LOOKING BACK

             It’s that time of week again.  Time to sit at the computer and think about the week.  This week, it’s about a book.

          I’ve shared thoughts about books before, so sorry if this is boring for some of you, but for me, books open up tons of new worlds and often touches on memories that need to be refreshed.

          This week the book is Kristin Hannah’s The Women.  Once again, one of her very powerful stories.  The first book of hers that I ever read was The Nightengale which I finished reading in the jungles of Costa Rica.  Thankfully so as the end was so powerful that I couldn’t stop crying.

          Well, The Women has had the same effect except that I am not crying (At least not yet).  It is the story of a very naive young woman who joins the Army Nurses Corps and heads off to Viet Nam.  This story overwhelms me with the research that Kristin Hannah had to do to write such a novel.

          It hits me hard for several reasons.  First, it starts in 1966, the year I graduated from high school.  I remember well some of my male classmates heading out to that war…. some never to return, some so traumatized by their experience that they never returned in a different way.

          I remember the protests and the news coverage that was never ending in those years. 

          What this book opens up is the story of the women who served, not in combat, but who nonetheless were there and were impacted in the same way as the men. 

          And the memory the book resurfaces is of my Mom’s experience as a Navy nurse during WWII.  I grew up on her stories of that war, totally different from what I suppose was the male version of the experience.

          She served in the South Pacific: Philippines, Australia, Guam, and Papua New Guinea among others.  Always immediately behind battle lines.  She never told explicit details from the OR, but this book fills in those blanks.  It provides me an entirely new vision of what her life had to have been like.

          It also explains one mystery.  In 1970 Mom and I went to the theater to see the newly released movie, M*A*S*H.  We were there about 10 minutes when Mom rose up, rushed out and was furious.  The only thing she said was, “It wasn’t like that at all.”  She never explained herself and I had to go back later to see the movie with a friend.  I didn’t understand her fury until I read this book. 

          The description in the book of what went on in those field hospitals is really beyond comprehension and now I understand Mom’s anger….55 years later.

          I love the book, it tells a heroic, tragic, compassionate story.  And my mind lingers on how many men and women had this experience, who came home and lived through it.

          It explains a lot.