2024
Introduction
This book tells the difficult story of American women who served in the U.S. Armed Forces during the Vietnam War in the 1960’s and the aftermath they encountered upon returning home. It takes us through the 1970’s as the star of the novel, Frankie McGrath, deals with her issues resulting from the war experience.
Author
Kristin Hannah is an American author who grew up in California, attended the University of Washington and graduated with a degree in communications. She subsequently went to law school and practiced law in Seattle before becoming a full-time writer. This novel debuted on The New York Times bestseller list at number one in early 2024.
Story
The story begins with Frankie and her family hosting a party to see her older brother, a fresh Naval Academy graduate, off to the Vietnam War. In her father’s study, there is a wall of family heroes from all previous U.S. wars. Her dad relishes in that family history. Frankie is envious of the honor and respect family and friends are giving to her brother Fin as he prepares to ship off to war. Frankie is in school finishing her nursing degree and when she graduates, gets a job in a small hospital in San Diego. While still learning her responsibilities as a new nurse and working the night shift, Frankie encounters a patient who lost his leg while serving in Vietnam. He talks about what his experience was like in the evac hospital right after he lost his leg when stepping on a mine. He told her the nurse he had really got him through that initial tough experience. As she sat with him, she had the thought, women can be heroes.
Frankie makes the decision to go to a Naval Recruiting station to see about signing up for service as a nurse. She discovers the Navy required two years of nursing experience before signing up, So did the Air Force. The Army was the only service that permitted her to sign up and immediately ship out for training. She comes home to tell her parents what she has done, only to find them horrified. “Women don’t serve!” her dad says. Just as she gets ready to ship out for training, she learns that her brother has been lost at sea during the war.
The story follows Frankie as she arrives in country and is immediately thrust into the results of wartime combat and its aftermath. The horror of the wounds, the amputations, the burns, and the loss of life are a lifetime of experience in very short order. It turns out, Frankie has remarkable skill and is called on to use all her skills so often during the two years she served in evac hospitals in Vietnam. The story places Frankie in some of the worst battles documented during the Vietnam War. She ended up being in an evac hospital near the fighting in Pleiku during the Tet offensive in 1968. The carnage never stops. Through the experiences, Frankie makes friends with her fellow nurses and the doctors she serves with and they work to keep each other sane as they go through such tough experiences. She falls in love a couple of times and the affairs end up with the doctor being reassigned, killed, or Frankie discovers they are married. Life just goes on for her.
When Frankie’s time of service is up in Vietnam, she returns home to find a country rabidly opposed to the war in Vietnam. As evidence turns up of atrocities committed during the war and a massive coverup by the U.S. government, the sentiment against the war turns even uglier. Worse for Frankie, she begins dealing with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but was not recognized for what it is back in the early 1970’s. As she seeks to get help, no one believes she was a soldier in Vietnam. Women don’t go to war. (As it turns out, about 10,000 women did serve, most of them in the medical services.) Two of the friends Frankie made when she first arrived in Vietnam were Barb, a black women from Georgia, and Ethel, a women from Virginia who eventually wants to become a veterinarian. As Frankie continues to deal with her PTSD, she becomes more and more reliant on drugs and alcohol to take the edge off. As she descends into major depression, Barb and Ethel are there to help her through the difficult times. The story covers Frankie’s involvement in several anti-war movements and organizations designed to help war veteran’s make the transition back home. Significantly for Frankie, the world is very slow to pick up on the issues of women war veterans—women don’t serve, they say.
Ultimately, Frankie decides she needs to leave California and start a new life. She convinces Barb to go on a road trip with her. They end up driving through Montana where Frankie sees a sign for a lot for sale, 27 acres. Frankie and Bard drive through the lot as Frankie’s mind is in a whirl. Ultimately, Frankie buys the place and turns it into a retreat center for women veterans of the Vietnam War who are struggling their way out of drug and alcohol addiction and PTSD and just need a place to find themselves. The story ends with a reunion of the 36th Evac Hospital staff during the unveiling of the new Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC in November 1982. As she goes and mingles with the many veterans, she runs into her mother and father as all three are looking for her brother’s name on the wall. And then, she runs into one of her first loves from Vietnam, a man she thought she had watched die. At last, everything just comes together for her.
Evaluation
This book was a fascinating read for me—not only for the strength of the story and the vivid descriptions of war, but because the first half of the book was very personal for me. My dad was an Army chaplain and he served in Vietnam during the period this story takes place, and served in the same place as the story takes place. He was assigned to the U. S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division and was based out of An Khe, not far from Pleiku where much of the fighting took place that was at the heart of this book’s first half story. His letters and tapes that he sent home described much of the same story that Frankie and her friends experienced, just without all the medical gore. Dad described colleagues he lost during battles and described a lot of the countryside he flew through as he traveled to visit his troops.
The second half of the book hit me hard as well. I started college in the fall of 1970 during the heart of the anti-war campaigns taking place on college campuses around the country. When I arrived at my college in St. Paul, MN, there was a major protest taking place across the street. The 1970’s were a time when there was so much hate in our country for the Vietnam War, for the government that got us into the war, and yet very little appreciation for the soldiers who served in that war. As I watched Frankie struggle to find herself and a new purpose for her life, I remember the newscasts and newspaper articles and public conversations taking place about how the country can redefine itself and find a new sense of purpose. We’ve made progress from that time, and yet my sense is that struggle still continues. I hope you enjoy the book.