The televised Memorial Day and July 4th concerts on the Washington, DC, Mall offer a variety of stage (concert and Broadway) and film celebrities. I like to watch and hear young performers that I didn’t know before and enjoy the nostalgia that the older performers offer. I’ve sung “backup” in several July 4 concerts and know the amazingly rapid and thorough preparation that New York producers and directors undergo for rehearsals and the final live performance. Several years ago, the Memorial Day Concert honored nurses who have served, especially in Vietnam. When introduced, they seemed happy and content with their current lives. Of course, smiles can cover a host of inner feelings.
Kristin Hannah’s 2024 novel, The Women, introduced me to much that I never ever considered about nurses in Vietnam. I did not watch the hit television series, Mash, because it aired (before DVRs were common) when I was often busy.
Hannah’s wealthy protagonist, Frances (Frankie) McGrath, desperately misses her brother, and his letters from Vietnam, full of positive aspects of the war, lead her to think that if she enlists, she can join him “in country.” The Army requires no extra nursing experience for enlistees, so she joins and gets confirmation of departing for Vietnam within weeks. She arrives home after signing her papers and tells her parents. Almost immediately, the dreaded knock on the front door with Naval officers waiting on the other side, announces the heartbreaking news of her brother’s death. A helicopter crash left no remains available for his burial. In shock, she realizes that she’s already committed to serve in Vietnam.
When she arrives, clad for the entire journey in skirt, heels, stockings, and girdle, the two nurses in her hooch (lodging) roll their eyes and begin her indoctrination. In essence, with no surgical experience, she must participate in gruesome surgeries and learn how to do a tracheotomy, sew up wounds, and every other procedure—because not enough doctors or nurses are available to treat the massive trauma each day when a medical helicopter—or ten—arrive with the wounded. A nurse assesses each man, and those with stomachs missing or bullet holes in the chest or face who cannot survive are treated last. Those with the most chance to live get as much help as they can—even when they arrive carrying body parts.
Frankie learns fast and excels while beginning what become life-long friendships with her roommates—one black and one white. That she, and those like her, survive, sometimes working twenty-hour days, is remarkable.
When Frankie returns to the United States, dressed in her uniform, bystanders spit at her, and taxi drivers refuse to drive her. Her family and friends refuse to discuss her experience, and being over-qualified for menial nursing positions eventually depresses her. Then the Veterans’ hospital denies her treatment because “no women served in Vietnam.” She eventually seeks the ocean for solace. Only after being rescued does she get treatment. Other personal betrayals also affect her until she eventually finds her way. Throughout, her two roommates appear to help and heal her.
This book surprised me. The vivid pictures of suffering and the need for those who tried to heal their own traumas from assisting the wounded by partying “hard,” just hadn’t resonated with me. I have been one of those like her high school friends who hadn’t bothered to consider how much the nurses had sacrificed of their own psyche and soma to save the many young men who didn’t know for what they were fighting.
If you have lacked proper admiration for someone who has represented the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, read The Women. See how we as a collective have blamed leaders for their choices but not offered compassion to whose who have served “in country”—for whatever reasons. It’s time to offer long-denied tributes for those who have courageously risked their own lives to save as many of their countrymen (and sometimes, their enemies) as possible.