Kristin Hannah · 2024 · survival

Frankie McGrath, a sheltered nursing graduate from Coronado Island, follows her brother to Vietnam with the Army Nurse Corps in 1967 and serves two brutal tours in the evacuation hospitals - then comes home to a country that insists there were no women in Vietnam, and must fight a longer war for healing and recognition that ends at the dedication of the Wall in 1982.

1. 1
   Coronado Island

   The sun-washed navy island where Frankie grows up on tales of the family hero wall, and from which she ships out for Vietnam after her brother Finley is killed.

2. 2
   Saigon

   Her arrival in-country at Tan Son Nhut, the plane taking fire on descent - the first shock of the war she volunteered for.

3. 3
   The Thirty-Sixth Evac

   The four-hundred-bed evacuation hospital sixty miles from Saigon where Frankie is made a combat nurse the hard way, alongside Barb and Ethel, and loses the surgeon Jamie Callahan.

4. 4
   Pleiku

   Rocket City: the Seventy-First Evac in the Central Highlands, her second tour, closer to the fighting and under the mortars.

5. 5
   Coronado Island

   The homecoming that is its own war: spat at in the airport, denied by the VA, erased by her own parents, Frankie spirals through loss and breakdown toward treatment.

6. 6
   Missoula

   The Montana farmhouse Frankie rebuilds into The Last Best Place, a ranch refuge for the women who served and were told they were never there.

7. 7
   Washington

   November 1982: the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where her father at last calls her a hero, Jamie is found alive, and the women who served stand at the Wall - they were there.