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We won’t ever forget, God knows, but we move forward. Away from Vietnam. Into the future.
In this quote from Chapter 22, Barb acknowledges the never-ending cost of warfare while expressing the need to move beyond it to Frankie. The way Barb speaks here makes their memories of Vietnam seem as though they’re real places. The nurses can’t ever “forget” what happened to them, but in Barb’s opinion they don’t have to do that in order to live valuable and fulfilling lives. Barb’s insistence on moving “into the future” gives a voice to the desire she, Ethel and Frankie share to leave behind the emotional and physical destruction caused by the war. While the optimistic approach seems to work for Barb, Frankie’s ongoing struggles suggest that the impact of Vietnam can’t be neatly contained or erased, no matter how far forward one moves. What works for one nurse may not work for another, despite how similar their experiences are.
Even worse than that, in the late seventies she’d sat here in her living room and watched a fellow Vietnam vet claim on television that Agent Orange had given him—and thousands like him—cancer. I died in Vietnam; I just didn’t know it, he’d said. Not long after that, the world had learned that the herbicide also caused miscarriages and birth defects. Most likely it had caused Frankie’s miscarriage.
Agent Orange was a tactical herbicide used by the US military to clear forested areas and harm enemy personnel during the Vietnam war. It was liberally sprayed from planes, and soldiers and civilians were repeatedly and directly exposed to it. In this passage from Chapter 35, Frankie reflects on a televised veteran’s statement—“I died in Vietnam; I just didn’t know it”—where he discusses how his terminal cancer was caused by his exposure to Agent Orange years before. Moments like this speak to how the consequences of war linger far beyond the roar of the battlefield. Agent Orange and its effects continued to claim lives long after combat ended. Indeed, as Frankie thinks, it was more than likely that her own miscarriage was caused by Agent Orange exposure. War inflicts harm in ways that remain invisible for years, both physically and to the mind. Survival does not mark the end of suffering when the battlegrounds leave a permanent mark on those they touched.
Frankie took a sip of the wine as she stared out at the night lights of Saigon. Even with music playing, the noise of the war was ever-present: the whir of a helicopter flying over the city, the pop of gunfire. Here and there, streaks of red arced through the night sky like fireworks; orange fires blossomed. From here, the war was almost beautiful. Maybe that was a fundamental truth: War looked one way for those who saw it from a safe distance. Close up, the view was different.
In this deceptively beautiful passage from Chapter 13, Frankie looks out across nighttime Saigon from her rooftop bar and thinks about how beautiful the war is from far away. When she isn’t being shot at or bombed, the “streaks of red” from the rockets and the “orange fires” of incendiary bombs and napalm look like celebratory fireworks. Frankie’s observation—that war “looked one way for those who saw it from a safe distance”—suggests that people at home like Connor and Bette glorify war because they only see the “fireworks.” They are safe at home and untouched by its immediate consequences, so they can romanticize or simplify it all they like.
