While we were on vacation in Michigan this past July, I was able to get a book read that was on my shelf. I have heard many comments about how good it was. I don’t know how many of Kristin Hannah’s books that I have read but none disappoint. I enjoy that she researches and speaks to the actual nurses who were in the war. The war that they were told that there were no women in Vietnam. So glad that she took this subject to say yes there were, approximately 10,000.
The story starts out at an affluent home in May of 1966, with Frankie who is 20 and is walking around sad because her brother is going to Vietnam. They have always been close, Frankie and Finley and she was feeling left out. She slipped into her father’s office where there was a wall devoted to their family’s history, it was “The Hero’s Wall”. Her father’s picture was not there as he had been labeled 4-F.Maybe all the hurrah about the heroes wall made Finley want to take up where his father wasn’t able to go or his father pushed it in his way to have one of his children be in uniform to go on the wall. One of Finley’s friend came into the office and were talking about the wall and he wondered why there were no women on the wall. she said it’s the hero’s wall, to honor those in the service of their country. He said that “women can be hero’s too”. Those words change the trajectory of her life.
Frankie had gone to college to be in nursing, and while in high school they had learned how to iron buttonholes and to precisely fold a napkin. Women were supposed to get married, raise children and keep a lovely home.
Well Frankie took her nursing degree to Vietnam and was put immediately to work. she followed her brother to war. She pushed herself in college by increasing her work load and graduated early with honors. She would write to her brother for the next 6 months getting amusing letters back from him telling about he and his fellow sailors aboard the ship.
The war was not portrayed correctly here in the states and America did not have a good view of what it was actually like. They were lied to.
While working in a small hospital after college she checked on a patient who tried to commit suicide. He talked about the nurse that helped him get through while he was at the 12th evac hospital in Vietnam. He had stepped on a bomb and lost his leg. It was a taste of what war was like. After that she had made the decision to volunteer. She wanted her parents to be so proud. She got something totally different.
Frankie went to basic training, flew to Honolulu boarded a jet bound for Vietnam, the lone woman at the front of a line of 257 uniformed soldiers. Women had to travel in their Class-A uniforms: a green jacket, slim skirt, nylons polished black pumps and a flat garrison hat. Beneath it all was a regulation panty girdle to keep her nylon stockings up.
She was met with explosions, red and orange and someone shooting at the plane. It took a couple of times till the plane could land. That was her welcome into Vietnam. The next part of the story is about what Vietnam was like in the evac hospital and how amazingly brave the nurses and doctors. There is so much that you just have to read it.
The last part of the story is when they come home and how they were greeted, by the U.S. and their parents. It explains how they overcame the horrors that they saw, and some were ok and other couldn’t shake it. It would take a long time.
I did not enjoy the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, or reading a book in college about it. It is all so sad as this book is too. It was a really good book and eye opening and needs to be read and I hope you do.