Novel puts combat nurses front and center THE WOMEN

A few chapters into “The Women,” I experienced a wave of déjà vu — and it wasn’t just the warm Tab and the creme rinse. If you grew up in the 1980s, the Vietnam redemption arc was imprinted on your gray matter by a stampede of young novelists and filmmakers coming to grips with their foundational trauma: patriotic innocence shattered by the barbarity of jungle warfare; the return home to a hostile nation; the chasm of despair and addiction; and finally, the healing power of activism. This was the generational narrative, told and retold in classics like “Born on the Fourth of July” and “The Things They Carried” — the ballad of the boomer, a masculine coming-of-age cri de coeur.

Now Kristin Hannah takes up the Vietnam epic and recenters the story on the experience of women — in this instance, the military nurses who worked under fire, on bases and in field hospitals, to patch soldiers back together. Or not.

The familiar beats snare you from the outset. When the sheltered San Diego debutante Frances “Frankie” Mcgrath’s adored older brother is killed in action in 1966, she’s inspired to enlist as an Army nurse. “Women can be heroes, too,” her brother’s friend tells her. Frankie laughs. Her flag-waving, emotionally constipated parents are not amused.

Dumped in-country without adequate training, Frankie learns the ropes from seasoned nurses and battle-scarred male doctors who propel her past internalized insecurities with barks of no-nonsense encouragement: “Damn it, Mcgrath! We don’t have time for fear. You’re good enough. Do it!”

Within months, she becomes an experienced trauma nurse, confronts the horrors of gut wounds and napalm with courage and compassion, rages against the naïve indifference of her family and friends back home — and attracts the devotion of handsome, tormented, unexpectedly married men.

Hannah is in top form here, plunging the reader into the chaotic miseries of the combat zone. She deploys details to visceral effect, whether Frankie’s performing an emergency tracheotomy during a mortar attack or sipping Fresca in the O Club afterward, while an evocative soundtrack of the Doors, the Beatles and the Turtles plays in the background. (“Music followed the smoke, infusing it with memories of home. ‘I wanna hold your ha-aa-aa-nd.’”)

With Hannah confidently in control, we swoop above the jungle canopy in a Huey chopper, peppered by sniper fire, and skid across the Mekong Delta on a pair of water skis. The historical scenery is rendered with such earnest authenticity that the few millennialisms — “girl squad,” for instance, snapped me back to the present day, as did a pair of kids named Kaylee and Braden — jar precisely because the author otherwise recreates this world so convincingly.

But Hannah’s real superpower is her ability to hook you along from catastrophe to catastrophe, sometimes peering between your fingers, because you simply cannot give

Author: Kristin Hannah Pages: 480

Publisher: St. Martin’s

up on her characters. If the story loses a little momentum after Frankie completes her second tour — slingshot to the finish by a series of occasionally strained plot twists — well, isn’t that the way it went for so many veterans returning home? You stumble along until you find your way.

I was struck not by the way “The Women” radically reshapes the contours of our Vietnam narrative, but instead by how vividly the novel affirms them. Hannah may not offer any revolutionary takes on the war and its aftermath, but she gathers women into the experience with moving conviction. And maybe this story’s time has come again. I described “The Women” to my collegeage daughter — a young woman with her finger on the cultural pulse — and she perked right up.

“Wow, the Vietnam War,” she said. “You don’t see much about that.”