Kristin Hannah’s novel asks us to honor ‘The Women’ who served in Vietnam

Kristin Hannah has been a juggernaut for three decades, crafting more than two-dozen historical fictions about women defining themselves during eventful times.

Hannah’s publisher printed a million copies of her “The Women,” about the life of an Army nurse in the Vietnam War. If the success of this book seems pre-ordained but you still think you can resist the allure of her storytelling — well, that’s the first sign you’ve never read a Hannah novel. With “The Women,” she again proves her skill at submerging readers in a compelling character’s experience and enlightening them about history’s overlooked heroines.

How does she do it? Hannah begins with an untested, unformed young woman, Frankie McGrath, 20, raised in privilege on Coronado Island. Her father honors the family’s male veterans with a “heroes’ wall” of portraits. It’s 1966 and Frankie’s parents throw her brother a lavish party before he reports to the Navy, as is expected for all McGrath men. The expectations for Frankie are just as clear: “She was to be the very portrait of a well-bred young lady.”

Frankie pursues nursing, one of the few careers her family considers acceptable for a woman. A Vietnam veteran tells Frankie a nurse saved his life and Frankie decides to become a hero too, joining the Army with limited training.

Bad idea, you’re thinking. But Frankie presses ahead, and Hannah hooks you, showing how the outcome of one impetuous decision can shape an entire life and overthrow a worldview. Frankie is plunged into field hospital chaos, witnessing unimaginable injuries. Hannah evokes this setting so vividly that the reader is at first shocked and then hardened alongside Frankie, as she contends with sucking chest wounds, duplicitous soldiers looking for romance and “crispy critters,” as the nurses call burn victims, explaining, “We laugh so we don’t cry.”

“The Women” follows Frankie through 200 heart-rending pages of combat hospital trauma, then presents the true challenge of her life: When she returns home, peers consider her service a disgrace. Even veterans shun her, disavowing that any women served in Vietnam. When she’s rocked by flashbacks, the V.A. denies her help. No one considers her a hero, and everyone wants her to pretend the war never happened. Frankie learns that many tenets her lovers, family, and country have insisted were truths were, in fact, lies. The only people able to help are her fellow former servicewomen.

And that’s it, dear reader, Hannah has rendered you helpless at this point, compelled by a character who grows increasingly complicated and flawed, as she flails in love and life and joins a quest for recognition of the approximately 10,000 women who served in Vietnam. “Some women had worn love beads in the sixties,” Hannah writes, “others had worn dog tags.” You’re basically marching alongside Frankie at rallies at this point and, sorry, but you’re a Hannah fan now.

Hannah enjoys the authorial reach to educate legions of readers about the significant subjects she dramatizes. In doing so she demonstrates that, just like the women she writes about, she deserves to be recognized.

Jenny Shank’s fiction includes “Mixed Company” and “The Ringer.” She teaches in the Mile High MFA at Regis University.

The Women

By: Kristin Hannah.

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, 480 pages, $30.