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.
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.