The Women Quotes

They stared up at the family photos and mementos. Men in uniforms, women in wedding dresses, medals for valor and injury, a triangle-folded and framed American flag that had been given to her paternal grandmother.

“How come there are no pictures of women up here, except for the wedding pictures?” Rye asked.

“It’s a heroes’ wall. To honor the sacrifices our family has made in service of the country.”

He lit a cigarette. “Women can be heroes.”

Frankie laughed.

“What’s funny about that?”

She turned to him, wiped the tears from her eyes. “I…well…you don’t mean…”

“Yeah,” he said, looking down at her. She couldn’t remember a man ever looking at her in such a way, so intensely. It made her catch her breath. “I mean it, Frankie. It’s 1966. The whole world is changing.”

Frankie had never thought about nurses in Vietnam; the newspapers never mentioned any women. Certainly no one talked about any women at war.

Women can be heroes.

At that, Frankie felt a kind of reawakening, the emergence of a bold new ambition.

“I could serve my country,” she said to the man whose hand she held. It was a revolutionary, frightening, exhilarating thought.

[…]

She could earn her place on the heroes’ wall, and not for marrying well. For saving lives in wartime.

Her parents would be so proud of her, as proud as they’d been of Finley. All her life she’d been taught that military service was a family duty.

“Take it back. Unvolunteer.” Mom looked at Dad. She got to her feet slowly. “Good lord, what will we tell people?”

“What will you…” Frankie didn’t understand. They were acting as if they were ashamed of her. But…that made no sense. “How many times have you gathered us in your office to talk about this family’s record of service, Dad? You told us how much you wanted to fight for your country. I thought—”

“He’s a man,” Mom said. “And it was Hitler. And Europe. Not some country no one can find on a map. It is not patriotic to do something stupid, Frances.” Tears filled her eyes. She dashed them away impatiently. “Well, Connor, she’s what you taught her to be. A believer. A patriot.”

Frankie flinched at every explosion. Oh God. What have I done? She thought of Finley.

Regret to inform you…

No remains.

“I’ve got you,” [Jamie] said again as her breathing sped up. He tightened his hold. “Don’t worry.”

The siren sounded again.

She felt the man’s hold on her ease, felt his tension soften.

“That’s the all clear,” he said. And when another explosion sounded, he laughed and said, “That’s us. Giving it back to them.”

She looked up, embarrassed by her fear. What kind of soldier was she? Standing here, shaking and ready to cry on her first day?

Mass casualty. That was what they called tonight, or actually MASCAL. Apparently, since the recent influx of troops, it was beginning to happen so often that they didn’t have time to call it by its full name.

Frankie stood in the back corner of the Quonset hut that housed the ER. After nine hours on duty, she was beyond exhausted and her feet burned with blisters, but it wasn’t the ache in her bones and muscles and feet that mattered. It was shame.

How on earth had she thought she belonged here? That she had something to offer men who were grievously wounded? She’d been as much help as a candy striper.

Tonight she’d held scissors in hands that never quite stopped shaking and cut off T-shirts and flak jackets and pants, revealing wounds that she couldn’t have imagined before today. She still heard patients’ screams inside her head, even though the ward had emptied a while ago.

It is a strange world we are all in. Volatile and uncertain. We—Americans, I mean—can’t seem to talk to each other anymore, our disagreements seem insurmountable.

I imagine it would feel wonderful to be good at something that mattered. That is something that too many of the women of my generation didn’t consider.

Frankie couldn’t stop thinking about Mai, lying in a ditch, burned, still held in her dead mother’s arms. “Her village had been bombed.”

War was one thing; bombing villages of women and children was something else. God knew there were no stories about it in the Stars and Stripes. Why weren’t they reporting that truth?

A silence fell between them; in it lay the ugly truth that none of them wanted to face. The village was in South Vietnam.

And only the Americans had bombs.

But you know what I’m going to say. It’s ‘Nam.

You meet people, you form these bonds that tighten around you, and some of the people you love die. All of them go away, one way or another. You don’t carry them around with you over there, you can’t. There isn’t time, and the memories are too heavy. You’ll always have a piece of him that was yours and your time together.

There was no winning in war. Not this war, anyway. There was just pain and death and destruction; good men coming home either broken beyond repair or in body bags, and bombs dropping on civilians, and a generation of children being orphaned.

How could all this death and destruction be the way to stop communism? How could America be doing the right thing, dropping all these bombs—many on villages full of the old and the young—and using napalm to burn whatever was left?

Whatever doubt—or hope—she’d once held was gone now: the American government was lying about the war. There was no way to avoid that simple truth anymore. LBJ and his generals were lying to the American people, to reporters, to everyone. Maybe even to each other.

The betrayal was as shocking as the assassination of Kennedy had been, an upheaval of right and wrong. The America Frankie believed in, the shining Camelot of her youth, was gone, or lost. Or maybe it had always been a lie. All she knew was that they were here in this faraway country, soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines and volunteers, risking their lives, and their government could no longer be trusted to tell them the truth about why.

She wouldn’t be surprised if those death stares would be a part of them forever now. Men staring into a world they no longer were a part of, no longer comprehended, a world where the ground beneath your feet exploded. Another kind of casualty. She thought of other men who had grabbed her hand over the past few months, begged her to answer the question, Who will want me like this?, and it struck her that it wasn’t just physical wounds that soldiers would take home from Vietnam. From now on, all of them would have a deep understanding of both man’s cruelty and his heroism.

For a moment she held back, but the effort it took felt toxic, as if the stories she wanted to share might turn to poison inside of her. She couldn’t be here, pretending nothing had changed, that she’d been in Florence for two years instead of holding men’s body parts together in her bare hands. She felt choked by her need to say, I was there and this is how it was. For them to welcome her home and say they were proud of her.

Frankie stood up abruptly. “I can’t believe you’re ashamed of me.”

“I have no idea who you are anymore,” Dad said.

“You don’t want to know,” Frankie said. “You think it means nothing when a woman, a nurse, goes to war. You think it’s glorious that your son goes to war and embarrassing when your daughter does.”

“I wasn’t in Florence, Bex,” she said slowly, trying to calm down, pull back, be okay. Be normal.

But she wasn’t okay.

She was standing with a bunch of debutantes and sorority girls who were planning a wedding with fresh flowers and honeymoons abroad while men their age were dying on foreign soil. Not their men, though, not their rich, pretty college boys. “I was in Vietnam.”

[…]

“Believe me, Bex. It is not a joke. I’ve held men’s severed legs in my hands and tried to hold their chests together just long enough to get them into the OR. What’s happening in Vietnam is no joke. The joke is here. This.” She looked around. “You.”

“Your heroes’ wall. It’s a big fat lie, isn’t it, Dad? You wouldn’t know a hero if one bit you in the ass. Believe me, Dad. I’ve seen heroes.”

“Your brother would be as ashamed of your behavior as we are,” Dad said.

[…]

“How dare you mention Finley?” Frankie said, her anger swooping back in. “You who got him killed. He went over there for you, to make you proud. I could tell him now not to bother, couldn’t I? Oh, but he’s dead.”

“Are you menstruating now?”

Frankie took a moment to process that. “I tell you I’m having trouble after being in Vietnam, and that’s your question?”

“You were in Vietnam? There were no women in Vietnam, dear. Do you have thoughts of hurting yourself? Hurting others?”

Frankie got slowly to her feet. It felt nearly impossible to do so. “You won’t help me?”

“I’m here for veterans.”

“I am a veteran.”

“In combat?”

“Well. No. But—”

“See? So, you’ll be fine. Trust me. Go home. Go out with friends. Fall in love again. You’re young. Just forget about Vietnam.”

“No one wants patriots anymore,” Frankie said. “I can’t wear an Army T-shirt off the property or I’ll be spit on. The country thinks we’re monsters. But I won’t disrespect the troops.”

“It’s not disrespectful to protest, Frankie. We had that wrong. It takes guts to stand up and demand a change. We’re vets. Shouldn’t our voices be heard in protest, too? Shouldn’t they be loud?”

“Enough of our silence, enough asking for information politely. Enough being ladylike. Being ‘just’ wives. It’s time that we stand up, strong and proud as military families and wives, and demand answers. […] We intend to become a political machine with one purpose: make everyone in this country aware of the military men in cages in Vietnam.”

Frankie heard the distinctive whine of a mortar rocket and the crash of its explosion.

She screamed, “Incoming!,” and dropped to the ground.

Silence.

Frankie blinked.

She was sprawled in the grass in her parents’ backyard. What the hell? She crawled to her knees, feeling weak.

Someone had set off a firecracker. A bottle rocket, probably.

And she’d hit the ground. What was wrong with her?

[…]

“Those idiots who get their firecrackers and bottle rockets from Mexico should be in jail,” he said.

Was he saying it was normal to hear that and hit the ground?

“Your pride should come from caring for your husband and child. Women going to war…” He shook his head.

“If I’d been a son who went to Vietnam and came home in one piece, would my photograph be on the wall, Dad?”

“You’re upsetting me with this jabble, Frankie. You’re my daughter. You had no business going to war and I told you so at the time. Now we find out we shouldn’t even have been fighting the damn war in the first place and we are losing. America. Losing a war. Who wants that reminder? Let it go, Frankie. Forget and move on.”

The pills her mother had given her helped to take the edge off of her pain. She learned that two sleeping pills softened the nightmares and helped her fall asleep, but when she woke, she felt lethargic, unrested. One of the Mother’s Little Helpers perked her right up, maybe even gave her too much energy. Enough so that she needed the pills again to calm down enough to sleep. It became a cycle, like the ebb and flow of the tide.

She stopped visiting her parents, stopped answering the phone, stopped writing letters to her friends. She didn’t want to hear their pep talks, and no one wanted to listen to her despair.

Her life alternated between two worlds—one of passion and the other of guilt. Day after day, she promised herself, No more. No more pills, no more Rye. He was as much a drug as the others.

She swore each day she’d tell him to go away and not come back until he was divorced, but when he showed up at her door, wearing a smile just for her, she was lost, and as good as it felt to lose herself in his arms, the pleasure turned cold when he left her bed. Each day she was reminded of her weakness, her dishonesty, her immorality, her obsession. Over and over and over.

“It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a bit controversial, they haven’t added it to the APA manual yet, but we’re seeing similar symptoms in your fellow vets. What you’re experiencing is a familiar response to trauma.”

“I didn’t see combat.”

“Frankie, you were a surgical nurse in the Central Highlands.”

[…]

Henry leaned forward. “War trauma isn’t a competitive sport. Nor is it one-size-fits-all. The POWs are a particular group, as well. They came home to a different world than you did. They were treated like the World War II veterans. Like heroes. It’s hard to underscore too much the impact of that on one’s psyche.”

Frankie thought about all the yellow ribbons on the tree branches in 1973. They hadn’t been there when she came home. Hell, they’d had parades for the returning POWs. None of them had been spat on or flipped off or called a baby killer or a warmonger.

The thing she still grappled most violently with was Vietnam. Those were the nightmares that haunted her. She talked about it with her doctor, told him her stories, and hoped for a kind of resolution, and while talking helped, she knew that Dr. Alden didn’t understand. Not really. She saw the way he sometimes grimaced at a memory, heard words like napalm and flinched. Those moments reminded her that he had never been in war, and no one who hadn’t been in the shit could really understand it.

She knew, too, that when she left the safety of the inpatient center, she would be thrust back into a world where Vietnam veterans were supposed to be invisible, the women most of all.

“You know, I wasn’t afraid to go to war, and I should have been. I am afraid to go to the memorial, and I shouldn’t be. People made us think we’d done something wrong, shameful, didn’t they? We were forgotten; all of us Vietnam vets, but the women most of all.”

The women nodded.

Frankie looked at the women, recognized their emotional wounds, felt their pain. “I used to wonder if I would do it again, join up. Was there still a believer inside me, a last shred of the girl who wanted to make a difference?” She looked around. “And I would. In some ways, the war years were the best of my life.”

“You think I feel guilty for urging my son to go to war? I do. It’s a thing I live with.” He swallowed hard. “But I feel more guilt about how I treated my daughter when she came home.”

Frankie drew in a sharp breath. How long had she waited to hear those words from him?

“You’re the hero, aren’t you, Frankie?”

[…]

“I don’t know about heroism,” she said. “But I saw a lot of it. And…” She drew in a deep breath. “I’m proud of my service, Dad. It’s taken me a long time to say that. I’m proud, even if the war never should have happened, even if it went to hell.”