Women in the Vietnam War: The Main Subject of Kristin Hannah's New Novel

Kristin Hannah, a best-selling novelist, is renowned for sharing the tales of women who have been overlooked by history and time. In her most recent epic, The Women, three nurses serving in Vietnam are depicted together with their return to civilian life. These ladies create a friendship through the terrible events and uncertainties of war that lasts long after the fighting ends. Kristin Hannah discussed a narrative that has been in the works for almost 30 years as well as the overlooked history and achievements of women.

Kristin Hannah claims that her concern in human psychology and the experiences that shape a person's identity is what inspired her to write this sort of fiction. She is drawn to those that persevere through extreme hardship, come out on top, and give it their all. Individuals may encounter the worst-case situations at all times, and those situations and the resulting conflict serve as the purging that molds their personalities.

She always aspires to produce a book that is huge, intricate, and intense, but it also needs to have a point and, ideally, impart knowledge to the reader. Her concept of women's forgotten stories resulted from this. She eventually realized that women are not educated about our own history. She thought, at the very least, that she was leaving high school and college without knowing enough about the whereabouts and activities of women throughout many of these significant historical junctures.

She claims that she spent thirty years sitting on this work. She returned to it again and again, eager to do it. However, there was a significant window of time during which people made it very apparent that they did not want to watch or read about the Vietnam War in movies or books. It was just a time period that people didn't want to discuss. She continued to wait and consider it. She said that she spent the most of the war in primary school and that everything had a profound effect on her.

The pandemic then struck. The news was about the trauma that the medical staff was going through and the price they were having to pay in order to aid their fellow people, and she was stuck in her house with nowhere to go and nothing to do. It was all connected by the fact that the nation was extremely fractured at the time and continues to remain so, and that healthcare workers were doing greater than their scope of duty without receiving the backing they needed. It fell into place with ease. Given that it concerns similar topics in a comparable age, now is the appropriate time. 

According to her, the book went through several iterations and narratives before arriving at the perfect one. Ultimately, she aimed to narrate a representative tale about these women, who were brought up by parents who fought in World War II and were instilled with a strong sense of patriotism, military duty, and the strength and integrity of America to volunteer and go to war without fully comprehending the implications or how it would completely change their world.

The second part of it is that once they do that and turn into this fierce combat nurse, they return home to a nation, and frequently a family, that is unable to discuss, consider, or honor their contribution. And after that, how do they proceed? From there, who do they become? She said that since she doesn't usually write about immoral individuals, the book's one twist—when someone returns—was really challenging for her to write. She had to write about a wider range of personalities in this novel in order to maintain the plot's momentum and put Frankie under pressure as she attempted to mend herself, practically on her own. 

She discovered that, frequently, when women return from war or similar events, no one is interested in hearing about them or wanting to hear their narrative. They return home and resume their lives instead of pushing back against it. They don't retell their narrative endlessly or write books about it soon. In this type of warfare, many men and women refrain from sharing their own narratives with their own families. The first and most crucial thing is that we need to provide a space where family members and veterans may discuss these challenging topics and draw lessons from each other. 

She aspires for others to read this book, become engrossed in it, experience intense emotional resonance, and gain a profound understanding of the sacrifices these ladies made on behalf of their nation. After that, check if there are any additional lessons they can learn by conducting independent study on their own about the politics, the war, and their own families. 

Resource: Goodreads