Beloved, bestselling author Kristin Hannah is out with a new novel called The Women. It follows Frankie, a wealthy white woman, age twenty, who signs up to be a nurse in Vietnam. Frankie’s family celebrates war heroism, and no one more than her father, who has a wall of heroes. Oddly, he never served in the military for reasons not disclosed, which shapes his character. When Frankie’s brother signs up to go to Vietnam, albeit in a way that feels safer than the army soldiers traipsing through the jungles, a party is arranged to celebrate his bravery. Shortly after, Frankie enlists, and then news is delivered that her brother has been killed. While her parents try to get her to unregister, Frankie goes to Vietnam a naive, barely-legal adult, which destroys any notion of Vietnam being a heroic adventure. Once there, she’s taken in by nurses at her unit, and shit gets real.
Author Kristin Hannah doesn’t romanticize war, and for that she earns my respect. The rats and bugs, gore and death, humidity and heat all come to life on the pages. Some of the most memorable scenes are Frankie learning from a doctor, which the narrative implies is not a normal way of becoming a surgical nurse, but when there are too few doctors, Frankie can step in and basically act as one. Also, the American soldiers take day trips into Vietnamese villages to treat ailments in the local community. Hannah doesn’t whitewash these scenes with feel-good, pro-American philanthropy. Instead, she clearly lays out how most of the injuries are the result of the war, frequently perpetrated by Americans. Through it all, Frankie writes chipper, heavily obfuscated stories about her time in Vietnam to her parents. Those letters read more like “my week at summer camp” than “death and destruction in Vietnam.”
I did feel hesitant about the amount of romance Hannah included in the novel. Frankie has three love interests throughout the decade during which The Women takes place, and I was worried that a happily-ever-after was going to steal the focus from meaningless death and PTSD. Even after she returns home and no one, not even her parents, can acknowledge that she is a veteran of the war (“There were no women in Vietnam” is a constant refrain), Frankie builds romantic relationships. To be fair, interspersed in the finding-a-man narrative are Frankie’s struggles with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and drug abuse. She’s also inspired to join a POW movement, informing people about American soldiers kept in cages in Vietnam so public attention puts pressure on the president to find these soldiers.
It is a near-tragedy that causes Frankie to begin anew after a deep spiral. Then, time passes and finally America comes to understand what it means to be a veteran of Vietnam; the cries of “baby killers!” falls away, replaced with “thank you for your service.” The ten years during which she was a war nurse and returned to the U.S. confused her father especially, who clung to traditional ideas about gender roles, but had to let go if he did not want to lose his only living child:
She had aged [her father], she knew, taught him that success and money couldn’t insulate a family from loss and hardship. Walls around a house were no guarantee of safety, not in a world that was constantly shifting.
If he couldn’t serve in the military, but his only child isn’t “bouncing back” after her two years in Vietnam, he must come to terms with what it means to serve, even if his notions of heroism don’t fit what he’s seeing happen to Frankie.
I appreciate that The Women gave me a better understanding of attitudes in the U.S. at the time, especially the way Frankie’s father was unmoving in his patriarchic notions for years and how her mother faced her own hardships, which taught her to at least recognize that she doesn’t understand what’s going on with Frankie. I did tire of the constant references to what was playing on the radio; I didn’t need a famous song name every other page to remember it was the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. In contrast. I enjoyed how Hannah shaped her veteran nurses because their friendship was unbreakable after serving together in the same medical unit, but they did not experience returning home or trauma the same way, emphasizing trauma is not one-size-fits-all.
Grab the Lapels 
We need more novels about women in war, particularly in the Vietnam War. Notwithstanding some of your criticisms (which may relate to her overall style/genre?), this sounds like it does grapple with some meaty issues that make it worth reading.
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You may enjoy this novel because you are old enough to remember Vietnam, though to be fair, I don’t now how the Australian experience would be different. I know you lived in California for a time, though.
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I think there are a lot of similarities in experience, Melanie. We were “all the way with LBJ” and so on! Our soldiers suffered too on their return from an unpopular war.
I did live in Ca but a bit later, 1990 to 1993. I also lived in Northern Va from 1983 to 1985. That’s where our son was born. In DC in fact.
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Does that mean your son has dual citizenship?
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Yes …
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Hannah’s books can’t stay on the shelf at my library these days. This one has a hold list a mile long. I’ve only read The Nightingale, which I liked but didn’t love. It sounds like she does a lot of research and for that I commend her.
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I read The Great Alone, which I think would destroy you, Laila. It had me ugly crying. That was my first Hannah book, and I hadn’t realized she was already published many times. She’s mostly historical fiction, but never the same time period.
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I’ve heard a lot of good things about this one. In general, I’m not drawn to books about the Vietnam War (unless it’s Tim O’Brien) but focusing on women does offer a new aspect.
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There don’t seem to be a lot of books about Vietnam in general, and I wonder if it is because people are worried about how they will frame it. The entire time period was so fraught that if a writer took the wrong side in his/her book, they would be flayed on social media.
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The Vietnam War is so interesting to me as a Canadian because I think of it one way as a historical event and then every now and then I’m reminded that many Americans think of it very, very differently. My community actually has a lot of men who came here as draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. There’s also very little pro-military sentiment in general in my part of Canada so people who have done military service tend to keep it pretty quiet.
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Oh, for sure Canada got loads of draft dodgers. There were also many men, I’ve since learned, who joined the priesthood/brotherhood to avoid service. It’s weird now because they’re quite old and have been religious leaders for decades all to avoid the draft. On the other hand, if you’ve met a Vietnam veteran, you’ll notice they’re still scarred from it.
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Yeah, sometimes I’m surprised by who turns out to have been a draft dodger around here. Because often they’re just these really ordinary, fairly conservative old men. I probably come across fewer actual Vietnam vets here but I did have a regular customer at an old job who was an Australian but had served in Vietnam. He was a lovely fellow but it clearly still affected him a lot.
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Being an American, I never hear about any other country doing anything in Vietnam. You’d swear it was literally Boomers in the US vs. Vee-IT-nam!
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Honestly, the only reason I know Australia had any presence in Vietnam is because of that customer. I always think of it as a very American part of history.
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This sounds interesting, though I’m frankly dubious about the idea of learning to be a nurse from a doctor. Most doctors would be terrible nurses, and especially military surgeons! I used to work with a lot of military surgeons in my old job, and half my life was spent picking up after the trail of interpersonal destruction they left behind them. Extremely skilled surgeons, of course, and exactly who you want to fix your kid’s broken arm or replumb your kidneys, but not really the person you want talking you through post-op care. There are some doctors who would make lovely nurses, though – mostly men who perhaps never considered nursing as a career option, and just knew they wanted to help people who were sick.
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Wow, this is an amazing perspective I had not considered. I thought about the doctor-nurse team as being an equal-ish partnership, but I had not considered personality or ability to teach while I was reading about Frankie learning to do more. I wondered if the doctor was showing her more simply because they were out of hands, and if she knew more, she could be more useful. But what made the author think the doctor could explain what he was doing?
What kind of interpersonal destruction was the military surgeons leaving behind?
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Well, for example, when they do the consent process. When you’re consenting someone for surgery, you (rightly) have to spell out all the complications that could reasonably be anticipated. The same is true of anaesthesia, but anaesthetists normally have much better people skills, so they will be able to put the risks in context and be reassuring while being honest. The surgeons would leave parents absolutely convinced that the worst possible outcome was almost guaranteed! They were also consistently rude to nurses and to their juniors – surgery in general is still a very hierarchical specialism, and military surgeons more than anyone. Coming from paediatrics, where (most) paediatricians treat nurses quite well and listen to us as respected colleagues, it was a bit of a shock to move into that environment! I think it’s somewhat inevitable – you have to have a particular type of personality in order to think that you’re the right person to crack open someone’s chest, after all – but there were some surgical specialties where it was more of a problem than others. The ENT team were generally lovely.
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I wonder if military surgeons are so haughty because they think they have seen worse than everyone else. That was a theme in The Women–a sort of Trauma Olympics that suggested nurses hadn’t seen anything because they didn’t do combat patrols.
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I think it is as simple as the fact that both the military and surgery are intensely hierarchical structures. You have to be pretty arrogant to make it to the top (especially in surgery), and people who aren’t naturally either become like that or choose a different specialism; getting to the top then reinforces that arrogance. The military surgeons I worked with were excellent, with good reason to be arrogant – it’s just that the arrogance also has its costs!
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I’m currently reading a book about a female, Black marine biologist, who left academia because she was tired of the arrogance and hierarchy that comes in that field, too. What she and some of her friends did was set up a boat. That’s all people of color. I can’t wait to see how it ends, and I hope they’re still truckin’.
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[…] The Women by Kristin Hannah (Biscuit Book Club and the Boozy Book Club) […]
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[…] Book Club, hosted at a local brewery. I read books I wouldn’t have picked up myself, like The Women by Kristin Hannah and The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters. This club will continue without me when I […]
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