Frances “Frankie” McGraw is a young woman from a privileged background raised on California’s idyllic Coronado Island. At the tender age of 22 she’s told “women can be heroes too” and that idea changes her life. In the world she inhabits, she’d never considered there could be a different path to life than marriage. Most of what she has been exposed to is women who raise children and spend their spare time in the country club. Her desire to earn the respect of her parents and follow her beloved brother into a warzone leads to her (rashly) signing up to the Army Nursing Corp. It isn’t a decision that is welcomed by her parents. They are horrified–they do not want for her war and bravery. That is for their son to do, not their daughter, but the die has been cast, and it cannot be undone.
Frankie, like many of the troops sent to fight, is little more than a child when she arrives in Vietnam a few short weeks later. While she apparently has a nursing degree, she is inexperienced and totally unprepared for the realities of war–she cannot even start an IV. Frankie is thrown into her first MASCAL (mass casualty incident) pretty much immediately and is soon questioning whether or not she’s cut out for the job.
Frankie does make it through however mostly by builds strong bonds with the women she’s serving with. Thanks to their support and guidance, Frankie finds her place and becomes resolute in her mission to do some good, to bring comfort to the injured and dying, and to help the Vietnamese people caught in the middle of the conflict.
Kristin Hannah paints vivid images of war. The operating room, the injuries she describes, the villages and atrocities…each are at times horrific. Against the backdrop of war, Hannah manages to depict lighter moments too; the camaraderie between the women, the celebrations when people finished a tour and that unbreakable bond between the people who were there. Those ‘lighter’ moments never felt too jarring, it’s a reality of war and even during those moments of “downtime” the threat of danger was still present.
I found that the story seemed to happen to Frankie while she was in Vietnam–she managed to survive without really growing. And maybe that is inevitable for a character going through a crucible. She was poorly trained and in a desperately risky situation, and yet, she survives and improves as a nurse. She falls in love multiple times, and while tragedies occur, she lives, she loves again, and she continues in some sense to bumble through her experiences making similar mistakes over and over again. It is really only in part two, when Frankie returns home, that she begins to learn the lessons from her time in the war.
Frankie is in no way prepared for the reception awaiting her at home, and maybe it is that rude awakening that finally forces her to confront reality. It’s well documented that those returning from Vietnam were treated as pariahs; they were labelled ‘baby killers’ and were spat at for their service. Many were left with life changing injuries, struggling with PTSD, yet they were shunned and left with little support. The learning for me was that for women like Frankie who served, the military itself gave them nowhere to turn to. “They weren’t there” was the refrain every time Frankie sought support.
Women who served in the war had seen many of the same horrors, they’d lost people they loved, suffered injuries, and been left traumatized, found themselves written out of history, their service erased. For women like Frankie, there was nowhere to turn to, and no place where they belonged, and in many ways I feel that injustice is what Hannah is attempting to rectify in this novel.
Frankie’s reintegration into ‘normal life’ is in some sense more distressing than her time in Vietnam. It’s like watching someone slowly drown. She makes some bad decisions, can be frustratingly naive, and isn’t always easy to like, but it’s clear how much pain she’s in and how alone she feels. Despite how bad her decision making and luck seem to be, Frankie continues to love, show empathy, and find the ability to forgive others, which occasionally struck me as deeply unlikely.
Despite some of the frustrations with Frankie’s personality and journey, The Women was an enjoyable read. It’s a powerful story about a distressing period in history – Hannah does not shy away from the crimes committed and the uncomfortable truths about what America did. At the heart of the novel is a story of humanity, telling the tale of the heroic women who made huge sacrifices for their country.
Hannah put significant time and research into this book, maybe to the detriment of the character development of her protagonist, but certainly for this history-loving individual, I enjoyed reading an alternate view of the war.