“The Women,” the War, the Wall
When someone said to Frances McGrath, “Women can be heroes,” those words set her trajectory, landing her on the other side of the world. The main character “Frankie” McGrath joined the Army as an Army Corps nurse because she wanted to follow her brother Finley to Vietnam.
From the beginning of Kristin Hannah’s new book, The Women, readers discover how fiction can tell the story of a war that the media and America’s leadership during that war worked to suppress.
In her author acknowledgement, Kristin includes an impressive list of research sources. She also wrote this:
“In writing this novel, I have tried to be as historically accurate as possible. Originally I created fictional towns and evacuation hospitals to give myself the greatest possible fictional latitude in telling this story, but my Vietnam veteran readers felt strongly that I should name the places accurately. Therefore, the hospitals and towns mentioned in the novel are all real; the logistics and descriptions and timeline in a few place have been altered to support my narrative. Any errors or mistakes are, of course, my own.”
Kristin Hannah
My daughter calls a book that she listens to on Audible and then buys the book a “Book Trophy.” That’s what I did––listened to the book and then bought a copy. It’s that good!
My daughter also invited me to attend her book club this past Friday where women nearer her age discussed this book. Not one of them was alive during the Vietnam War. To a person, each of these young women said that once they started reading, they could hardly stop. Riveting.
Caring about Characters in Books
The movie Saving Private Ryan employs the same method of telling a story, a fictional account that describes something that is too big for anyone to grasp. Relating to any historical event like war, you and I have to see through the lens of one person, learn how they experienced that war, know their reasons for being there, identify with the character and care what happens to them. And in the course of reading historical fiction, learn to care about history.
Vietnam Memorial, Washington, D.C., a black granite wall with the 56,000 names of soldiers killed in that war.
Non-fiction history books sanitize, claim authority, attempt objectivity, which is of course impossible. History is said to be written by the winners of wars, which is one reason people were not interested in Vietnam. America lost that war. Hindsight makes the case America should not have engaged in that war.
Years ago, I listened to a book on tape, Alistair Cooke’s America, which chronicles America’s history from Christopher Columbus to Vietnam. The one thing I remember from that book is how Vietnam changed America’s perceptions and attitudes about war. How?
What changed America’s view of war? Alistair Cooke said, “Television.”
Alistair noted that previous wars were seen as heroic endeavors, indisputably necessary. Patriotism and heroism propelled men to enlist to fight. Beliefs were supported by what newspapers reported happened on the battlefield. Stories and films glorified the efforts of soldiers. Soldiers carried out the orders of men far removed from the effects of their decisions. History books ennobled war. Names of soldiers who died in WWI and WWII had been publicly displayed and their memories paid tribute to in colleges, among other places, where men had left school in order to enlist.
A recent film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front showed how idealistic young men volunteered to fight, left their colleges believing they went off to defeat enemies and win battles, not to die in ditches. During Vietnam, college students were among those who protested the war.
But a bitter truth about Vietnam, soldiers were drafted. Countless numbers of those who fought in Vietnam had not reached their twenty-first birthday. These young men couldn’t vote, but they could die for their country.
Before Vietnam, people could imagine war as a noble endeavor. In Vietnam, supposedly, our country fought against Communism.
But when actual footage of what was happening in the Vietnam war was shown on TV news casts, the graphic, violent, and massively destructive images viewed in people’s living rooms changed all that. The narrative began to shift.
“By 1968, at the height of the [Vietnam] war, there were about 600 accredited journalists of all nationalities in Vietnam, reporting for U.S. wire services, radio and television networks, and the major newspaper chains and news magazines.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Vietnam-Veterans-Memorial
Previous wars were supported by media propaganda and fueled by lies fed to the public by politicians and leaders who personally benefitted from war. (I call this kind of leadership, “wickedness in high places.” History more than 50 years later reluctantly confirms how the leaders during that period steered the ship of state.)
Kristin Hannah’s Heart and Her Art
Kristin Hannah writes that she was in elementary or middle school during the Vietnam War. She said, “I remember it vividly: the protest, the darkening tone of the nightly news, the arc of the story told by the media, more and more young men dying, and most of all, how the veterans––many of them my friends’ fathers––were treated when they came home. All of it made a lasting impression.” The seeds for this story were planted then.
I was alive during the Vietnam War too. The television news ran in the background of my busy life. I listened to the radio, knew all the words to the protest songs. The guy who sat in the desk next to mine in high school, his name is on the Vietnam War Memorial in D.C.
Glenna Goodacre, artist born in Lubbock, died in 2020 at age 80. This picture of her sculpture of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial is pictured at the back of Kristin Hannah’s book.
An Untold Story Awaited Its Time
Kristin Hannah tells the story of The Women who were there in Vietnam, helping to save lives providing comfort to dying men, and who came home needing help and comfort themselves. Repeatedly, these women who returned home after their tours of duty met with, “There were no women in Vietnam.” But the nurses, support staff, and countless other women testify otherwise.
The Women is a gripping story about trauma and love and loss, showing the costs of war that lie submerged beneath the hubris of national leaders who move people’s lives like pieces on a game board.
And it’s about friendship. Women friendships, relationships that make the unbearable endurable.
In her acknowledgements, to her children and grandchildren, Kristin Hannah wrote, ” … may you love, read, and learn about history.”
Because, believe it or not, history keeps repeating itself.
