Kirsten Hannah Archives

Cover image of "The Women" by Kristin Hannah

The Women, Kristin Hannah. St Martin’s Press (ISBN: 9781250178633), 2024.

Summary: A historical fiction account of the experiences of women nurses who served in Vietnam war combat areas and what it was like to come home.

Frankie McGrath grew up in a strict Catholic household where military service was honored on a “wall of heroes” in the family library. So when her brother Finley enlisted as a Navy helicopter pilot, she decided to follow him in one of the few ways women could, by becoming a nurse. After completing nurses training, she enlisted in the Army, where she could go to Vietnam right away, ill-prepared as she was, leaving her parents in shock. The only “heroes” were men.

But she wouldn’t follow her brother. She would take the place of one who died in a helicopter crash in which no remains could be recovered. And soon she would discover that this was only the tip of the iceberg. She arrives at mildewed quarters amid a mass casualty event. She sees mangled bodies of young men and blood thick on the floors. Nurses Barb and Ethel, who become steadfast friends, walk her through it. A skilled surgeon, Jamie, teaches her step by step how to close wounds and perform procedures to save lives nurses would not ordinarily perform. She not only becomes good, she discovers a calling. Some men live because of what she does. She comforts many in their dying moments.

She re-ups when her friends go home to help the younger nurses. But something is wrong. The war is escalating and young men rushed into service come in droves to her evac. One day, napalm victims come to the hospital and she holds a napalm burned child as it dies. She watches Jamie, wounded severely under attack take off in a helicopter and a medic stopping CPR.. She falls in love with a helicopter pilot, Rye, who she learns died just before he was due to come home.

The second part of the book is about what happened after her tour ended and she returned home. People curse and spit on her when she arrives at the airport. Her parents don’t want to hear about her experiences. They want life to go on as if she hadn’t been in Vietnam. She learns they had given out the story that she was studying abroad in Florence. She’s not a hero to them. Rather, they are ashamed of her.

Then the nightmares begin. She has flashbacks when she hears a loud noise at a party. She can’t keep nursing jobs. Drink and drugs help her self-anesthetize. Frankie seeks help at the VA and is told women didn’t serve or see combat in Vietnam. She cannot find help. Something is broken inside, but she doesn’t understand what. She tries to pull herself together, with the help of Barb and Ethel, only to lose it all when a triggering event sends her spiraling out of control

We watch her self-destruct, despite the people, including her parents, who try to care for her. We wonder as we read if she will get the help she needs to pull out of the death spiral she is in.

Kristen Hannah captures a story too-seldom told. It took nearly twenty years to unveil The Vietnam Women’s Memorial in 1993. It depicts a combat nurse caring for a wounded soldier.

Vietnam Women’s Memorial, Washington, D.C. Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

I have a friend, a former colleague, who was a nurse in Vietnam. She has never talked about her experiences in the war or coming home. I wonder if they were anything like this book. Kristin Hannah helps me understand why she may have remained quiet. She also helps me understand the debt we owe to all the women who served. I grieve the painful things they saw and the horrible ways many were treated when they returned. I grieve hearing “no women served in Vietnam” when 265,000 did in military and civilian roles. Thanks to Kristin Hannah’s fine account that affirms that “they were heroes, too.”

The Nightingale

I noticed a few trends in my reading this month. One was that I read more fiction than in the usual month, including works by Kristin Hannah, Agatha Christie, and Rohinton Mistry. The last author overlaps another trend, and that is reading non-Western authors. Rohinton Mistry is from India, Nabeel Quereshi is American-born of Pakistani descent, and Soong-Chan Rah was born in Korea and now lives in the U.S. I’ve also enjoyed reading a couple women theologians, Michelle Lee-Barnewall and Marva Dawn. All these voices stretch me to see a bigger world than my roots as a white male from the Midwest of the United States. I also had the chance to plunge into David Maraniss’ excellent biography of football icon Vince Lombardi, a social history of the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century and a few other books as well. So, here are my July 2016 reads:

The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015. The story of two sisters, estranged from each other and their father, a poet and bookseller, broken by World War I and the loss of his wife, as they face the Nazi occupation of France, how each resists this brutal regime, and how they find reconciliation and a kind of healing in the end. (Review)

Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian, Michelle Lee-Barnewall. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016. Argues on the basis of the biblical texts for a reframing of the discussion of the relationship of men and women from one of power versus equality to one that focuses on the elements in the biblical texts around reversal, inclusion, unity and service. (Review)

When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. The biography of Green Bay Packers football coach Vince Lombardi, showing a man striving for excellence in, and caught in the tensions of the three priorities in his life: faith, family, and football. (Review)

In The Beginning, GOD, Marva J. Dawn. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009. A series of reflections on the texts of Genesis 1-3 focused not on questions of beginnings and the controversies that surround these chapters but on what they show us of God and how this may lead us into worship. (Review)

Mapping Your Academic Career, Gary M. Burge. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015. Traces the career trajectory of a college professor, identifying the factors that mark the successful passage from one “cohort” to the next, the risks to be negotiated in each season of work, and key resources for career development. (Review)

Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, Nabeel Qureshi. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016. Contends that there is a basis in the foundations of Islam for violent, and not merely defensive, jihad, which neither can be ignored, nor assumed of all Muslims, but calls for a proactive response, particularly of Christians, of love and friendship with the hope of breaking the cycle of violence. (Review)

The Big Change, Frederick Lewis Allen. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2016 (forthcoming, originally published in 1952). A social history of the United States from 1900 to 1950 chronicling the expansion of the middle class, the technological changes that occurred, and the impact of two World Wars and the Depression. (Review)

Prophetic Lament, Soong-Chan Rah. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015. A commentary and exposition of the book of Lamentations that advocates for the restoration of the practice of lament as part of the worship of American churches, particularly majority culture evangelical churches. (Review)

One Nation Under God, Bruce Ashford and Chris Pappalardo. Nashville: B & H Academic, 2015. Explores whether and how it is appropriate for Christians in the American context to engage in politics, how one brings one’s faith into this, and applies this to seven contemporary issues. (Review)

Breaking the Rules, Fil Anderson (foreward by Brennan Manning). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2010. Anderson traces his own spiritual journey of moving from rules- and performance-based religion to an intimate relationship with God where he was unafraid of revealing his true self. (Review)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie. New York: HarperCollins, 2002 (originally published 1926). Poirot comes out of retirement to solve the murder of Roger Ackroyd, who is killed after learning that the woman he loved, who has taken her life, had poisoned her first husband and was being blackmailed to cover up the fact. (Review)

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Centered around the flat of Dina Dalal, inhabited by two tailors and a student with a larger circle on the periphery, the novel charts the “fine balances” the people of India sought to maintain through the Emergency Rule of Indira Gandhi–balances of both physical and spiritual. (Review)

Best of the Month: This was a tough one. I was torn between Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Hannah’s The Nightingale. Both are well-written books dealing with profound themes. I will give the nod to Hannah’s book as a better read. Both books actually explore “the fine balances” of survival under tyranny and the razor’s edge between hope and despair. Hannah’s book was the one that kept me up at night thinking about what I had read.

Quote of the Month: One of the runners up for best of the month this month was Soong-Chan Rah’s Prophetic Lament. He made this challenging observation about the imbalance between celebration and lament in most American churches:

“What do we lose as a result of this imbalance? American Christians that flourish under the existing system seek to maintain the existing dynamics of inequality and remain in the theology of celebration over and against the theology of suffering. Promoting one perspective over the other, however, diminishes our theological discourse. To only have a theology of celebration at the cost of a theology of suffering is incomplete. The intersection of the two threads provides the opportunity to engage in the fullness of the gospel message. Lament and praise must go hand in hand.”

Coming Soon: I will post a review tomorrow of Japanese-American artist Makoto Fujimura’s wonderful new book, Silence and Beauty, a reflection upon Shusako Endo’s novel, Silence, and the intersection of Christianity and Japanese culture. I’m also currently reading Julie M. Fenster’s Jefferson’s America, an intriguing account of the explorations of the American west commissioned by Jefferson during his presidency, and how he used these to assert America’s hold on these lands. I’m also reading John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One, having read his sequel on Genesis Two and Three, and Richard Horsley’s Covenant Economics, a biblical study of how the covenant shaped (or didn’t) economic relationships in Israel, and in the communities of followers of Jesus. I’m looking forward to reading a gift from my wife, Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time, a novel exploring the life of Dmitri Shostakovich under Stalinist Russia.

Hope you are able to squeeze a few more “summer reads” into your life before school or work pick up for you!