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Summary
Chapters Eighteen—Twenty-Two
Chapter Eighteen
On March 14, 1969, Frankie prepares to leave Vietnam. She writes a goodbye note to Margie. Rye—who has just under a month left of his own tour—takes her to the airfield. Frankie is surprised to find out that her uniform makes her a target of anger and violence when she gets back to California. She has to take public transport as no taxi will pick her up. Arriving in Coronado isn’t much friendlier. Frankie gives him a photo of herself, Barb, and Ethel for the family’s “heroes’ wall,” but he doesn’t hang it. Bette is kinder, but explains that Finley’s death has emotionally numbed Connor.
Chapter Nineteen
Frankie is not home for long before she has her first public incident of PTSD. Bette takes her to lunch at the country club, but Frankie is still tightly wound from Vietnam. A loud noise makes Frankie duck under a table, which startles the room and mortifies Bette. Frankie doesn’t understand why everyone thinks this is so odd, until a friend of her father’s explains that Connor told everyone she was taking classes in Florence during her time in Vietnam. Frankie wakes in the night with horrible nightmares. Her parents hate all the changes to her speech and her habits that she’s picked up in Vietnam. Frankie is tense and drinking constantly. Wanting a change, she gets in touch with Barb to plan a party for Rye’s homecoming. However, when Frankie goes to Compton to see Rye’s parents, his surly and unwelcoming father Stan tells her he’s been killed and his body was unrecoverable, just like Finley.
Chapter Twenty
Frankie becomes bedridden with grief. After several days, Barb and Ethel visit to try and help. Ethel shares that she’s back in vet school and reunited with her high school boyfriend, while Barb talks about her interest in an anti-conflict organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Spending a few days with her friends helps lift Frankie from utter despair. After they leave, Frankie applies for a night shift nursing position at a small local hospital called St. Barnabas. She is hired by the supervisor Mrs Henderson as a probationary nurse. Frankie tries to remain optimistic. A few weeks into the job, she encounters a couple called José and Elena Garcia. Elena is a patient, and Frankie comforts her and applies lotion to her hands.
Chapter Twenty-One
By June, Frankie has been home for three months without much change. She reads in the paper that First Lieutenant Sharon Lane, a nurse, was killed by enemy fire in Vietnam. Her mother arranges for her to visit an old schoolmate, Becky Gillihan. Frankie is expecting a quiet catch-up but when she arrives, she finds herself at a wedding shower. Becky dismisses Frankie’s time in Vietnam as a joke, and Frankie reacts angrily, telling her she’s held severed limbs in her hands to shock her. That night, back at the hospital, a young man with a gunshot wound arrives. When no-one responds to the calls she puts in, Frankie performs a tracheotomy to save him. When the doctors in charge find this out, Mrs Henderson immediately fires her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
A miserable Frankie goes home, still in her bloodstained uniform. She chugs two large glasses of vodka. As soon as they realize it’s not her blood on the uniform, Frankie’s parents begin to berate her for what she said to Becky. Frankie argues back, accusing Connor of being ashamed of her and saying he has no idea what heroism is. She slams out of the house and drunkenly drives her VW Beetle into a streetlight. The car is a wreck, but she drives it to the VA center. Instead of helping her the doctor there tells her there “were no women in Vietnam” and asks if she’s on her period. With nowhere else to turn, Frankie calls Barb. Barb tells her to get a room at the Crystal Pier cottages. Barb and Ethel fly in to help, and Ethel suggests Frankie move into her father’s farmhouse.
Analysis
Although the reader might hope that Frankie would get some much-needed rest upon going home, these chapters illustrate how war continues to affect her long after she leaves the front lines of Vietnam. Frankie does not get the hero’s welcome she expects on any front. She’s used to seeing soldiers in uniform being treated with respect and adoration. However, upon her return to California, Frankie faces immediate hostility from everyone around her. Rather than welcoming her home in open arms and seeing her uniform as a sign of her bravery, civilians and anti-war view her as a symbol of the pointless fighting they despise. This reaction emphasizes the disconnect between Nixon’s policy and the desires of the American people at this point in history. There’s a staggeringly huge gap between members of the military, however disillusioned about US presence in Vietnam they are, and the public that opposes the war. The treatment that Frankie receives makes her feel like a second-class citizen. She’s ignored by taxi drivers and forced to struggle with her luggage on public transport. She knows she’s going home to parents who disapprove of her choice to serve, but she was not expecting to be shunned by everyone she met. She feels utterly overlooked and devalued.
At home, the aftereffects of her time in Vietnam continue to affect Frankie’s relationships, particularly with her father, Connor. Connor greets his returning child with cold indifference, especially in comparison with his wife Bette’s surprisingly more welcoming attitude. Frankie had hoped that—despite his initial opposition—her father would be proud of her when she got back from the front lines. Sadly, this could not be further from the truth. Rather than seeing her actions as brave and changing his mind about the roles women should play in wartime, Connor doubles down on his discomfort with Frankie’s choices. Her father’s refusal to acknowledge her service as equal to her brother’s hurts Frankie enormously. This rejection worsens her sense of isolation, which is already at an all-time high as she realizes no one knows she was working as a field nurse.
Frankie’s PTSD becomes more difficult to conceal as she struggles with nightmares, waking up on the floor of her room screaming. Now that she is in peaceful Coronado she’s haunted by images and sounds of destruction from her time in Vietnam. There’s no readily available source of help for her, as the VA refuses to acknowledge that she is a veteran. To the doctor Frankie tries to speak to, only men who fought in the war are capable of suffering from its aftereffects. The painful irony of him asking Frankie if she’s menstruating when she asks for help dealing with her trauma is a sign of the times.
Women’s emotional and psychological struggles were often dismissed as the result of hormones, and this narrative played into the disregard with which the US government treated its former Army nurses. The unpleasant interaction with Becky, where Frankie feels completely out of place at the wedding shower and says gruesome things to shock people, further exemplifies how disconnected she feels from civilian life. Frankie used to think of herself as a member of this group, but she no longer feels that way after returning from war. Surrounded by people who can’t understand and don’t respect her experiences, Frankie becomes frustrated and alienated. After she learns that Rye is “dead,” the only thing that pulls her out of bed is emotional support from people who understand what she went through. No one else can help, but moving in with Barb and Ethel is the beginning of Frankie’s tentative steps toward healing. However, even with their encouragement and the relative peace of the shared house in Virginia, Frankie still isn’t free of the demons she brought home from war.
Frankie’s argument with her parents after being fired from the hospital is the last straw in her first attempt to return to civilian life. Stealing Finley’s photo from the "heroes’ wall" as she leaves is a symbolic act of reclaiming her sense of belonging. She risked her life in memory of Finley, and stealing his photo allows her to stake a claim over his military legacy. It also gives her some control over the contents of the hero’s wall: even if she can’t be on it, she can remove things from it. Her sacrifice has been overlooked and undervalued, and—even if it is drunken and impulsive—she asserts her right to be recognized.
