Stark truths___5 plus

The Women by Kristin Hannah   

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The wall of heroes in Frances Grace McGrath father’s house holds no place for women! 

When a friend, Rye Walsh, says to Frances that women can be hero’s, she believes him.

Her brother Finley, a recently graduated naval officer, is deployed to Vietnam. He doesn’t return.

Kristin Hannah has taken the story of women who served in Vietnam and broken it open, revealed it in a way that breaks your heart.

I’m rendered speechless by this beautiful, sobering story of one woman’s journey.

Frances is a barely trained nurse, just turned twenty-one who enlists with the Army to nurse in Vietnam. Believe me she hits the ground running, all innocence lost in her introduction to the harrowing circumstances she faces. Vietnam! A place where she’ll grow, grieve, and work under atrocious conditions.

The scenes of the overcrowded Mobile Medical units, ‘in country’, close to the fighting, are horrendous. Apocalypse Now on steroids. 

Frances is betrayed by her country, the man she loves, and her family. When she arrives home she’s spat on, she’s abused.

The forgotten women of the war. Even Veteran Affairs refused to acknowledge the women as vets!

I cried a lot during the reading of this. The silence is resounding.

We all know Vietnam was a war that should never have happened. Frances’ story encapsulates that.

Frances’ journey is one of hope and disappointment, of shame and guilt, of coming to the place of personal peace at a huge cost.

Hannah has written a novel for all the forgotten women who served in Vietnam in a myriad of capacities. It’s a tribute to the harsh retelling, of the psychologically wounded, of the people who came home to a government that failed to support them, that refused to acknowledge MIA personal may still being held by the North Vietnamese, that lied to them, and like Pontius Pilate washed their hands, in the blood of their people.

Heroic in scope, tragic in forgotten-ness, a generation lost through no fault of their own. Some bought into the myth, some endured, most lost themselves.

Frances’ story encapsulates them all.

Lest we Forget! I know I won’t!

A St Martin’s Press ARC via NetGalley.                                              

Many thanks to the author and publisher.