The Women

When I first arrived here, I met a very nice woman who was a captain at the time, and we worked together often. Sadly, after a couple of years, she got promoted and left (as do most people in the military). Fortunately, she stayed in the same town, so I am able to see her every now and then. A couple of weeks ago, we met for coffee, and she told me about a book she had just finished and absolutely loved, The Women, by Kristin Hannah! My friend’s initial training in the military was as a nurse, and she went to Afghanistan a couple of times, so I understood why she would really like that book.

It’s the story of a rich and young woman from California who studied nursing and decided to go serve in Vietnam. Her brother also went there and died quite early on, but she stayed there for a couple of years. There, she made friends, fell in love, worked in very difficult conditions, and saw the horrible destruction brought on by this war, both from the Vietnamese and for the Americans perspectives.

When she left California, soldiers who were sent to Vietnam were hailed as heroes, but when she came back, anti-war sentiments were growing in the US, and she started feeling ashamed of her work there. Those difficult feelings plus PTSD (which doctors were just beginning to learn about), plus a few difficult love dramas, plus a less-than-supportive family, plus the fact that every time she asked for help people told her that « there were no women in Vietnam! » sent her into a self-destructive path.

The last part of the book is about her work to live with her past, find herself, and find how she could help those forgotten women veterans.

It was an excellent book indeed. I found the love stories a bit long at times, especially the last one, but everything actually made sense in the end. I learned a lot about women in Vietnam, a subject I knew nothing about, and about their very difficult time when they came back. We often read books and watch movies about heroic soldiers (men) in horrible conditions, but we rarely tell the story of women (nurses and journalists and doctors) who also went to the war. We forget that the Vietnam War veterans were perceived as « baby killers » and traitors and horrible human beings once the US started realizing that they were not going to win the war, but people blamed the soldiers instead of blaming the government who had sent these soldiers there.

The narrator of this book was excellent, and it took me about 15 hours to get through it. I listened to it while cooking, cleaning, driving, playing cards on my computer…. And even if the last few paragraphs were too cheesy, the whole book was definitely worth reading.