My review of this realistic, historical action suspense thriller will join hundreds of thousands already on Amazon and Goodreads. Still, how many of those ratings and reviews were written by Vietnam combat vets who were there?
Soon after this novel was released, The Women was mentioned in my VA PTSD support group that meets every Wednesday morning. This support group may differ from many since half are women that served in the Air Force, the Navy, with one a Marine, who served in the Middle East. In combat!
Later that day, I saw The Women at Costco and bought a hardcover.
The main character in this novel is a young Army nurse, and the first half of this brutal combat story mostly takes place in Vietnam. Although Frankie McGrath was an Army nurse saving lives in a field medical unit beyond the front lines, and not behind them, she didn’t fight in combat. Yet she was in combat, every moment, awake or asleep. I’m going to explain what I mean soon.
For me, reading this historical fiction became a triggered journey back in time. And I started losing sleep, waking at the slightest sound. Alert, ready to fight.
Remembering!
And by the time I finished reading, I was angry.
My DD214, a form we get when we leave the military and return to civilian life, had one entry that said I’d gone on one major military operation for a few days during 1966. Yet I was in combat almost daily after climbing down that net (like the kind used on D-Day during World War II) on the side of a Navy transport ship, jumping the last few feet into a landing craft that took us Marines ashore. As we landed, fighting was taking place not that far from our location on the beach. And a few hours later, the first night we were there, my company was hit before we’d finished setting up our base camp. We had no wire surrounding us yet, and none of the bunkers had been completed.
All of Southern Vietnam was a war zone. It didn’t matter if you were inside the wire, in a bunker, we were always in the war. No place was safe. We didn’t have to go out on a major field operation to find the war. It found us almost nightly and sometimes in daylight.
Frankie McGraths’ medical unit was inside the wire, protected by bunkers, almost all the time, yet her unit was also under attack, as VC or North Vietnamese mortar rounds dropped in without warning, looking for random kills.
Like me, McGrath has some close calls inside the bunkers and wire. Like me, she lost friends. Like me, she came home to protestors calling her a baby killer. And she shot no one. Instead, she saved lives, even Vietnamese citizens, including children. She was a nurse. Not a US Marine rifleman. Not a grunt like me.
Some protestor in the story spit on her once she returned to the States. I’d heard about that when I came home in December 1966, but being spit on didn’t happen to me.
McGrath suffered from PTSD as I did, and we still do. Yet when she went to the VA for help, she was told no women served in Vietnam and she couldn’t have PTSD. They sent her back home. When she returned to the VA later, after a traumatic episode of PTSD, and tried to join a group of combat vets to share her trauma with, the men told her she couldn’t stay because she couldn’t be a combat vet. No women served in Vietnam. She left again, with no support.
And yet thousands of military women served in Vietnam.
Maybe what happened to McGrath is like what happened to me.
Her being told women didn’t serve in Vietnam reminded me of something someone working in VA-mental health care said to me after 2005. I don’t remember the exact wording but it was something like, Your PTSD can’t be that bad, since you only went on one military operation.
WTF!
Like McGrath, VC mortar shells dropped into my base camp without warning to kill at random. One time, in daylight, a sniper almost took me out. The round grazing my left ear. An inch further to the right, my body might have been shipped home with a Purple Heart my parents could hang on a wall in the same case the folded US flag arrived in.
Then, unlike McGrath, there were the night patrols and ambushes outside the wire that were not part of a major military operation, that were not mentioned on my DD214.
Or that mad dash with sniper rounds snapping past us while we drove at top speed through the jungle, me in an unarmored jeep with no doors on a one lane dirt road to reach a forward artillery base outside the division perimeter that had been hit hard and needed to be resupplied before they got hit again. While I was there, they got hit again, a rain of mortar shells and rockets, when one Marine lost his life, decapitated by a rocket.
I recommend reading The Women for the reality it paints and when you finish the story, read the author’s notes, to learn that about 10,000 women served in Vietnam, many just like McGrath.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of military action suspense thrillers: The Patriot Oath, Never for Glory, and Running with the Enemy, a novel placed in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
The Soulful Veteran's Blog 
Lloyd, I and my book club group read it. It brought me to tears and gave me real insight to PSTD. I am more insightful to the repercussions of war. My dad was a medicine in WWII. He never ever spoke of what he saw. But when I turned 18 in 72, he was adement and did not wany me to see any compt if I was chosen by the lottery. I was lucky I was 18 at the end of it. The real cowards are the warmongers who will never serve or send their children.
My parents were not political and never voted. As a teen all of my reading was from books and I didn’t follow the news since my parents didn’t. When I joined the Marines in 1965, right out of high school, I didn’t even know we were at war in Vietnam. I found out in boot camp. Why I joined had nothing to do with being patriotic or wanting to be a hero. I didn’t want to go to college, but that is another story. Later, after I left active duty, I became more aware of events, patriotic and started voting. While in combat being shot at, I also changed my mind about college. Not the best way to be motivated to go to college, but it worked.
Years later, when I was teaching high school English and journalism, I told my students (if that topic came up because a student asked. Since they all knew I was a Marine and combat vet someone almost alway asked. I may have been the only teacher they ever had who was a Marine combat vet.) I’d tell them if they wanted to join the military for whatever reason, the Air Force should be their first choice and the Navy 2nd.
I suggested they stay away from the Marines and Army so the odds would be in their favor they wouldn’t end up dead, losing limbs, and struggling with the fallout of PTSD.
Have you seen the film Hacksaw Ridge? It’s a true story about an Army medic in WWII who refused to fight and ended up being awarded the Medal of Honor for what he did as a medic to save lives, the risks he took were mind bending.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2119532/
i will definitely read that book. Interesting, I have been surrounded by two different groups. In high school, the young mail teachers were those who want into teaching to avoid the rat. I also belong to what was originally a fraternal organization and those about 10 years my senior all were drafted. Some went to Vietnam while others found ways not to go even though drafted. Anyway, I have a profound respect to those who served and saw action. I can honestly say that I do not know know how I would have reacted to real battle and death if I would have been in Vietnam. I also used to go with my father to the VA for treatments from war injuries. Although a medic, he got frostbite during the Battle of the Bulge and was thrown by the by a bomb. He had back and feet problems. He died because of vascular problems caused by the frostbite.
No one knows how they will react in combat even if they say they do. The repetitive training help similar to years of training in martial arts so our bodies know what to do without thinking. Boot camp is 24/7 for several months and the DIs never let up. A martial arts class might be an hour a day or an hour a week. Military training is condensed, brutal, repetitive and compact.
Still, even with the training, we don’t know how we will react in combat. On one patrol, someone we never saw tossed a grenade at us. An instant later I found myself twenty or thirty feet from the spot where it landed. Everyone else but one Martine had also vanished like I did, in every direction. When I first was aware of where I went, I didn’t know where anyone else was until heads started to appear.
One Marine stood frozen staring at the grenade on the ground inches from his toes. Lucky for him, it turned out to be a dud and did not explode.
Another episode, we were in a forward operating post miles from the front lines for a few days. One evening, I and several others went out near the wire to have a look. Stupid but still… Our excuse must have been our age.
Mortar rounds started dropping in. The VC never let us know in advance. An instant later, I found myself a long distance from the wire behind the only cover there was in that very flat area. A long prone telephone pole. Everyone else was beside me behind that cover but one. He went the wrong way and jumped into the concertina wire and got tangled in it with barbs buried in his skin. After the VC stopped and left. They never stayed long because of return fire. It took three of us to pluck him off and one of us threw him over his shoulder and ran to the medical tent.