February 2024
I remember watching the evening news with footage from the Vietnam War. Walter Cronkite supplied the daily commentary of what was happening on the battlefields. It was the first time that a war was being shown in real time on television. Each night, I felt like we heard about napalm, Agent Orange and the jungle, and it was all so remote and alien. It also was a war that divided America deeply, and I recall watching protests, seeing draft cards being burned, and when the soldiers came home, there was lots of talk about how they were not treated as heroes. And when we left Vietnam, I remember the South Vietnamese clinging to the aircraft as we fled the country with a war neither won nor lost.
However, what was missing from all of this coverage and conversation were the women who served on the battlefields as nurses. I confess that until I heard the subject of Kristin Hannah’s latest novel, I never even thought about their roles in the war. But now, after reading THE WOMEN, I have a firm sense of what it must have been like to be a war nurse there.
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