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By titling her novel The Women, Kristin Hannah implores the reader to ask a question: Which women? Hannah endeavors to answer by exploring the experiences of Frankie McGrath. After returning from the Vietnam War, traumatized and flailing, she’s turned away from the many veterans’ institutions she approaches for help, hearing the refrain that “there were no women in Vietnam” over and over again. Even though she herself is a living and breathing example of a woman who served in the Vietnam War, the idea of “the women” is brushed aside by society. The novel endeavors to reveal the realities of warfare that Vietnam’s female medical veterans endured.
There are many moments where Frankie’s continued existence is in real danger. She scrapes through perilous situations by the skin of her teeth. In the combat zones, especially in the mountains at Pleiku, she works under constant threat. Far from her initial dreams of working on a “safe” Navy ship, the novel often finds her treating patients during the chaos of rocket attacks and performing lifesaving operations using only flashlights or firelight when generators fail. Starting with her brother Finley she waits and watches as many of the people she cares about die, but she manages to persist. Her survival also goes beyond keeping her physical body safe, as she undergoes a whole new frontier of psychological warfare when she returns home to California. Rather than avoiding shrapnel and bullets, Frankie has to force herself to overcome her trauma and guilt in order to survive. When she builds The Last Best Place Frankie’s healing hits a turning point. She both provides a refuge for women veterans and makes a space to heal herself through helping others.
Frankie’s journey to safety in Montana is slow and gradual, but there are many moments in the novel when huge changes come as enormous surprises. Two of Frankie’s lovers from Vietnam essentially rise from the dead, shocking the reader. Rye’s reappearance signals the beginning of Frankie’s almost-terminal downward spiral, but Jamie’s reappearance offers her a new lease on life. Frankie had been sure he was dead, and had lived her life accordingly. Just like her, he managed to beat the odds and make it home to the US. Although it’s not a romantic return, Donna’s arrival at Frankie’s farmhouse is also a startling moment for the reader. These experiences show how survival requires more than physical endurance. It demands emotional strength and self-discipline no matter what the potential consequences.
Ignoring consequences is a damaging habit that Frankie must work to break. Frankie’s relationship with Rye illustrates how love can obscure judgment and lead to harmful choices. She stays emotionally tied to Rye despite discovering that he has lied to her about their relationship for many years. Rye’s promises to leave Melissa trap Frankie in a cycle of hope and disappointment. This attachment prevents Frankie from finding real love, and limits her ability to rebuild her life. She forgives Rye repeatedly, even when his actions are totally divorced from his words. Although she loves him, Rye is a terrible influence on Frankie. Her feelings for Rye damage her relationships with other lovers and with her family members, and brutally diminish her confidence. She keeps doing the same thing and hoping things will be different, until hitting rock bottom forces her to address these patterns.
Frankie falls into these unhealthy patterns, for the most part, because they are all she had to cling to when she was serving in Vietnam. She’s repeatedly traumatized as she is forced to witness the suffering of soldiers and civilians, often having to dismiss young children from the triage line as hopeless cases. She also works under life-threatening conditions herself, which is a far cry from how he expected life as a nurse to be. She expects a warm welcome when she returns to California after her tours. However, a miasma of danger and horror seems to follow her back. There’s no crown of laurels waiting for her at the airport, at the new hospital where she works, or at her parents’ mansion. Instead of being in physical danger but surrounded by understanding comrades, she is comparatively physically safe but is surrounded by people who dismiss or despise her.
There is no support for women like Frankie, and so she must fight constantly not to fall into a pit of depression and isolation. The war also leaves physical and emotional scars on others. Barb’s brother Will dies in a police shootout after returning disillusioned from an army that exploited young black men. Jamie and Rye live with lasting injuries and harrowing memories of captivity from their time as POWs. The effects of Agent Orange—which the US government weaponized without knowing its carcinogenic properties—add another layer of suffering to the trauma festering in veterans like Frankie. Like particles of Agent Orange, the truth about her past is within her, rotting her from the inside and causing irreparable damage.
Because there’s no infrastructure to help them, women veterans have to use their nursing talents and their solidarity with one another to heal themselves. The Last Best Place allows women like Frankie and Donna to find solace in understanding company. Because they are understood and accepted, they can rebuild their lives. Frankie’s creation of a heroes’ wall of her own flies in the face of McGrath tradition, relegating men to the background and celebrating the women whom she believes deserve honor and recognition. Her efforts show that healing occurs best in an environment where pain is acknowledged and addressed, not dismissed. Through this, The Women emphasizes the need to acknowledge the toll that war takes on veterans regardless of gender, and to consider the heavy price they continue to pay for their service.
