I Read Kristin Hannah’s ‘The Women’.
I’ve watched the Ken Burns documentary series, ‘The Vietnam War’ and have plugged in to a great deal of post-war, counter-culture films and books since. I’ve come to terms with the fact that no matter how much media, documentary style, historical fiction style or beyond, I will never truly grasp what that war meant for this country and for the people that fought in it. It remains a fascinating disconnect between the decisions of the military, the position(s) of the government and the participation of the youth of that era both in and out of the War that I don’t believe will ever appear in our lifetimes. The rifts in perceptions were just too broad and our nation was in desperate need of a rise to modernity. All of that being acknowledged, I didn’t read this book because it was A Vietnam Book. No, instead this book was brought to my attention time and again by many friends who read this book and gave it rave reviews. On some level, I didn’t know what to expect from it, but I did know that this was a book that hit home with a few people for many different reasons.
The first half of the book somewhat underwhelmed me, if I’m being honest. The book was very descriptive and did drag me directly into the war. The rains, the heat, the absolute chaos and fear… all of this felt very on-point with so much of the other depictions of the war that I’ve read and watched. I could cobble together the things I’d seen in documentaries with Hannah’s descriptions, and it felt especially fresh with a perspective from the women’s point of view, nursing for all of these men who were constantly being brought into the OR after facing different combat wounds. Watching her grow into her role through attrition was truly encouraging, and watching the character herself grow was rewarding. However, I felt a little bit like I was reading a story that had already been told. While it had never focused on women before, I still felt like I was getting wave after wave of depictions of events I already knew. This was a war that we stood nearly no chance in, and to have our soldiers mowed down again and again in the fashion that they were was cruel on a massive scale. Maybe that was the message in this portion. Maybe the concept of being “not in combat” but having to consistently be met head on with patients who were both soldiers and civilians is meant to provide a vision of cleaning up the mess of a nation who would not listen.
There are elements of this early and middle portion of the book that I’ll talk about towards the end of this writing, but there was more than just the nursing.
The second half of the book is where the story takes a far more important turn into why this war and the writing about this war needs to persist. In discussing Frankie’s battle with her flashbacks, her memories, her experiences, we get a look into what veterans of all wars become inundated with. The sights they see, the things they endure are simply not meant for the human psyche. Our brains are not built to cope with a continuous loop of harrowing visuals, of trauma, of devastating damage. What makes the experiences even worse is the fact that coming home from this war for Vietnam Veterans didn’t yield the standard hero’s welcome that other wars had rewarded those veterans with. And this book does an excellent job of highlighting the concept of being a stranger in a strange land after coming home from a place that one eventually grew to feel at home in. The tragedy really starts to form as even before it’s written in the book that the main character and her friends almost felt more at home and more useful in a place that wanted them dead than they did when they returned to a place they longed to be for nearly the entire book.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to get an understanding of what that experience must have been like for individual soldiers, and I think Kristin Hannah does a great job at accurately depicting the slowly deteriorating psyche of Frankie who not only deals with the same kinds of PTSD-like symptoms of combat veterans, but deals with the rejection of the American public and the constant unfair expectations of women at the time, not only at large, but also from her own family. Reading through this, you can see an attempt for her and other soldiers simply trying to get back to a normal life and trying to use not only their talents, but also the skills they picked up in the war to advance themselves, but being blocked at every turn in a society that felt more and more unfair at every turn.
Throughout this book, though, a secondary shadow that passed throughout it from about a quarter through the book all the way through until the end are a few different romantic interests that somewhat took away from the credibility of the narrative. Two of the three men that are the love interests throughout this book kind of have no personality beyond Good Looking Man Provides Flat Empty Promise. The interactions between her and those two guys feel ultimately interchangeable and serve no distinct spark or intrigue. I can say that while reading portions of this book, I was saying out loud, “oh hell no… men are DOGS,” which really, I believe anyway but saying it into a book felt a bit diminishing. I wondered several times if this book would pass the Bechdel test. I think the third interest is actually a more realistic interaction and I appreciated the reality of it, but it almost made the other two stand out more.
Even though this book adds nothing new to the Vietnam conversation, I definitely recommend this book! I think it’s written in a way that definitely did not allow me to put it down without a struggle and I really blasted through it faster than I normally would books of this same length. The language is flowy and breezy, despite delving into some pretty heavy subject matter and I think above all else, it is a very entertaining and engaging read that deals with a stark reality in a way that doesn’t preach to you too much. A great read that definitely deserves to be passed around and recommended to friends and family! One thing I will add is a perspective from a friend: she said that this book greatly helped her understand her father’s experience and “would help her connect with a part of him she never knew.” There’s nothing more powerful than that.
