The Women: A Novel

“Back in the world, when Frankie had told her friends that she’d hoped to make a difference over here, hoped to make her family proud, they’d rolled their eyes and acted impatient with patriotism; but out here, sitting beside this woman she barely knew, Frankie remembered the pride she’d felt on joining the Army.”

The need to find purpose is one that most women in Frankie’s social circle in California cannot understand. For her, enlisting in the American army where her nursing skills are needed is a step toward this goal. She is reassured that she made the right choice by the like-minded women who surround her in Saigon.

“Frankie was afraid of all of it—mass casualties, failing at her job, keeping Jamie at bay—but she’d been here almost two months and, as bad as it was, time was moving fast. She’d learned what she could from Neuro. If she really loved nursing and wanted to be even better, it was time to take the next step.

‘Okay, Captain Callahan. I’ll put in for a transfer to surgery.’”

Though she lacks confidence in her ability to thrive as an OR nurse, Frankie takes a risk anyway—challenging herself to improve. It is with the help of those who recognize her potential, both fellow nurses and love interests, that she can grow beyond self-imposed limits.

“It was the way of Vietnam; people came, they did their tour, and they left. The lucky ones, like Ethel, flew home in one piece. Some wanted parties for their send-off and some wanted to slip away in silence. Some wanted both. Either way, you woke up one day and your friend was just gone.

War was full of goodbyes, and most of them never really happened; you were always too early or too late.

Like with Finley.

[Frankie] had said goodbye to her brother long after the words could have mattered to him. That was one thing this war had taught her; there was never enough time with the people who mattered.”

Frankie quickly accepts the difficult aspects of life in war—specifically, the fact that loved ones cannot remain forever. It is determination, the desire to save lives, that helps her endure.

“Life isn’t always easy, as you can imagine. People come and go. But I love nursing. It’s important you know that, and that you know I’m happy I came here. Even on bad days, even on the worst days, I believe this is what I’m meant to do and where I’m meant to be. Finley told me once that he’d found himself over here, that his men were important to him, and I know how he felt.”

In a letter to her parents, Frankie stresses that she has no regrets about her decision to serve as a nurse in Saigon. She knows they are dubious about her service, but wants them to at least understand she feels fulfilled as Finley did.

“There was no winning in war. Not this war, anyway. There was just pain and death and destruction; good men coming home either broken beyond repair or in body bags, and bombs dropping on civilians, and a generation of children being orphaned.

How could all the death and destruction be the way to stop communism? How could America be doing the right thing, dropping all these bombs—many on villages full of the old and the young—and using napalm to burn whatever was left?”

Though she is saving wounded soldiers, Frankie begins to question war as a whole. She grows frustrated when her experiences do not match the American media’s reporting. This disconnect will prove even more frustrating once she returns home to anti-war sentiment targeted at her.

“Frankie took a sip of the wine as she stared out at the night lights of Saigon. Even with music playing, the noise of the war was ever-present: the whir of a helicopter flying over the city, the pop of gunfire. Here and there, streaks of red arced through the night sky like fireworks; orange fires blossomed. From here, the war looked almost beautiful. Maybe that was a fundamental truth: War looked one way for those who saw it from a safe distance. Close up, the view was different.”

Frankie’s reflection on the framing of war explains the American public’s anti-war sentiment. As the war grows increasingly deadly, she questions its utility: As an abstract concept, war seems easy to endorse, but the reality of its damage proves difficult to justify.

“Whatever doubt—or hope—[Frankie had] once held was gone now: the American government was lying about the war. There was no way to avoid that simple truth anymore. LBJ and his generals were lying to the American people, to reporters, to everyone. Maybe even to each other.

The betrayal was as shocking as the assassination of Kennedy had been, and upheaval of right and wrong. The America Frankie believed in, the shining Camelot of her youth, was gone, or lost. Or maybe it had always been a lie.”

Frankie grows increasingly frustrated by the disconnect between her reality and war-related information conveyed to American citizens. In this, she has grown from a naïve girl to a seasoned nurse, someone capable of critiquing herself and her home.

“Frankie had been looking forward to going home, longing for it, dreaming about it, but suddenly she pictured it […]

What would it actually be like, being home, living with her parents? How could she go from red alert sirens and saving lives to butter knives and champagne glasses? […]

There was no nurse here with the experience Frankie had. How could she leave the hospital and the casualties—American and South Vietnamese—who needed her? She’d come here to make a difference, to save lives, and God knew lives still needed saving. As much as she sometimes hated the war, she loved nursing more.”

As the end of her first tour approaches, Frankie realizes she is not ready to return to her former life. She recognizes that she has been forever changed by her experiences and is skeptical about fitting in again, about finding meaning in a socialite’s life. When she does return home, her skepticism proves true.

“[Rye] finally released a breath. ‘Will you have dinner with me tonight?’

[Frankie] knew it wasn’t just dinner he wanted; she wanted more, too. Still, he was Rye Walsh, the rule-breaker who’d pushed her brother into trouble more than once (not that Finley needed much help in that regard), and she knew she wouldn’t be safe with a man like him. But, he was still an officer, and hopefully a gentleman. ‘You broke off your engagement? You swear it?’

‘I swear I’m not engaged.’

Frankie stared at him, felt a spark of excitement, like coming alive after a long hibernation. ‘Dinner sounds great.’”

When Rye invites Frankie to dinner, she initially hesitates, torn between propriety and desire. She only reciprocates Rye’s crush when he claims he is no longer engaged, as she wishes to uphold her moral code no matter her decision. Overall, the pair’s reunion brings hope to an otherwise terrifying situation.

“Most of the tables were full of vacationers, talking, laughing, smoking. It was a sharp reminder that while she’d been in Vietnam, the world had gone on. Kids had gone to school; parents had gone to work; not everyone lived and breathed the war. In ‘Nam, it was easy to hear about the protests going on in America and think that everyone was burning the flag and protesting for peace; here, it was obvious that most people had quietly gone on with their lives, avoiding the dangerous shores on either side of the divide.”

Recuperating away from the war serves as culture shock for Frankie, who has grown accustomed to atrocities. For most American citizens, the war remains an abstract concept, a reality that will become more difficult for Frankie when she completes her second tour.

“Don’t believe everything you read—our boys are dying every day. I see more and more soldiers stumbling in from the boonies, their minds broken, their nerves shot to hell. They walk through the bush, snipers everywhere, and step on hidden mines and blow up five feet away from their buddies. It’s awful. […] I can’t fix them all. No one can. But I’m doing my best, and I want you to know that. I am making a difference and helping to save lives.”

Frankie’s letters to her parents have changed since her early days of service. Then, she maintained optimism and revealed nothing about the horrors she had experienced. However, as her service continues, she becomes more direct in conveying these horrors.

“[Frankie had] joined the Army to find her brother and found herself instead; in war, she’d found out who she really was and who she wanted to be, and as tired as she was of all the death and destruction, she was also more than a little afraid to go home. What would life look like stateside?”

Again, the war has allowed Frankie to find purpose and temporarily overcome grief over Finley. She worries she will be unable to thrive without her nursing, and upon returning to California, often longs for Vietnam—which speaks to her need for medical treatment.

“Frankie was surprised to feel a version of sorrow. As bad as it had been in ‘Nam, as frightened and angry and betrayed as she’d often felt by her government and the war, she’d also felt alive. Competent and important. A woman who had made a difference in the world. This place would forever hold a piece of her heart. Here, she had found her place in the world, and she was afraid that ‘home’ was no longer the place she wanted it to be.”

While she has yet to recognize her own need for medical treatment, Frankie knows she has been forever changed by the war. She has grown as a person and nurse, having done what she could to help her fellow nurses and doctors succeed in her absence.

“[Frankie] felt choked by her need to say, I was there and this is how it was. For them to welcome her home and say they were proud of her.

Frankie stood up abruptly. ‘I can’t believe you’re ashamed of me.’

‘I have no idea who you are anymore,’ Dad said.

‘You don’t want to know,’ Frankie said. ‘You think it means nothing when a woman, a nurse, goes to war. You think it’s glorious that your son goes to war and embarrassing when your daughter does.’”

The dissonance between Frankie and her parents—especially her father—is evident as soon as she arrives home. She points out the hypocrisy of her father’s praise of the male veterans in their family (including Finley) and shame over her heroism. She wishes to share her experiences with her parents, but they continue to fixate on traditional femininity.

“Life goes on. But does it really? Not the same life, that was for sure […]

The question was, how? How did you get through grief, how did you want to live again when you couldn’t imagine what that life could be, how you could be happy again?

It was a question that hadn’t occurred to [Frankie] before. She’d done her best to exist (or not exist, really) in the safety of her bed, with the covers pulled up, but even she knew that couldn’t go on forever.”

Frankie unknowingly suffers from PTSD. She feels hopeless and does not see an end to this feeling, partially due to a general lack of understanding regarding mental health. She attempts to cope by misusing alcohol and working, but at other times, she remains confined to her bed.

“‘You exposed my fib about Florence,’ Dad said.

‘Fib?’ Frankie couldn’t believe he’d said that. ‘Fib?’

She knew then what this was about, what it had always been about. His reputation. The man with his stupid heroes’ wall who knew nothing about heroism and lived in fear of that embarrassing truth being exposed. ‘If you don’t want to be seen as a liar, maybe you shouldn’t lie, Dad. Maybe you should be proud of me.’

‘Proud? That you embarrass this family at every turn?’

‘I went to war, Dad. War. I have been shot at in a Huey and lived through mortar attacks. I’ve had my ears ring for days when a bomb hit too close. But you don’t know anything about that, do you?’”

Frankie calls out her father’s shame, which is especially painful since she sought to make him proud by enlisting; however, she is not wrong in wanting support from her parents in general. She is frustrated that he seeks to cover up her experiences rather than understand them, reinforcing the hypocrisy of lauding honor without having suffered for it.

“‘That’s what we’re giving you,’ Ethel said, ‘time to figure it out.’

If Frankie hadn’t been so sick of crying, so emptied out, she would have cried. Thank God for girlfriends. In this crazy, chaotic, divided world that was run by men, you could count on the women.”

In Ethel and Barb, Frankie finds a reliable support system. As fellow nurses, they share her pain: While male veterans have denied the authenticity of her experience, Ethel and Barb recognize her courage and struggle to acclimate.

“About your father and his…reticence about you and the war. All I can say is that something in him was broken by being unable to serve his country. All the men of his generation went to Europe, while he stayed home. Yes, he was proud of Finley and ashamed of you. But perhaps in truth he is ashamed of himself and worries that you judge him harshly, as he feared his friends had done.”

Frankie’s mother explains in a letter that her father denied her service out of personal shame. This misplaced anger partially stems from toxic masculinity, the reverence of warfare as the only way to prove oneself as a man; furthermore, grief over Finley likely plays a role in this dissonance.

“For the past two years, [Frankie had] hidden [the] fact [that she was present in Vietnam] at every opportunity, changed the conversation when Vietnam came up. Even Barb and Ethel rarely mentioned Vietnam; Frankie knew their silence was to protect her, and, on good days, she knew it helped. On bad days, she worried that she couldn’t forget because there was something wrong with her, something broken. In time, hiding her service and not talking about it had allowed shame to take root. She was never exactly sure what she was ashamed of, just that she was weak, or had somehow done something bad, been a part of something bad, something no one wanted to talk about.”

Frankie’s coping strategy for her PTSD is ignoring it—which ultimately fails her as PTSD requires facing one’s pain. Overall, this quote speaks to the downplaying of women’s experiences in Vietnam as less impactful than those of men.

“Writing letters on behalf of the League of Families and the Vietnam prisoners of war quickly became an obsession. Frankie wrote when she felt lonely, when she couldn’t sleep, when she felt anxious, when her mother was in physical or occupational therapy, while she sat in the waiting room at the medical center. She wrote sitting on the beach after dinner. She wrote to everyone she could think of—Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Bob Dole, Harry Reasoner, Gloria Steinem, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters. Anyone who might listen and help or talk to someone who might.”

Frankie finds new purpose by caring for her injured mother and acting on behalf of American POWs. This is ultimately a way to honor her own wartime experience.

“Despite her best intentions, Frankie couldn’t seem to pull herself back from the edge of despair. If anything, the solitude and silence settled so heavily on her that sometimes she found it hard to breathe unless she took a pill, which she often did. By the end of May, she had refilled her prescription twice; it was easy to do for any woman these days, but certainly easy for a nurse.”

Frankie has repeatedly sought help for her undiagnosed PTSD but is turned away—told that women did not serve in Vietnam, or that she is not truly ailing. Her substance misuse leads to a near-drowning, reflecting the depth of her pain but also bringing her the help she needs in former fiancé Henry.

“Henry leaned forward. ‘War trauma isn’t a competitive sport. Nor is it one-size-fits all. The POWs are a particular group, as well. They came home to a different world than you did. They were treated like the World War II veterans. Like heroes. It’s hard to underscore too much the impact of that one one’s psyche.’

Frankie thought about all the yellow ribbons on the tree branches in 1973. They hadn’t been there when she came home. Hell, they’d had parades for the returning POWs. None of them had been spat on or flipped off or called a baby killer or a warmonger.”

As The Women draws to a close, Frankie not only begins to understand the existence of her trauma but the need to work through one of its consequences— internalized shame. By honoring her experiences as he always has, Henry helps her heal.

“So much of what had filled [Frankie] up in the past few years was dark—memories, love, nightmares. She didn’t know who she was without the pain or the need to hide it.

But sobriety—and therapy—had given her the tools to heal. One day at a time. For the first time in years, she was sometimes able to imagine a future that didn’t include pain or pretense. She didn’t believe in ‘soldiering on’ anymore and knew that trying to forget trauma only gave grim memories a fecund soil in which to grow.”

With counseling, Frankie is finally able to face her trauma, allowing her to once again live a meaningful life. Her recovery is a testament to her strength, the heroism that defined her two tours in Vietnam.