Review of The Women by Kristin Hannah

Years ago, I read Lynda Van Devanter’s memoir Home Before Morning (1983) which served as the basis for one of my favorite television shows, China Beach.  When we moved to Indiana, we found out that one of our neighbors had served in the Navy Nurse Corp in the Pacific during WWII.  I loved hearing her stories and experiences as she would come over and teach us how to properly plant flowers and shrubs around our house.  I also read Winnie Smith’s memoir American Daughter Gone to War (1992) when it first came out. Kristin Hannah's historical novel is in this tradition.

It had been a while since I had read a book about Vietnam, so when one of our friends left us a copy of Kristin Hannah’s book The Women, I read it in a couple of days.  It was difficult to put down.  While it is a historical novel, it is very accurate in locations, events, and times.  It is a story that intimately reflects the lives of the women nurses who served in Vietnam.  Hannah shows the reader the horrors of war through the eyes of young women who were thrown into almost impossible situations trying to save the lives of young men while often being the last person many of them would see before their death.  The transformation of a young, helpless, naive “girl” nurse into a competent woman surgical wartime nurse is detailed.  The contradictory experiences of nurses in Vietnam and their return home including beauty and ugliness, inability and ability, lack of confidence and confidence, idealism and realism, laughter and sadness, hope and despair, happiness and anger, support and resentment, respect and lack of respect, shame and pride, and so many others are illustrated as you follow the life of Army Nurse “Frankie” McGrath from her two years “in-country” in 67 to 69 to her struggles coming “home.”  The return home to a family, a community, and a country that did not understand them and weren’t ready to welcome them as “heroes,” especially the women, is a major theme.  The strong bonds of friendship and love between Frankie and her friends, Ethel and Barbara, that develop in Vietnam and last a lifetime figure prominently in the book.  Hannah has written a book whose characters are as complex as the Vietnam War era.  It is also a book about patriotism, something that we do not talk about much these days.