In Kristin Hannah’s New York Times bestseller, The Women, we meet Army nurses who were shamed and made to feel unworthy of recognition or thanks for their service in Vietnam. The story opens in 1966 when the world is in turmoil. A friend tells Frances (Frankie) McGrath that “women can be heroes” as she contemplates her father’s family heroes wall of military men, and her brother prepares to serve in Vietnam. To be near him she enlists in the Army Nurse Corps against her parents’ wishes and gets shipped to Vietnam. Meanwhile, anti-war demonstrators burn their draft cards. While in-country she saves the lives of wounded soldiers, holds the hands of others as they die, and cares for a dying baby covered in napalm.
Coming back home to sunny California, she doesn’t fit in with the debutantes and social life she left behind. Her outbursts of anger and grief are incomprehensible to her friends. They tell her to forget about the things she experienced in Vietnam. When she performs a tracheotomy on an accident victim in the hospital where she is now working, she is fired. By responding as a combat nurse, she has exposed the hospital to liability because only doctors should do this kind of intervention.
Her father is embarrassed by her erratic behavior. “Everyone at the club will be saying Connor McGrath’s daughter went to Vietnam and came back crazy.” She lashes out at him and leaves, crashing her car into a lamppost. Crying and mood swings drive her to the VA outpatient clinic. The doctor there tells her she wasn’t in Vietnam because there were no women in Vietnam. He is there for veterans. She’s not a combat veteran, by his definition, so he tells her to go home and just forget about Vietnam.
Frankie calls her Army nurse friends and they come up with a plan to help her. To get their voices heard, they join the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Frankie thinks she would rather just not talk about it anymore. She will forget and just move on with her life. The nightmares get better, and she learns to never speak about her struggles. “Quiet was the perfect camouflage for pain.” She often feels ashamed and that she had been a part of something bad.
At a march on Washington, Frankie is told by male veterans that there were no women in ‘Nam. “I WAS THERE!” she screams. Gold Star mothers who had lost their sons in Vietnam are denied the opportunity to place wreaths on their graves. Frankie feels that America is so divided and so wrong about Vietnam. Her moral code, shaped by her Catholic upbringing, leads her to feel confused and devastated by the conflict and betrayal experienced by herself and the soldiers and nurses during the war.
She becomes involved with the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, selling Missing/POW bracelets and writing letters. Moral injury is not yet a widely recognized concept, but she learns that some experiences settle in our bodies as well as our minds. Addicted to both pills and alcohol, she crashes into a bridge, hitting a man on a bicycle and losing her job as a nurse. Realizing she is lost, she seeks out a veteran’s therapy group where she is told she doesn’t belong because it’s for vets who saw action in ‘Nam. A suspected suicide attempt lands her in the locked psychiatric ward of a drug and alcohol treatment facility where the psychiatrist diagnoses her with post-traumatic stress disorder. As this is a new label just now being applied to veterans, she doesn’t understand. When she tells him she didn’t see combat, he tells her she did see combat – she was a surgical nurse in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Tarred by the same brush as those like Lieutenant Calley who perpetrated the My Lai massacre, she had become ashamed of her time there. She had lost herself. She felt invisible. Through guidance in individual and group therapy, she released memories in session after session. Journaling helped her to confront both the evils of battle and the wonderful ways the soldiers and nurses had cared for each other. After a while she quit “soldiering on” and trying to forget her trauma. On her release she found an AA meeting and a sponsor. Moving to Montana she buys a ranch, names it the Last Best Place and opens it up to other women like herself. Horseback riding, carpentry, art, knitting, writing, and music brought healing and peace. Frankie and another nurse take classes in clinical psychology and offer therapy to the residents.
Frankie’s healing comes closer to completion when she visits Washington, D.C., in 1982 for the unveiling of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial – the Wall. She is thanked for her service by a wounded veteran who is there. This motivates her to tell the country about her sisters – the nurses with whom she had served. She decided to begin her story with “three simple words: we were there.”
Reading this book has been cathartic for me. My late husband served on a 12-man Special Forces team in Vietnam from 1966-67. From his stories to me I recognize the truthfulness of Frankie’s story. She and her friends at the Last Best Place were practicing many of the tenets of MISNS’ ATHENA (Archive of Testimonies, Histories, Experiences, Narratives, and Accounts) Nexus Project. Releasing their memories through art and writing was a means toward their healing from the shame and feelings of invisibility caused by hearing that “there were no women in Vietnam.”
10,000 American military women were stationed in Vietnam serving as nurses, physicians and medical personnel, and in air traffic control and military intelligence.
Author Kristin Hannah acknowledges the guidance and support of Captain Diane Carlson Evans, a former Army nurse who founded the Vietnam Women’s Foundation. Her own story is told in Healing Wounds.
MISNS is signing up organizations as partners, seeking funding from grantors, sponsors, and donors, and recruiting women veterans to participate in a pilot program.
Interested individuals can contact Dr. Roberts at droberts@chaplainconsultants.com.
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Susan Sganga is the Media Specialist for Moral Injury Support Network for Servicewomen, Inc. and is a public health specialist located in North Carolina. She can be reached at 704-254-1548 or susanpsganga@gmail.com.
Sources
Evans, Diane Carlson, and Welch, Bob. (2020). Healing Wounds: A Vietnam War Combat Nurse’s 10-Year Fight to Win Women a Place of Honor in Washington, D.C. Permuted Press.
Hannah, Kristin. (2024). The women: a novel. St. Martin’s Press.
Roberts, Daniel. (September 3, 2024). 5 Year Strategic Plan for Moral Injury Support Network for Servicewomen, Inc.As of September 3, 2025. Email to staff.