“There were no women in Vietnam.” This statement is repeated as Frankie McGrath, a former army nurse in Vietnam back from the war and suffering what we now know is post traumatic stress – nightmares, alcohol addiction, the inability to settle into a stateside job—pleads for help at the local VA. She is told there were no women in Vietnam. She is asked by one of the few psychiatrists who deign to meet her whether she is menstruating, which, apparently would explain her emotional reaction to having been intimately involved with the carnage and chaos that was the Vietnam war.

Kristen Hannah‘s novel, “The Women,” introduces us to Frankie, a 20-year-old in 1966 who impulsively joins the army to become a nurse in Vietnam, following her older brother who has joined the Navy.

He is killed in action before she ships out, but this only strengthens her resolve. The first half of the novel shows us why Frankie later suffers from post traumatic stress. She is an operating room nurse in Pleiku (Hannah initially planned to use made up names for places in Vietnam, but was convinced by the women she interviewed that the truth was more important.) She is trained to react to the sound of helicopter rotors, indicating that mass casualties will soon be on the ground and waiting for triage.

Frankie learns quickly from two other nurses, Barb, a black woman from Georgia and Ethel, a white woman from Virginia (the women who give the title its name). They help her navigate the paralyzing terror that comes from hearing shells explode 10 feet from the building.

I related most strongly to the first half of this novel because I am the wife of a Marine Lieutenant who served in Vietnam. I can attest that like Frankie, he still has nightmares about the war and carries visible scars, as he lost a good deal of his hearing from artillery fire. For years, he’d jump out of bed in the middle of the night choking, muttering “Stand By,” a signal before jumping out of a helicopter.

Stand By

Fighting your way out of sleep,

you stumble out of bed, disoriented, muttering

the words etched on the black rock in your chest:

Stand by.

You’re in the doorway of a plane over a ravine,

the earth below a jungle hiding villages,

where even little children try to blow you up.

Stand by.

Prepare to jump into a maelstrom,

so scared you nearly cut your finger off,

shooting with your safety on.

Your ears are ruined, ringing,

blasted by artillery fire, then steeped

in a filthy brew of swamp.

They creep into your daylight hours¾

sharp bursts of anger aimed at machines that won’t work,

waiters who can’t wait, the job you think you hate.

Some days I leave you at the checkout line,

refuse to make excuses to unlucky clerks.

Other days, I stand by, until the cordite clears.

*

Frankie falls in love with two men in Vietnam. Those feelings keep her from finding love back at home, even though she believes both men are dead. The first, Jamie, is a married surgeon. Frankie tells Jamie she is unwilling to pursue a relationship with him because she knows he is married. She’s also been warned by Barb and Ethel that men in Vietnam will lie to get a woman into bed. Nonetheless, Jamie tells Frankie that he loves her and it’s clear she has fallen in love with him. He is shot down on his way to R&R in Hawaii. Somewhat improbably, he shows up in the operating room with very little chance he will survive. He’s lost a leg and has grievous head injuries. The last we see him, he’s being medevacked to a hospital. Frankie sees the medics in the helicopter abandon CPR and takes this as a sign that Jamie has died.

The second man she falls in love with is Joseph Ryerson Walsh, her brother Findley’s best friend from the Naval Academy. She meets Rye at a going away party for Findley when he finds Frankie hiding out in her father’s study festooned with photographs of heroes from various military engagements. There are no photos of women. Ry tells her “women can be heroes too,” an oft repeated phrase in the book.

It’s hard to follow such a dramatic and high stress narrative with a much wider view of the society that Frankie returns to, and the novel loses energy in the second half. Frankie wants to be seen as a hero, but discovers that the country is embroiled in Vietnam protests and views returning vets with disdain or disgust.

Frankie spends a lot of wasted energy trying to get her father to be proud of her or even acknowledge her service. He has lied to his neighbors by saying she was studying in Florence. Her mother wants her to return to country club life. But neither parent abandons Frankie, even when she becomes angry and drug addicted.

Frankie’s love for Jamie was forged in the operating room and on their few trips to water ski or dance at the Officer’s Club. Frankie is determined not to have sex with him. Rye, as Frankie calls him, does seduce her into a full-on love affair. At first, Frankie tells him she wants nothing to do with him because she has heard that he is engaged, but he arranges to meet her in Hawaii where she is on R&R (and where he assumes she is months away from her discharge and therefore a safe target). Rye says “I promise I am not engaged.”

What she doesn’t know at the time and learns only years later when she sees Rye, who she believes had been killed in action, return as a POW is that he had been married all along. Rye’s betrayal and lies speed Frankie into drug abuse and hopelessness.

In my opinion, Frankie‘s love life detracts from the novel. Frankie’s ideas about love may have been as naive as her statement that she was “serving her country” in Vietnam, but what she learns as an OR nurse is to juggle emergencies, stand on her feet for 17 hours until every casualty has been dealt with, and comfort soldiers who had moments to live, telling them she would write to their mothers. Hannah’s attempt to tie up the love stories feels contrived. Frankie didn’t need a second betrayal by Rye to resort to taking pills—a familiar PTSD saga.

Throughout Frankie‘s rocky return to civilian life, her friends Ethel and Barb rescue her from time to time. They pick her up and take her to live with them on Ethel‘s farm in Virginia. But Frankie returns to California when her mother has a stroke. The novel isn’t really about The Three Women. In fact, Barb and Ethel can’t help her, and at one point, Frankie avoids Barb’s phone calls because she doesn’t want to tell her the truth about Rye’s return.

Hannah wanted to honor the 10,000 women who served in Vietnam. But it seems Hannah didn’t trust her reader to stay with Frankie’s story without several dramatic love stories. Did this do her a dishonor? Frankie ultimately finds her calling counseling other women who have returned from Vietnam. Perhaps this would have been a good note to leave it, on “the women,” all 10,000 of them.

*

In January of 1973, Nixon announced “Peace with Honor,” the signing of a peace treaty that began the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.

The treaty was designed to ensure South Vietnam’s independence, but by April of 1975, Saigon had fallen to North Vietnam and the peace accord was recognized as a sham. We might refuse to call our involvement in Vietnam a “war.” We might refuse to say we lost. But both are lies. Our experience in Vietnam ushered in decades of U.S. troops on foreign soil, and a growing recognition that our military might is not equipped to win conflicts we don’t understand.

I was a student in Berkeley during most of the Vietnam years, where protests were common, but the war seemed far away. None of my friends were drafted, although I’d had a boyfriend back east for a time who’d been a medic. He said little about what he did and saw. I had no real contact with the war until 1975, when at our first law job, I met the vet who would become my husband. Hearing his experience was when the war became very close and personal.

What was your experience of the Vietnam War? And how does it affect what you think about armed conflicts today?