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Summary
Chapters Four-Seven
Chapter Four
On her flight to Vietnam—having passed Basic Training with flying colors—Second Lieutenant Frankie McGrath meets Captain Norm Bronson. When she asks, he tiredly tells her that he can’t explain what war is like. Enemy fire strafes the plane as it approaches Saigon Frankie is scared but Bronson comforts her. After deplaning in the heat and humidity of a Vietnamese night, she travels by bus and Jeep to a temporary building to spend the night. She drinks water from a tap, which a spectator tells her is a bad idea. It is, as Frankie learns when she suffers hours of diarrhea later that night. The next day, Frankie meets a female Colonel, who assigns her to the Thirty-Sixth Evac Hospital, located 60 miles from Saigon. Frankie takes her first helicopter ride and arrives, somewhat shaken, at her “hooch,” a Quonset hut in the “Thirty-Sixth.”
Chapter Five
A few hours later Frankie meets her roommates. Ethel Flint is a red-haired ER nurse from Virginia, and Barbara Sue “Barb” Johnson is a Black surgical nurse from Georgia. They immediately tell Frankie that her skirt uniform is not right for the Thirty-Sixth, and offer her some far more casual clothes. They bring her to meet the rest of the medics on sight, but the gathering is quickly interrupted by a rocket attack. Frankie is terrified, but a surgeon named Jamie Callahan offers her a drink to calm her nerves. She’s hesitant at first, but then accepts.
Chapter Six
The next morning, Frankie is egregiously hungover after drinking whiskey with Jamie. She goes to the mess hall for breakfast but can’t keep any of it down. She’s vomiting so much that she arrives three minutes late for her meeting with the fastidious Major Goldstein. Goldstein upbraids her, and then assigns her to assist Lieutenant Flint in the ER for the day. There’s a massive flurry of activity at the ER as a mass casualty event is happening. During a MASCAL, helicopters sprint back and forth between the hospital and the battlefield carrying wounded soldiers to get medical attention. Frankie is overwhelmed and almost panics, so Ethel asks her to comfort a dying soldier named Private Fournette. Frankie does her best but has to watch Fournette die.
Later, Ethel finds Frankie crying by the sea, as she’s wandered away to try and find somewhere to be alone. They talk, and Ethel shares that she also enlisted to follow a boy. However, for Ethel it wasn’t a brother but a lover, a man named George who died in the fighting. She says she had pictured a whole life with him but that dream had died with him. She asks Frankie if she drinks, takes her to the mess hall for a bite to eat, and then to the Officer’s Club to drown their sorrows.
In the middle of the night Frankie gets up to pee, and runs into Jamie smoking outside the bathroom. He’s upset and angry because he had to watch an old friend die that day and was unable to help him. Frankie’s uncomfortable and unsure how to help, so she tells him about what happened to Finley.
Chapter Seven
Captain Ted Smith, who leads the neurological ward, gives Frankie a tour of his facility. He explains that he and his team try to stabilize both injured soldiers and injured villagers before sending them to a better-equipped hospital for major treatments. Frankie gains confidence in her nursing abilities as she learns how to dress wounds and care for patients in the relative calm of the Neuro ward. When she’s been working there for six weeks, she checks on a soldier called Private Ruiz. Ruiz is comatose, but he was a radio operator who saved most of his platoon. She learns this—and that Ruiz was from Texas and wanted to be a fireman–when two of his platoon members visit him. Later that day Ethel and Barb bring Frankie to a Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) mission led by Captain Smith. The team travels to a nearby village to treat civilians. Because none of the Army medics speak Vietnamese, they communicate with patients through gestures. A little boy approaches Frankie and leads her to a small, dirty room that contains a little girl with a gangrenous leg. Frankie fetched Captain Smith, who amputates the leg and gives the girl’s guardian antibiotics to help her recover. After the procedure, the boy gives Frankie a smooth stone, as if in payment. She’s very moved, and she hands him her confirmation necklace in return.
Analysis
The early chapters of The Women don’t make Frankie’s life seem dangerous or precarious in the slightest. However, by Chapter four Frankie has arrived in Vietnam and is surrounded by all the ways a warzone is different from Coronado island. Frankie’s experiences—both physical and emotional—show how survival in a place like wartime Vietnam requires vigilance and the ability to endure under extreme conditions, as well as a hefty amount of luck.
Frankie’s arrival in Vietnam immediately throws her into danger. She’s being fired at before she even lands, as the Viet Cong shoot at the passenger plane carrying her and the other soldiers to the base. It’s a telling introduction to the environment in which she’ll spend the next few years of her life. Even before setting foot on the ground, Frankie realizes that making her way as a nurse in the Army will demand complete awareness of her surroundings and the acceptance that her wellbeing is always at stake. The helicopter ride to the Thirty-Sixth Evac Hospital reinforces this, as bullets pass dangerously close during what should be a routine transfer. Even the basics of commuting between locations are not safe in a war zone. Frankie’s fear during these moments makes the reader feel sympathy for her, as does her refusal to stop moving forward even when everything around her is new and frightening. The first chapters have already shown Frankie’s ability to adapt under pressure, but that skill is really put to the test here. It’s clear that things won’t get much easier once she’s on the ground, and she’ll need a lot of backbone to survive the months ahead.
Once Frankie arrives at the hospital her own direct experience with the line between life and death begins. Her first experience with a mass casualty event, where hundreds of maimed and wounded soldiers are airlifted in, immerses her in a kind of chaos she’s never experienced before. As a nurse in training, she has always had guidance and mentorship. However, in the field when patients arrive in critical condition the pace of the ER leaves no room for hesitation or doubt. In this setting, survival feels random and uncertain. When they arrive at the Thirty-Sixth, all the wounded soldiers transition a liminal state where they are caught between life and death. It’s up to Frankie, the other nurses, and the doctors to decide who lives and who dies among the seriously injured. Decisions that can seem simple—between prioritizing one patient and another—literally become life-or-death choices. This binary becomes even more explicit when Frankie learns about field triage, where she must look at wounded soldiers and diagnose in seconds whether or not it’s worth trying to save them. It’s a difficult task. Frankie feels the weight and intensity of it so strongly at the beginning of her time in the Army that she almost panics and runs away during her first day in the ER.
In Vietnam, survival for Frankie isn’t just about keeping her own body away from live bombs and bullets. It’s also about doing the best work she can and making as much of a difference as she can. These are the only ways she feels she can honor Finley’s memory. She volunteers her time to help the people around her in service of that goal, even those who belong to the “opposing” side of the war. The Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) missions Frankie and the other nurses go on are intended to extend the possibility of survival to the local Vietnamese population. The medical staff feel so strongly about helping the locals that they are willing to risk their lives to travel through the jungle, knowing the Viet Cong could attack at any moment.
Frankie’s encounter with Mai—the young girl suffering from gangrene—reinforces the vulnerability of the non-combatants caught in the crossfire. Assisting Captain Smith with the girl’s leg amputation forces Frankie to confront the full weight of what survival means in this environment. She has never assisted in an amputation before and struggles to keep her composure. The little boy’s gesture after the procedure (giving Frankie a smooth stone as a present) is an acknowledgement of her kindness and bravery.
Frankie would not be able to weather the emotions of life in Vietnam if she were doing it alone. Her growing friendship with Barb and Ethel is one of the most important aspects of these chapters, and it’s where her emotional survival strategy also begins to take shape. Her relationships with Ethel and Barb are born from necessity but turn into true, loving friendships. The women can offer one another support as they navigate life in a foreign army base in a country at war. When they’re sad they talk to each other about home and family, which lets them step away from the unpleasantness of surgical rounds and cleaning up horrible injuries. These moments remind Frankie and the reader that survival also depends on the ability to escape—however briefly or superficially—from the constant weight of surroundings that might otherwise be unbearable.
