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But time—and friendship—had done exactly as promised: pain and grief had grown soft in her hands, almost pliable. She found she could form them into something kinder if she was deliberate in thought and action, if she lived a careful, cautious life, if she stayed away from anything that reminded her of the war, of loss, of death.
In this quote from Chapter 23, Frankie reflects on the difficulty of living with her persistent memories of Vietnam and her loss of Rye. Her description of pain and grief as “soft in her hands, almost pliable” through time and friendship make grief feel like a real object, rather than a weightless emotion. The metaphors she uses here refer to how friendship with Barb and Ethel allows her to reshape the emotional weight of her experiences. If she can stay on the surface of her painful emotions she can keep going. She has to be very cautious, steering away from anything that could hurt her or remind her of “loss or death.” If she does this, she’s able to keep on living, although her life is limited by the very rules that allow her to persist. Survival, for Frankie, depends on maintaining a “careful, cautious life” to avoid triggers that could reopen old wounds. The language suggests that Frankie is not really healing from her trauma here, but is learning to coexist with it in a controlled way.
They wanted her to just get up, stand, start to walk. As if grief were a pool you could simply step out of. In reality, it was quicksand and heat. A rough entry, but warm and inviting once you let go.
In this quote from Chapter 20, Frankie scoffs at the way everyone around her wants her to just dismiss the loss of her love. She has experienced grief before, when Finley died, and she knows that grief is not something that can be put aside until it’s convenient to address it. Rather, she compares it to “quicksand and heat,” as though it is a real substance that could suck her down into its depths and suffocate or extinguish her. For other people who feel less deeply grief might seem like “a pool you could simply step out of,” but for the dreamy and idealistic Frankie it’s not nearly so navigable. Instead, she sees grief as being both dangerous and deceptively comforting, in the way that drowning is sometimes described. The “warm and inviting” quality of quicksand reveals how surrendering to loss can feel easier than trying to fight against it. It’s much less work to submit to negative emotions than to struggle your way through healing.
Napalm—a jellied firebomb used in flamethrowers by the U.S. to clear out foxholes and trenches, and dropped in bombs by U.S. planes—had become common in these first few months of her second tour. More and more of its victims were coming into the OR; most of them were villagers. Tomorrow they’d be flown to the Third Field—a real burn unit—but few would survive until then. The few who did would wish they’d died. These burns were like nothing else on earth. The gel-fueled firebomb mixture stuck to its target and didn’t stop burning until nothing was left.
In this quote from Chapter 17, Frankie describes the devastating effects of napalm during her second tour in Pleiku. She sees it for the first time when she’s performing nursing duties on civilians who have come in with napalm burns. The napalm is so horribly damaging that Frankie struggles to look at her patients. Her account of napalm burns emphasizes how indiscriminate the destruction they wreak is. Napalm was employed in Vietnam as a weapon of physical and psychological terror during the Vietnam war. Most of the people affected by napalm injuries were not the intended targets, but rather, as Frankie says here, “most of them were villagers”—civilians caught in the war’s violence. Frankie knows that there’s little she can do to help people with napalm burns beyond stabilizing them and preparing them to the taken to a real burn unit. The clinical tone in “few would survive until then” shows how grim the outlook for the burned people truly is. Frankie’s statement that survivors would “wish they’d died” also shows the unimaginable suffering caused by these injuries.
