The women who would be war heroes

For many Americans, the tears never stopped. While the 1973 Paris Peace Accords stilled the guns of the Vietnam War, they did not still the legacy of atrocities on all sides nor the record of leaders’ lies on all sides—including those told by three US presidents.

Neither did the accords still our systemic pretense that women played little or no role in the conflict. Granted, women formed only a fraction of the combatants (roughly 10,000 of 3.1 million) and only a tiny fraction of the fatalities (eight of 58,000). But those data obscure a deeper truth. Ninety percent of the women who served in Vietnam were nurses, and they saved thousands of lives. Not without cost: all eight of the women killed were nurses.

The Women is a novel, but Kristin Hannah bases it on sustained research into military nurses’ firsthand accounts of their experiences in Vietnam. She constructs one Frankie McGrath to symbolize all of them. Frankie is a White Catholic college graduate when she joins the Army Nurse Corps and ships out to Vietnam. She hopes to serve her country while becoming a war hero like the men in her family.