THE WOMEN, Kristin Hanna’s 2024 novel tells the story of Frances “Frankie” McGrath, the well-bred daughter of a wealthy Coronado, California family that values military valor in its men and steely poise in its women.  The novel opens at the gala going away party for Frankie’s beloved older brother, Finley, a Naval Academy graduate, who is leaving for Vietnam in 1966.

Finley writes cheerful letters home, detailing the camaraderie, the scenery, but nothing of the dangers. Months later Finley is killed, shot down, no remains recoverable. Reeling from the shock, the unfathomable pain of this death, Frankie, at age twenty-one, completes her nurse’s training at a Catholic women’s college, and without telling her parents, signs on as an Army nurse requesting assignment in Vietnam. The Army immediately assigns this young, untested nurse to an evac unit in the midst of the fighting.  She endures the brutal Tet Offensive of 1968.

Kristin Hannah’s portrayal of the chaos and mud and blood and tears, the severed limbs, the broken bones and broken hearts and busted guts and burned infants, will leave readers shaken.  Frankie’s fatigue and desolation (along with dysentery and insomnia) are vivid. Battle tested, strengthened, Frankie responds to, cares for the wounded, the desperate, the scarred. She becomes a skilled and respected surgical nurse. When her first tour of duty is over, she re-ups because the men she serves still need her.

Amid the stress and strains of caring for soldiers and civilians caught in the fighting, Frankie (a virgin at twenty-one) falls in love. Twice.  Her first lover lost to her. Her second lover, fulfils her heart before he, too, is lost. More crucially than the love affairs, Frankie befriends two other nurses, Barb and Ethel, women whose background could not be more different than hers. And it is from this triumvirate of women that the novel takes its title. Indeed, the very dedication of this novel is to the “courageous women who served in Vietnam.” The book lives up to this promise.

Amid the battles and the blood, Frankie Barb, Ethel and others are only barely aware of rising stateside dissent against the war.  (Letters from Frankie’s mother decrying the protests provide this info to the reader.) On her return to the States in 1969 Frankie is made brutally aware of opposition to the war and to those fighting it. Stepping into baggage claim at LAX, still wearing her Army uniform, she is spat upon and called a baby-killer.

For this reader her struggles after homecoming were the most harrowing part of the book, more brutal even than the battle sequences in Vietnam.  Once home, Frankie the nurse becomes the wounded, the desperate, the scarred. This whole second half of the book follows her struggles to adjust to a society that despises and denies her service.

Frankie’s PTSD and outbursts of rage make her unfit for society of any sort, much less to conform to the conservative values of her parents. Barely enduring a country club luncheon with her prim mother, Frankie learns from a well-wisher that her father has put about the lie that she has been studying in Florence for two years.  The family lauded her brother’s military service, but they are ashamed of hers. At every turn her worth and experience are denied. She gets a job in a local hospital where her surgical skills, honed in war, are dismissed and she is treated like a Candystriper until she is fired for saving a gun victim’s life before the doctor shows up. Her intolerable situation with the parents explodes and they cast her out. Desperate, flailing in a cauldron of alcohol, despair and PTSD, she crashes her car and goes to the VA hospital begging for help, only to be told that basically, she does not exist. “There were no women in Vietnam,” they insist, and prescribe a bit of Midol and a nice nap, dearie.

By the time she (with Barb and Ethel’s help) has slowly recovered some measure of equilibrium in 1970, the killings at Kent State and Jackson State have shocked and horrified the American public. Barb and Ethel and Frankie know the true cost of that war and they too turn to protest. They try to march with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but they are told, “There were no women in Vietnam…” Their work, their suffering, their service are all denied.  They are asked to step aside, out of the way.

Amid all this drama there is romantic heartbreak with its concomitant loss of self-worth. Compounding that erosion of confidence is Frankie’s conviction that neither her service nor sacrifice merits acknowledgment much less reward. Frankie turns to addiction, pills she relies on to sleep, to wake, to function at all.  Crawling out of that trough, getting clean, creating a new life for herself and other women broken by the system, that process becomes Frankie’s quiet triumph.

I first read The Women while I was working on Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice.(University of New Mexico Press, July 2026.) I could not help but see a parallel in Frankie’s postwar experience to that of my brother, Doug Johnson, who went to Vietnam in June 1969 as a nineteen-year-old grunt. Just as the Army persistently denied any recognition to Frankie and the women who had served, they did the same for Doug. His postwar situation was further complicated by drug addiction and the burden of Undesirable discharge which clung to him (and to his sense of self-worth)  like dirty toilet paper to a shoe.

Doug’s parents, unlike Frankie’s, did everything they humanly could to help him heal and integrate, including psychiatric care and hospitalizations.  (Undesirable denied him any veteran’s benefits.) My father, convinced the Undesirable was undeserved, mounted a heroic campaign to get it reversed. The first foray took place in December 1970, just three months after Doug’s return. At a daylong hearing in December 1970 with Inspector General’s office at Fort MacArthur, Doug was cross-examined by an elderly colonel. When the Inspector General’s office announced their findings in January 1971, they declared that Doug’s accounts, “while abounding in plausible particulars, were simply untrue.”  His claim was denied. The Undesirable stood.

The Johnsons fought on. In their long battle with the Army to get the Undesirable reversed, they found that, rather like Frankie McGrath, Doug’s experience was discounted, demeaned, dismissed.  When finally, after three years of denial and defeat the Army offered Doug a half-measure of victory, that is a General Discharge Under Honorable Circumstances, the Johnsons gratefully accepted. At least he now had veteran’s benefits.

The Women ends correctly (metaphorically speaking) at the dedication of Wall, the granite memorial in Washington DC, with its 58,000 [plus] names of the American dead in the Vietnam War. By 1982 Frankie’s strength and her struggles have earned her internal peace and the support of caring friends. My brother was not so fortunate.  I do not know what, if anything, he thought of the Wall. By 1982 I had distanced myself from him to the point where we hardly spoke.  His drug addition, PTSD, mental illness and other woes wrought havoc among his family, his friends, his wives and lovers for thirty years.

I created Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice out of documents that had been locked in my basement for half a century, a cache of papers related to my parents’ long struggle with and for my brother. I first came upon these papers in the autumn of 2023. In December that year, my mother died. I began work on this book in a spasm of grief and anger. As I read, re-read, poured through these letters and documents, that grief deepened, broadened.  And the anger?  Oh, the anger bubbled up like lava. Doug Johnson’s name is not on the granite wall, but Vietnam took his life all the same.  His experience in Vietnam left him miserable and scarred  What the Army did to him after his return, that, I came to believe, was criminal.