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Summary
Chapters Thirty-Four—Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Four
By February 1974, the war has ended, and Vietnam veterans have faded into the background of society. Rather than being celebrated as heroes, male and female veterans are both ignored and treated with contempt. Frankie, still in treatment, has been working through her feelings about Rye and her time in Vietnam. Dr. Alden decides she is ready to leave the treatment center, and Bette and Connor come to take her home.
By summer, Frankie regains her driver’s license but has yet to recover her nursing license. She informs her parents she is moving and plans to sell the cottage they had given her to start fresh. Though concerned, her parents don’t object. In August, after the sale, Frankie and Barb take a road trip to find a new place to begin again. In Missoula, Montana, Frankie sees a dilapidated farmhouse for sale. Struck by its beauty and remoteness, she feels it could be a very safe place for women veterans.
Chapter Thirty-Five
In September 1982, Frankie receives an invitation to a reunion for the 36th Evac Hospital. This coincides with the unveiling of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in November. She thinks about all of the different ways veterans were mistreated upon returning and how, in the late 1970s, Agent Orange’s devastating health effects on veterans became public knowledge. Seven years earlier, Donna, another nurse struggling after Vietnam, arrived at Frankie’s door. Frankie took her in, and Donna stayed. Together, they rebuilt the farmhouse into a ranch called The Last Best Place, a sanctuary for women who served in Vietnam. They wanted to provide a place where women veterans could come to feel heard and to get the help they needed.
In November, Frankie travels to Washington for the reunion and meets Barb and Ethel. They attend the unveiling of the memorial with Frankie’s parents, who want to see Finley’s name. Connor admits his guilt over how he treated Frankie after she returned from the war. He tells her how sorry he is and how much he wishes Finley’s death hadn’t also created the distance between him and his daughter. Frankie is deeply touched. While searching for Jamie’s name on the memorial, Frankie is shocked when Jamie himself approaches her, alive and well. He shows her the stone she had given him in Vietnam. He has been carrying it after all these years. Jamie then tells her he is now divorced, which means they can begin again in a real relationship.
The story ends with Frankie thinking about how important remembrance is to her and to people like her. She wants to ensure that people know about the women who served in Vietnam and understand how brave they were. She thinks, “We were there.”
Analysis
These final chapters focus on the healing process Frankie must go through in order to leave her cycles of pain behind. They examine the long-term effects of the war in a different way from the rest of the novel, focusing on Frankie’s struggle to be vulnerable and address her issues rather than repressing them with drugs and alcohol. Just like Frankie’s negative cycles mirrored the cycles of conflict in wartime, her positive cycles reflect her attempts to ensure women’s contributions in Vietnam are not forgotten.
Frankie’s time at the treatment facility is a turning point in her attempt to address her trauma, because she can’t try and escape from the truth through fantasy or substances. Getting the correct diagnosis for her psychological distress is an important part of the change she undergoes. The change is not immediate, however. When Henry suggests she has PTSD, she rejects the idea at first because she was not involved in armed combat. When she compares her troubles to the traumas POWs experience, Frankie reveals her doubts about whether her suffering is valid. She has spent so long trying to absorb the idea that her service didn’t matter to people that it’s difficult for her to talk about it when she has the opportunity. The years of denial she was forced to take in show a wider societal failure to recognize the toll of non-combat service, particularly for women. When Henry reminds her that trauma is not a competition—a fact that seems obvious in our contemporary period—it’s a direct contradiction of everything the VA told her about prioritizing male suffering.
Although Frankie’s decision to share her struggles with Dr. Alden and her other confidantes shows progress, she’s still dealing with the fact that her healing takes place in a world that overlooks women veterans. By 1974 therapeutic interventions for women and non-combat veterans are still very much an anomaly. Veterans like Frankie were often left to deal with their demons alone. Frankie wants to provide a pipeline for other women to overcome the obstacles to having happy lives that society is still imposing.
When she sells the cottage in California and buys the farmhouse in Missoula, Frankie is sloughing off the shell of her previous life. She’s making a concerted effort to reclaim control over the next part of her story. The farmhouse could not be more different from her parents’ home in California or the war-torn mountains of Vietnam. The quiet isolation allows her and women like her space to think. The Last Best Place becomes a space where they can find healing and support. It’s the third and final incarnation of Frankie’s life as a nurse for those who served in Vietnam. This time, instead of caring for combatants, Frankie and the women she works with are making a haven for women like themselves. In this environment, Frankie’s creation of her own hero’s wall feels like a joyous evolution of her family’s exclusionary tradition. Her work ensures their stories are preserved and their sacrifices are no longer ignored. Through this, Frankie turns her pain into purpose and builds a legacy of recognition, not erasure.
