What we should remember ... how "The Women" reminds us

By JoAnne Young 

 

There were no women in Vietnam, they said. 

 

Except for the 11,000 or so American women who served there during 10 years the United States sent troops to fight alongside the South Vietnamese in their battles with the North. Except for the women who were there in makeshift hospitals in the middle of battlefields as nurses and doctors. The women who were communications specialists, intelligence officers and support workers in military headquarters. 

 

Except for the several million Vietnamese women who served in the military and in militias,  especially those engaged with guerrilla forces that supported the North Vietnamese Army in spying, medical care, logistics, administration and combat. 

 

The women served their country in the most controversial war in recent memory. And no one noticed. Except for the men who suffered the blasts and bullets, broken bones, burns and brain injuries and passed through their care in one of the battlefield hospitals. The men who were treated with ingenuity, compassion and expertise by those women. 

 

Nearly 50 years after the Vietnam War ended, I am rethinking what I thought I knew about the war and the role of women there. I joined the cascade of readers recently who tumbled through The Women, by Kristen Hannah, following 20-year-old fictional character Frances “Frankie” McGrath as she graduated from nursing school and joined the Army after her brother’s enlistment, following his example to serve her country. 

 

We soon find out how difficult a life she has chosen. 

 

Kristen Hannah, a lawyer turned writer, whose best-selling books The Nightingale, The Four Winds, The Great Alone, has mesmerized readers and developed a huge fan base. That’s evident by the number of Lincoln library holds on this, her newest book, standing for weeks at more than 400 people waiting to check out the 109 copies. 

 

“The women had a story to tell,” Hannah said, “even if the world wasn't quite yet ready to hear it, and their story began with three simple words. We were there.” 

My daughter, a big fan of Hannah’s books, surprised me with a copy of The Women for my birthday in May. I’m usually a slow reader, switching off among three or four I have going at once. I gulped down this one. Weeks after finishing it, I am still thinking about it. 

 

Hannah researched the women who served in Vietnam well. Then she threw everything she learned about those who served into Frankie’s story. 

 

In one scene of 10 hours of mass casualties, rows of helicopters with the injured hover near the hospital, waiting their turn to touch down. Rocket blasts shake the Quonset huts. The lights go on and off in the operating room. The noise of mortar attacks, helicopters, suction machines,  generators, surging electricity, hissing respirators, is excruciating. All the while, U.S protests of the war are going on at home, with returning GIs getting the opposite of a hero’s welcome.

 

The book is intense. The stories of the women who served is thought provoking. 

 

I knew there were nurses there because where there is war, there are nurses and doctors to care for the injured and sick. My mother was a nurse in her hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, and then a military wife. My father spent his career in the Air Force, but when his next assignment was to be Vietnam, my mother drew the line and he left the service. 

 

I was a military brat, one of those kids who learn bravery, resilience, adaptability and toughness as only the military can teach. You have to learn those skills when you follow your parents from station to station, changing locations, schools and friends every 12 to 24 months. 

 

I knew a bit about the Vietnam War. I had participated as a student in protest marches and sit-ins against the war and the country’s leaders who sent so many young men to their deaths or to a life of physical, mental or emotional disability. More importantly, I had known a young man killed in that war.   

 

Kenney Chappell, his name on Panel 28E, Line 53 on the Vietnam Wall Memorial in Washington D.C., his body buried in Shreveport, Louisiana. His single mother did ironing for my grandmother and I had known the family when I was a young girl living in Shreveport with my mother and sister while my military father was stationed in Turkey. 

 

Kenney was small, 5’6 maybe 5’7, and the story goes that he was eager to join the Army so he ate as many bananas as he could the weeks before his physical to get his weight up to qualify. He ended up in the jungle, and was near the end of his deployment, two weeks until he was to go home, when he stepped on a landmine in Quang Tin Province.  

 

The details Hannah reveals in her book about the war and the aftermath for the women who served there, even though fictionalized, are profound. And they are repeated over and over in real life in our world in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza, where women suffer along with the men, in medical roles, in combat roles, in spousal roles. 

 

Cheryl Feala of North Bend, Nebraska, had a true life experience as a nurse in Vietnam, as recounted in several media reports, including Nebraska Public Media. Like Frankie, she spent her first year out of nursing school stationed near heavy fighting. Cheryl was close to the Demilitarized Zone (the DMZ) in 1968. The Tet Offensive had only just begun when she arrived at Chu Lai Airbase.

 

She provided crucial emergency care accompanied by small comforts and necessary but doleful tasks like helping to identify the dead in makeshift morgues. Her airbase was regularly targeted by the Viet Cong. She worked seven days a week, and like Frankie, she would spend occasional downtime on the beach of the South China Sea.

 

When she returned home, “I didn’t talk about it at all for probably 20 years,” she said. “Even my folks didn’t ask. ... It just was never brought up.” 

 

In her service, she was simply doing the right thing, she said. 

 

If you haven’t read the book, consider it. Even if the plot or the writing doesn’t completely suit you – although many, many readers have praised the story and the writing – reading it will recount the details of the Vietnam War and the effect of it. 

That war and those more recently in our world, and their impact on women as well as on the men, need to be remembered. 

 

When it comes to war, women can be, and are, our heroes.