Chapter Thirty-Five #2
Frankie looked at Gwyn, saw the woman’s anger, remembered it.
“And the worst,” she agreed. “You’re right, Gwyn, I don’t think disappointing people is a reason to go to the memorial.
Most of us have made too many decisions based on other people.
We need to do what we need to do. But we’ve been silenced for too long, invisible for too many years. ”
“It’s all about the men,” Gwyn said. “Did I tell you I tried to join a Vietnam vets talk therapy session in Dallas? It’s always the same thing. ‘You don’t belong. You’re a woman. There were no women in Vietnam.’”
The women in the circle nodded at that.
“We don’t have a memorial,” Gwyn added.
“We share that pain, don’t we?” Frankie said. “We’ve been dealing with the war for a decade, most of us, some even longer. Pushing through. I know how the Agent Orange news has brought it all back up,” Frankie said. It was a topic that came up consistently in the circle.
“I had four miscarriages,” Liz said, tears bright in her eyes. “A baby might have saved me, us, you know. And all that time, they were spraying that shit, killing us all slowly.”
“Sometimes I think dying would be easier than living this way,” Gwyn said. “We’ll probably all get cancer.”
Frankie looked at each woman in turn, saw the variations on pain. “Who here has considered suicide?” she asked.
A taboo question that she asked in each new group of women.
Gwyn said, “I’ve thought it might be a relief to… disappear.”
“That’s a brave thing to say, but we know you’re brave, Gwyn. All of you are. And you’re tough.”
“I used to be,” Liz said.
“You’re here,” Frankie said. “In the wilds of Montana, sitting in a barn that smells like manure, and saying the most frightening, intimate things out loud to strangers.” She took a beat.
“But we aren’t strangers, are we? We are the women who went to war—the nurses of Vietnam—and many of us felt silenced at home.
We lost who we were, who we wanted to be.
But I’m living proof that it can get better.
You can get better. It starts here. In these chairs, reminding ourselves and each other that we are not alone. ”
In Washington, D.C., on the morning of November 13, 1982, Frankie woke well before dawn.
She’d hardly slept last night. If she’d still been a drinking woman, she would have poured herself something strong.
She almost wished she was still a smoker; she needed something to do with her hands.
As it was, she got up at five A.M. and pulled her old black overnight bag out of the closet of her cheap motel room.
She could have brought a new suitcase on this trip, but the travel bag just felt right.
It had been with her in the beginning, in Vietnam. It should be with her now at the end.
It landed on the cheap shag carpet floor with a thunk. She clicked on the bedside lamp, knelt in the pool of light, and unzipped the bag.
The smells assailed her: sweat and mud and blood and smoke and fish. Vietnam.
Don’t drink the water.
I’m new in-country.
No shit.
That’s us, giving it back to them.
On top of her belongings was a Polaroid picture taken at the O Club.
In it, Ethel, Barb, and Frankie all wore shorts and T-shirts and combat boots.
Jamie had an arm around Frankie’s waist and held up a beer in a toast. There was a picture of her dancing with Jamie, both of them sweaty and laughing, and another one of the guys playing volleyball in the sunlight while the women watched, and one of Hap playing his guitar.
Look at those smiles.
Good times. They’d had those, too.
Frankie pulled out her battered old boonie hat and felt a wave of nostalgia thinking of all the places where she’d worn this hat, all the times she’d had to hold it down so rotor wash didn’t whip it off her head.
A dozen pins and patches decorated it, mementos her patients had given her, both from platoons and squadrons, even a happy-face pin and a peace symbol.
When had she written MAKE LOVE NOT WAR across the brim in magic marker? She didn’t remember.
She’d worn this hat on her MEDCAP trips into the villages and on her supply flights to Long Binh, on the beach, and even on her R and R to Kauai.
She’d worn it handing out candy to kids at the orphanages and sitting in the back of a deuce and a half, bumping over red dirt roads and splashing through rivers of mud.
And she would wear it today.
No more hiding this treasured memento away in her closet, trying to forget the woman who’d worn it. No more hiding at all.
She pulled out her dog tags, held them in her hand for the first time in years, surprised by how light they actually were. They’d taken on a weight in her mind. She thought of all the bloody dog tags she’d held in her life as she looked for a wounded man’s name, blood type, religion.
Some women had worn love beads in the sixties; others had worn dog tags.
She pulled out the stack of Polaroid pictures of Vietnam she’d brought, remembering the night, years ago now, at the ranch, when her mother had asked to see them, when they’d sat outside by a fire, a spray of stars overhead, and looked at these faded photographs of nurses and doctors, soldiers, Vietnamese children herding water buffalo along the banks of a river, green jungles, white beaches, old men in rice paddies.
Mom hadn’t said much, but she’d sat there, listening, for hours.
Frankie pulled out the latest of her journals. She’d first begun journaling in rehab, at Henry’s urging. Her first sentence, written all those years ago, in angry black marker, was, How did I end up here? I am so ashamed.
In the years between then and now, she’d written hundreds of pages.
They initially chronicled her pain and then her recovery, and finally her coming-of-age in Montana, on the land where she had found herself, her calling, and her passion.
She didn’t have children, imagined now that she would never have children, but she had her ranch, and the women who came to her.
She had friends and family and a purpose.
She had the big, full life she and her brother had once dreamed of.
She opened up the first blank page, dated it, and wrote:
I can’t stop thinking about Finley today. Of course.
Mom and Dad chose not to come to the unveiling of the memorial. I wish they were here, I need them here, but I understand. Some grief is too deep to reveal in public.
We were the last believers, my generation. We trusted what our parents taught us about right and wrong, good and evil, the American myth of equality and justice and honor.
I wonder if any generation will ever believe again. People will say it was the war that shattered our lives and laid bare the beautiful lie we’d been taught. And they’d be right. And wrong.
There was so much more. It’s hard to see clearly when the world is angry and divided and you’re being lied to.
God, I wish we
There was a knock at the door. Frankie wasn’t surprised. Who could sleep? She got up, went to the door, opened it.
Barb and Ethel stood outside, beneath a feeble overhead light. A sputtering neon sign in the parking lot behind them read NO VACANCY .
“Smells like ’Nam,” Ethel said. “I wish you’d let me pay for nicer rooms.”
“It’s her damn overnight bag,” Barb said.
“I have to be careful with money these days,” Frankie said.
The three of them left the room, each wearing whatever they’d worn to sleep in, and walked down the stairs to a kidney-shaped pool that needed cleaning.
Lights in the water created an aqua glow, as did the few lights on the exterior of the motel.
The neon sign gave off a faint beelike buzzing sound.
“Six bucks and you get a pool,” Barb said, sitting in a creaky lounge chair.
“For seven, they might clean the pool,” Ethel said, sitting beside her.
“I’d rather they wash the sheets,” Barb said.
“Quit complaining, you two. We’re here, aren’t we?” Frankie said, stretching out on the chair between them.
“Last night, I dreamt about our first night in the Seventy-First,” Barb said, lighting a cigarette. “Haven’t thought about that in years.”
Ethel said, “For me, it was my first napalm-orphanage shift.”
Frankie stared out at the water in the dirty pool with the chain-link fence around it all.
She’d had those nightmares, too, and they’d wakened her, too, gotten her heart pumping, but she’d also dreamt of waterskiing on the Saigon River, of Coyote’s howl, of Jamie’s smile, and dancing to the Doors with her girlfriends.
She’d surprised herself by thinking about Rye—for the first time in years—and found there was nothing left in her that cared about him; all that remained was a patched and faded regret.
“It’s going to be crazy today,” Ethel said. “A huge crowd.”
“We hope,” Barb said.
They all considered that, feared it. The unveiling of a memorial to a war—and warriors—that no one seemed eager to remember.
“We’re here,” Frankie said. “That’s enough for me.”
In a way, even with as far as she’d come, Frankie feared that the vein of fragility in her would open up when confronted again with Vietnam and all that had been lost there.
This morning, she stared at herself in the mirror, dressed in her fatigues, seeing the young version of herself staring back. She attached her ANC pin to her collar.
Outside the motel, in full daylight, she met up with Barb and Ethel; their husbands and children would be meeting them at the memorial. This, the beginning, was just for the girlfriends.
Each was wearing her fatigues and boonie hat and combat boots.
Barb smiled. “Don’t tell me there were no women in Vietnam.”
A ceiling of white clouds lay over the city. The air smelled crisp and cold, of the coming winter.