In Memory

"I just finished The Women by Kristin Hannah," my friend Amy mentioned at dinner a few weeks ago when she was visiting from Arizona. "It was amazing."

It just so happened that I was looking for an audiobook for our road trip to Mountain Lake that weekend, and the premise of the novel, the story of a young woman who enlists as an Army nurse in Vietnam and her experiences there and upon her return to the States, seemed like something Heidi and I would like. The fact that it was narrated by Jill Whelan was a plus-- I have enjoyed her work on several other recordings.

We were rolling through the Piedmont of Virginia as the novel started in 1967, Coronado Beach, CA, and we followed the saga of Frankie McGrath all the way to the southern Blue Ridge Mountains and home again, with more than half of the book to go. "This is brutal," I said after her first week in Vietnam. "She's gotta get a win soon." And she did, becoming an extremely competent OR nurse at an evac hospital, despite or maybe because of the brutal conditions she was thrown into. Over her time in the country, she made lifelong friends and lost some, too, and we were as relieved as she was when she headed back to California.

We continued listening a couple weeks later all the way to Buffalo as Frankie faced a rocky adjustment to life at home, her ups and downs propelling the trip forward. And we heard the end of the book a little more than an hour into our trip home, shaking our heads to emerge from the late 70s into present-day Pennsylvania. 

And, although I found the book flawed in many ways, heavy-handed, overwrought, and predictable in places, I was profoundly moved by the real-life experiences written there, particularly the invisibility and subsequent struggle of the over a quarter million women who served in Vietnam. So today, when we loaded Lucy in the car and headed downtown for a walk on the National Mall, we hadn't gone far when I suggested we visit the Vietnam Memorial, a place I usually pass by without a second glance as I round the reflecting pool.

We paused more than a moment at the Vietnam Women's Memorial, erected in 1993, more than 20 years after the war ended. Three women are shown in it, one holding a bandaged soldier, another shading her eyes looking skyward, and a third on her knees in perhaps grief, but more likely, exhaustion. Eight trees are planted around its cobblestone circle, one for each woman killed there. 

I don't think I'll ignore it again.