Kristin Hannah’s “The Women:” Honoring the Female Veterans of the Vietnam War

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, now, as we’ve discussed, international pressure is ramping up on Israel, and the U.S. students are demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and transparency from their leaders. For many, the images of young people demonstrating on campuses and clashing with law enforcement evokes memories of the protest movement during the Vietnam War. A setting used as a backdrop for a hit new novel, “The Women,” by Kristin Hannah. It shines a light on the thousands of forgotten nurses who served their country and returned home to a bitterly divided nation. Kristin Hannah joined Walter Isaacson to discuss the novel.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Kristin Hannah, welcome to the show.

KRISTIN HANNAH, AUTHOR, “THE WOMEN”: Thank you so much, Walter. It’s great to be here.

ISAACSON: You’ve been the author of more than 20 novels, and your latest, “The Women,” talks about the combat nurses in Vietnam. Tell me what happened when you first pitched this as an idea, maybe 20, 25 years ago.

HANNAH: Well, yes, I pitched it in 1997 to my then-editor. And, you know, we had a long talk about it. And the bottom line was, she had been at Berkeley in 1968, my editor, and she said, you know, the world isn’t ready for this book, and frankly, you aren’t ready to write this book. You aren’t old enough, you don’t have enough perspective, and you aren’t good enough. So, you know, come back when you think you are and come back when, you know, we think that we’re — the country is ready to hear this story.

ISAACSON: What’s happened in the country that you now think it’s more relevant or we’re ready to hear it?

HANNAH: Well, you know, I mean, just to go back a bit, I was a child during the Vietnam War. And my good friend in fourth grade, her father served and was shot down. And so, we wore — back in those days, we had the prisoner of war bracelet which we wore in remembrance of the soldier who was lost in the hopes that he would come home when we would take it off. And so, I had this bracelet on for years and years and years. And I was constantly thinking about him and the other soldiers who didn’t come home. And then as a girl, even, I saw how the soldiers were treated when they did come home. So, this was sort of the thing that I wanted to write about, the part of the Vietnam experience that I wanted to write about. And I kept checking back in with it over the years as I was writing other novels. And finally, in — it was March of 2020, when in my hometown of Seattle, we were on lockdown from the pandemic. And I was watching the nightly news and seeing what we all were seeing, the political divisions that were, you know, I felt tearing the country apart and the anger, and it felt very much like the Vietnam era again. And then, I was watching, you know, our nurses and our doctors who were on the frontline of this pandemic sacrificing so much for all of us. And not always getting the thanks and the gratitude and the support that they needed. And that’s really, I think, when it all came together and I thought, OK, I’m ready. I’m ready to write this novel. I think it’s important. I think it’s time. And I’m going to go for it.

ISAACSON: Well, the book centers on a woman nurse, Frankie McGrath — Frances McGrath, known as Frankie. Tell me, who is she and why is she the person that best represents what you were trying to do?

HANNAH: She’s not based on any actual nurse, but she is certainly inspired by several of the nurses whose memoirs I read in research. And they had a very sort of — there was a lot of commonality with the women. A lot of them had come from families whose parents had proudly served in World War II, you know, the greatest generation. They had been raised to be patriotic. They also came from the conservative, you know, end of the 1950s. And a lot of them were extremely young, fresh out of nursing school. And so, I really wanted to show the fullness of the arc of a lot of the nurses, not all of them, of course, but, you know, going to war, being sort of woefully unprepared emotionally and in their nursing skills. And then, you know, to become these amazing combat competent nurses and come home to a country that was vastly different than the one they left, and where their reception was, you know, unexpectedly negative for them. And left them for years trying to — you know, trying to come to terms with what they had done and how their parents and their friends in their country felt about what they had done.

ISAACSON: One of the more visceral scenes in the book, or a lot of them, involve the medicine, you know, involve being there watching these procedures. I think you’re a lapsed lawyer, right? How did you get all that medical stuff? And what was your point of being so realistic and almost brutal in the — in your description of the medicine?

HANNAH: You know, that’s interesting, Walter, because I really made that choice to really make these scenes in the surgical units visceral and brutal and difficult, and that was for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, on my mind was that often in this war and in other wars, when female vets come home and seek help, especially if they are suffering from some kind of PTSD, one of the first things they tend to hear is, well, you weren’t in combat, because, you know women in combat officially is a very recent thing. And it was important for me to show what they had gone through, what they had lived through, why they would have, you know, emotional trauma stemming from this afterwards. And so, that’s part of the reason that it was — that it’s so difficult to read, because I want the reader to understand this slice of war and what it means and what it feels like and how it affects you.

ISAACSON: You also tried very hard to capture the devastation of — that happened to the Vietnamese civilians. Why was that important to you?

HANNAH: Well, the — you know, the thing about writing about this era, and I hope actually that this book sparks a lot of other fiction about it and a lot of other nonfiction about it because I think there are so many avenues to be explored and stories to be told. But what I was trying to do, you know, was this single woman’s story of one woman gone to war that really addressed not only the futility of war and the difficulties endured, but the — you know, from all sides, how it affected other people. Obviously, the story of the Vietnamese people and the civilians is not my story to tell, but it was important to me, you know, that it felt real.

ISAACSON: You know, finding love amid war, or the aftermath of war, it’s been one of themes in your books. In this case, I think one of the closest relationships is with two women. I think Ethel and Barb. Tell us about the friendship and why you focus so much on female friendship here.

HANNAH: Well, you know, we are all so used to seeing male camaraderie during war, Walter. And it — you know, when I was like writing this book and I set out and, you know, Frankie goes to war and she ends up in Vietnam and she enters her hooch and — which is their living quarters. And, you know, there would have been two women there. And I realized that in as difficult a setting as this, those kinds of friendships and the humor, the love, the difficulty, the intensity, all of that would come to fruition, you know, as a friendship between these women to save each other during, you know, this really difficult year. And since female friendship is so important to me, I’m such a believer in this idea that women hold each other up, that women, you know, speak out for each other and care for each other. And so, it was really great to have this novel that is, you know, about war and about the aftermath of war to also be about the fundamentals of friendship and the importance of friendship and about women being almost soulmates to each other throughout their lives.

ISAACSON: One of the issues facing the nurses when they came home is that their service didn’t count for certification as nursing service. Tell me about this and what was done about that.

HANNAH: You know, that was a really interesting part of the research to me. I was shocked to discover that — you know, as I said earlier, these — a lot of these women went to war very young, right out of nursing school, or just having received their nursing diploma degrees. And so, had very little clinical experience. And — you know, and then they go to war and they’re thrown into, you know, this hell of combat surgery and combat medicine and mass units. And you can tell through the book, and I could certainly see through the research, the level of nursing skills that they were attaining over there. And I mean, from so many of their memoirs and from speaking to them, what they faced when they came home was, you know, an — all too often a disregard for everything that they had learned over there. And so, in other words, the hospitals and the people hiring them in the U.S. we’re looking at their U.S. service and seeing, well, you know, you don’t have a bunch of experience here. So, let’s start you as a beginner nurse again. And for a lot of them, I think that’s led them out of the nursing profession because they had so much experience and weren’t being rewarded for that. Although, interestingly enough, I met a woman, who is now a judge in California, who was a former army nurse. And I asked her about this very point. I said, you know, what was it like coming back and being treated, you know, as a lesser experienced nurse than you were? And she said, well, the interesting thing about the whole experience in Vietnam, and one of the things that it changed in them was this idea that once they had been through that and come home, they felt that they could do anything. And so, a lot of the women that I met were now doctors or dentists or judges or — you know, so they had gone back to school to become something else.

ISAACSON: You know, this work is a piece of historical fiction, like many of your works, especially famously “The Nightingale,” which I think sold more than four and a half million copies. When you do the genre of historical fiction, how much research do you do into history? Because this is a very rich tale of what it was like in these medical camps in Vietnam.

HANNAH: Yes, I mean, it does take a lot of research to write a really authentic feeling historical novel. I mean, as a lot of us know, what history was and what we think history was isn’t always exactly the same thing. And so, you’re constantly trying to be as truthful and as authentic and as real as you can be within the parameters of fiction. But this one was particularly, I guess, scary for me to write, to set out to write because I knew that there would be so many readers of this novel who had actually experienced the war in a way that I had not. And so, it was very important for me, once I had done the year of research to understand the time and the experiences to then speak to the actual nurses and the helicopter pilots and doctors and Red Cross workers to make sure that, you know, I was telling the story in a really authentic and true way. And I was so fortunate to come into contact with Diane Carlson Evans, who is a former army nurse and the founder of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. And she ended up being kind of my mentor in this. And she’s been just a profound help. And it’s been great to meet so many of these nurses and see how much it means to them to have this story told.

ISAACSON: Tell me more about Diane Carlson Evans, who was sort of your helpmate in a way in writing this book.

HANNAH: I was so lucky, you know, to find her. She had written this book called “Healing Wounds” about her experience as a nurse and her experience then coming home and, you know, channeling her energy into the fight for a memorial that remembered her sister veterans, and it was a decades-long fight for her. I was fortunate enough last November, for Veterans Day, to go to Washington, D.C. for the 30th anniversary of the Women’s Vietnam Memorial with Diane Carlson Evans. And to see this group of female Vietnam vets at their memorial standing together, telling their stories, you know, they were hugging, they were crying, they were introducing their children, it was really one of the most powerful moments of my life to watch that. And I often say now, I feel like my mother who I lost, you know, when I was young is somewhere — and put Diane and me together because it was an amazing experience. And I’m so proud of her. And I’m proud to say that she has just been nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more.

ISAACSON: At the very end of the book, you have Frankie talking almost directly to the reader, as if it were almost you talking to the reader. And I’m going to read you from that portion, you said, Frankie would not let them be forgotten anymore. Somehow, she would find a way to tell the country about her sisters, the women with whom she’d serve, for the nurses who had died for their children, for the women who would follow in the years to come. Maybe, like so many things. It began simply with words, speaking up, standing in the sunlight, coming together, demanding honesty and truth, taking pride. The women had a story to tell, even if the world wasn’t quite ready to hear it. And their story begins with three simple words, we were there. Tell me about that notion of you almost talking directly to the reader saying, here’s why I had to do this book.

HANNAH: That’s exactly it, that — you know, and interestingly enough, I don’t know that I would have known, that I would have gotten there, that I would have expected that to be sort of the ending pass of this novel when I started. But one of the things I learned over the process of researching this was exactly that point, that it is so important. And again, I keep hitting on it, on — to remember people who sacrifice on our behalf and to honor them and to — you know, especially now as they are aging, to make sure that we as a society are collecting their stories and are showing that we think it matters.

ISAACSON: Kristin, Hannah, thank you so much for joining the show.

HANNAH: Thank you, Walter. This has been lovely.