Novel: The Women – by Kristin Hannah

The Women by Kristin Hannah

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kristin Hannah has done an outstanding job of recreating the Chaos, stresses of the operating theatre in casualty hospitals during the Vietnam war as well as giving insight into the ways in which the emergency clinic nurses, doctors, and patients managed and dealt with those stresses during and after the war. The return home from war in the late 1960’s after two tours of duty in Vietnam for nurse Frankie McGrath is in many ways as traumatic as being in the war zone itself, to find how her own family and country had covered up, lied about and concealed even the fact that Army nurses were even in the combat zones, living and travelling via the same modes of transport through the same enemy fire zones as combat pilots and soldiers. Is it really any wonder that our military personnel even today are reduced to having to turn to drugs and strange behaviors when they return from combat when they are ostracized, and shat upon by the very nation that sent them off to do battle for what was a bogus cause? The wonder of the horror, the trauma and the grief that these returnees go through is how many are able to eventually pull their lives together, find a place of peace, happiness and love later in life. The corollary to this of course is the large numbers of those same traumatized persons who are unable to do it alone and are abandoned on our streets and homeless camps in perpetuity. Author Hannah has done a brilliant job of bringing the reality picture of war into the reader’s home. Please read it, pray on it and do what you can to support any and all of the veterans of our wars, male or female. They deserve everything that we can give them and more.



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