The Women is a novel written about the role women played in combat in the Vietnam War by the best-selling author Kristin Hannah. I found the first half of The Women to be captivating because it covers a combat nurse’s role in the Vietnam War, the casualties, the horrific nature of warfare and the description of surgeries and hospital beds. It was a vivid read of what warfare is like and what it means being a woman at the warfront. The heroine of the novel, Frankie, is shown to be from a posh family in Colorado but loving Vietnam as a war nurse because she feels useful. Her brother Finley dies in the war early on and this propels her to join the army as a nurse. Frankie’s innocence about joining the war is shown at the beginning of the novel when she says to her friend Ethel: “My brother died over here, too. And…I wanted to make a difference.” Frankie stopped hearing the naivete in her words. “Yeah. That’s why I re-upped for a second tour. We all want that.”
Soon enough, Frankie understands how difficult it is to actually make a difference and work eighteen-hour shifts at the war-front. Yet she is shown to be one of the best nurses there. Describing Frankie as a nurse, Hannah writes: “Frankie had learned to think fast and move faster. She could do more than she’d ever imagined; she could initiate a surgery or close a wound or put a chest tube. Hap trusted her with morphine administration and talked her through all his surgeries, teaching her every step of the way. And some of this took place under direct rocket attack and mandatory black out conditions, in a pouring rain.”
There she falls in love with a married man, Jamie, whom she avoids getting embroiled with and finally she meets Finley’s friend Rye who it is said is engaged but is only trouble for Frankie throughout the novel. To understand Frankie and Rye’s complicated relationship throughout the novel, it is best if you give ‘The Women’ a read. It is a heart-wrenching and captivating saga of lovers that Hannah has written with great depth and emotion. Frankie’s relationship with her uptight parents is another interesting dimension of the novel that I will leave to the reader to explore in depth, when they pick up the book.
The Vietnamese characters are not as fully fleshed out as the Americans. There is in fact no main character or even side character that is Vietnamese
The description of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese people in general, the riots back home in America (through Frankie’s mother’s letters in the first half of the novel and through Frankie’s participation in riots in the second half) are all epic. One paragraph describing the war reads as follows: “Frankie waited for a smile that never appeared. She wished she were surprised but she understood the child’s trauma all too well. More and more villages were being bombed. More Vietnamese were dying, leaving their children alone in the world. The tragedy of it all was overwhelming.”
There is also a great deal of emphasis on sisterhood and the bond of friendship, as whenever Frankie is in trouble (which is often), Barb and Ethel – her African American friends and fellow nurses from back in Vietnam – come to her rescue. Their bond is shown to be a tight one throughout the novel, and this is a feature of Hannah’s writing that I for one really appreciated because who in today’s world doesn’t understand the joy of having women best friends who are by your side through thick and thin. One problem, though, that I felt while reading the first half was that the Vietnamese characters are not as fully fleshed out as the Americans. There is in fact no main character or even side character that is Vietnamese, although there could have been assistants, a patient, a driver – shown as a native character whom Frankie perhaps befriended. And that is a flaw in the characterisation of the novel and hence its portrayal of the war itself.
The second half of the novel is, in my opinion, blander, as Frankie suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and deals with the ramifications of serving in a war which everyone, even her Republican parents wants to be over. She suffers from nightmares and has difficulty keeping up all her relationships. She is ashamed and without giving any spoilers to the details of her problems she goes through a series of changes which lead her to show her transformation after therapy from a naïve girl to a stronger, mature woman towards the end of the novel, proud of the fact that she has served at the war-front. The book is a dedication to all the women who served in the Vietnam war and were brushed aside when they came home and told that “there were no women in Vietnam.” In its own way, it is a feminist novel, portraying the lives of women at the warfront, their turmoil, their challenges upon returning home, their relationships and their friendships. Hannah has written a book which is worth putting on your reading list.