Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
WESTERN MONTANA
You’re invited to a reunion of the
following the unveiling of the new
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
on November 13, 1982
Frankie’s first reaction surprised her.
Anger.
Now a memorial to the men who had died?
Now? More than a decade after they’d been unceremoniously buried and forgotten by their fellow Americans?
As hard as Frankie had worked in the last eight years, and she’d been dedicated to the endeavor, she’d never quite been able to completely dispel the shame her fellow Americans had made her feel over serving in Vietnam, nor her anger at how the government had treated the veterans who returned broken in body or mind or spirit.
Even worse than that, in the late seventies she’d sat here in her living room and watched a fellow Vietnam vet claim on television that Agent Orange had given him—and thousands like him—cancer.
I died in Vietnam; I just didn’t know it, he’d said.
Not long after that, the world had learned that the herbicide also caused miscarriages and birth defects.
Most likely it had caused Frankie’s miscarriage.
Her own government had done that to her.
Maybe if the politicians in Washington, D.C.
, had built this memorial as an apology to a generation of servicemen and -women and their families, she might have felt differently, but no.
The government hadn’t moved to honor the veterans of Vietnam.
The vets themselves had had to make this happen.
Those who remained honoring those who had fallen.
She heard Donna come up behind her. Pause.
Donna had worked here at the ranch for more than seven years now.
Frankie still remembered the cold day Donna had driven up to the front door, her fake black hair every which way, her skin pale from alcoholism, her voice barely above a whisper.
I’m a nurse, she’d said. Cu Chi, ’68. I got your name from the VA. I can’t…
Sleep, Frankie remembered saying. That was all. Enough. Everything. She’d taken Donna by the hand and led her into the farmhouse. They’d sat in a pair of folding chairs in front of the fire and talked.
A rap session, Jill at the center had called it.
It helps sometimes to feel you’re not alone.
They’d been there for each other, she and Donna, often held each other upright.
Donna had urged Frankie to fight for the reinstatement of her nursing license, and the fight had proven to be healing.
By the time she’d officially been granted the right to be a nurse again, Frankie felt strong enough to try.
That had been the beginning of the ranch. She and Donna had joined forces, using the money from the Coronado cottage sale to make improvements.
In Missoula, both of them took nursing jobs at a local hospital.
After work hours, Frankie attended night classes at the college toward a degree in clinical psychology, and a year later Donna did the same.
When they weren’t studying to become counselors or working shifts at the hospital, they remodeled the house and repaired the outbuildings and attended regular meetings.
That first summer, Frankie’s friends and family had shown up to help.
Mom and Dad, Barb and Jere and their growing boys, Ethel and Noah and their two kids, Henry and Natalie and their rowdy sons.
They took over bedrooms and pitched tents in the grassy backyard.
They worked together during the day and sat around a campfire at night, talking and laughing and remembering.
As soon as they got their master’s degrees, Frankie and Donna put up flyers at the nearest Veterans Administration office that said: To the women of Vietnam: We lived through it over there. We can live through it here. Join us.
A year later, Janet had shown up, her face blackened by bruising, her quick laugh too sharp to be anything but a substitute for crying. Janet stayed for almost a year.
From then on, the ranch they called the Last Best Place became a haven for the women who’d served in Vietnam.
They came, they stayed as long as they needed to, and they moved on.
Each left an imprint somehow, a path for women like them to follow.
They left art and easels and paints. Knitting needles and skeins of wool, short stories and memoir chapters and musical instruments.
They worked during the day—hammering nails, painting walls, feeding horses, tending the garden. Whatever needed doing.
They learned to breathe, and then to talk, and then, if they were lucky, to hope. Frankie taught them the healing power of words and the joy of finding quiet. Peace, at least the beginning of it, was the goal. But it was never easy.
The beautiful, unexpected by-product of helping other women was that Frankie found her own passion again, her own pride.
She loved this place fiercely, loved the life she’d forged in the wilderness, loved the women who came to her for help and helped her in return.
She woke up each morning with hope. And each summer, her friends and family showed up to spend as much vacation time as possible on the ranch. It became a haven for them, too.
“Group is ready.”
Frankie nodded, looking down at the silver POW bracelet she still wore for the major who’d never come home.
Donna came up beside her. In the years they’d worked together, both women had filled out, gotten physically strong by pounding fence posts and hauling hay bales and tossing saddles up on their horses’ backs.
Both routinely wore Levi’s, cowboy boots, and flannel shirts; no shoulder pads or power suits in this part of Montana.
“There’s a lot of talk about the memorial,” Donna said. “Lots of reunions are happening.”
“Yeah,” Frankie said.
“It’s a lot to think about.”
They stood side by side, staring through the kitchen window, out at the autumn fields. Each knew what the other was thinking: they’d talked about it often enough.
Taking her cup of coffee, Frankie left the kitchen, heard Donna behind her, putting a pot of beans on to soak.
Outside, the world was awash in fall color; snow lay heavily on the jagged, distant mountains. Skiing would come early this year. The brilliant blue of the Clark Fork river meandered through the fields, swirled and bubbled over polished stones, made a sound like children laughing.
The Last Best Place Ranch now boasted a whitewashed farmhouse with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The furniture was all secondhand, garage-sale finds, as well as the stuff Mom had shipped up years ago from the bungalow when it sold.
Here, women had painted through their pain and left images on the walls, a kind of graffiti.
One wall—Frankie called it the heroes’ wall—was filled with photographs of the women who’d served, those who’d come through the ranch, and others, their friends.
Hundreds of photographs were tacked onto the pine planks.
In the center was the picture of Barb, Ethel, and Frankie standing in front of the O Club at the Thirty-Sixth Evac.
Across the top of it all, Frankie had painted in bold black script: THE WOMEN.
Three refurbished bunkhouses held bunk beds and writing desks. A fourth had been turned into a communal bathroom with showers and sinks and toilets.
The barn was still a little undone, but the roof was solid now and seven horses lived in the stalls. Frankie had learned how beneficial caring for animals and riding could be for women in crisis.
In the center aisle of the barn, six folding chairs had been set in a semicircle on the sawdust floor.
On this cool morning, four of the chairs were occupied by women.
Frankie took her chair and pulled it closer and sat down.
The women looked at her; one in a shuttered, closed-off way, one in anger, one who seemed almost disinterested, and a fourth woman was already crying.
“I got an invitation to a reunion of the Thirty-Sixth Evac,” Frankie said. “It’s tied into the unveiling of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I suspect some of you may have gotten invitations, too.”
“Ha,” Gwyn said. She was older-looking, but not old, just worn out, her mouth flattened, her eyes dark with anger. “Like I want to remember,” she said sharply. “I spend half my waking hours trying to forget.”
“I’m going to go,” the crying woman, Liz, said. “To pay my respects. This memorial matters, Gwyn.”
“Too little, too late,” said Marcy, who leaned forward in her seat, put her forearms on her thighs. It was her first full day at the ranch and she didn’t believe in any of it yet.
“I am done with Vietnam, Liz,” Gwyn said. “Everyone always tells me to forget. To let it go. And now I’m supposed to go running back? Nope. Not me. Not going.”
“You’ll disappoint the people you served with,” said Ramona.
“What’s new?” Gwyn said. “I’ve disappointed pretty much everyone since I got home.”
Frankie had heard these words from every woman who’d come through the ranch, trying to right themselves after the war.
She knew what they needed to hear. “You know, I wasn’t afraid to go to war, and I should have been.
I am afraid to go to the memorial, and I shouldn’t be.
People made us think we’d done something wrong, shameful, didn’t they?
We were forgotten; all of us Vietnam vets, but the women most of all. ”
The women nodded.
Frankie looked at the women, recognized their emotional wounds, and felt their pain.
“I used to wonder if I would do it again, join up. Was there still a believer inside me, a last shred of the girl who wanted to make a difference?” She looked around.
“And I would. In some ways, the war years were the best of my life.”
“And the worst,” Gwyn said.