Recognizing `The Women' of war
Kristin Hannah's novel highlights an often overlooked part of US forces in Vietnam: Nurses
The idea to write about nurses in combat zones in the Vietnam War came easy, novelist Kristin Hannah says.
The writing? Not so much.
“The Vietnam War was such a shadow across my childhood,” Hannah says of her earliest inspiration for her new novel, “The Women.” “My friends' fathers were serving, and in fact, my best friend's father was shot down and lost.
“I didn't understand all of the complexities, but I knew that the country was angry and divided,” she says. “You know, we were watching the aftermath and what was happening in the war on a nightly basis. So it just made a really big impact on me.”
So around 1996, after half a dozen or so novels,
Hannah decided to base her next book on women who served in the war.
And then: “The truth was, I just wasn't a good enough writer at that point,” she says. “Because I knew this story was really important, or at least I felt it was important. and I really wanted to be able to write it to the best of my ability.”
She was a new mother at the time, too, so when her editor urged her to set it aside until she felt ready to write it, she did. And there it sat, surfacing occasionally for new beginnings, only to be put aside again until 2020 when the pandemic arrived.
“I had turned in `The Four Winds,' actually the week that Seattle went on lockdown,” says Hannah, who lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington, referring to her previous novel. “Here we are, trapped in our homes for quite some period of time. And I was watching the nurses and the doctors in the medical community, and the price that was being exacted on them by this pandemic.
“Somehow this confluence of being trapped and being reliant on the medical community, and seeing the cost that they were paying to help us, led me back to the Vietnam female nurses,” she says. “I thought, OK, I can't go anywhere. There is no excuse for me not to write this book now, because it feels even more relevant. Our country is divided once again, and so it all felt very familiar.”
“The Women,” which has already been optioned by Warner Bros. for development as a movie, arrives in bookstores Tuesday, one day after Hannah appears at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa.
The protagonist of
“The Women” is Frances “Frankie” McGrath, a 20-year-old Southern California nurse who in 1966 decides to follow her older brother Finley to Vietnam.
She arrives naively thinking she'll be safely stationed far from the front, only to be thrown into the visceral reality of the 36th Evacuation Hospital, where wounded troops and civilians flood the operating rooms during frequent mass casualty events. She's mentored by her bunkmates Barb and Ethel, nurses who've been there a few months longer.
Frankie comes to flourish despite the hard work and heartache she experiences in Vietnam. After signing up for a second tour of duty, and a transfer to the 71st Evacuation Hospital closer to the fighting, she comes home and finds that her reintroduction into civilian life is anything but easy.
“It wasn't solely nurses in the beginning,” Hannah
says of her earliest idea for the novel. “Then, once I read the memoirs of these women and understood what they had lived through, and how heroic and tragic their stories are, I just thought, I cannot believe that this story hasn't really been told.”
The decision to focus on Frankie, a daughter
of privilege from Coronado Island off San Diego, rather than Ethel, a farm girl from Virginia, or Barb, a young Black woman from the South, came partly because the Southern California background matched the early life of Hannah, who was born in Garden Grove.