Parents' Guide to The Women

THE WOMEN begins in 1966 at the McGrath family estate in California. There's a party for Frankie McGrath's brother, Fin, a recent Naval Academy graduate who's off to Vietnam. When Frankie gets her nursing degree, she decides to enlist in the Army Nurse Corp and join Fin in Vietnam, something her father thinks is ridiculous as "women don't serve." Then Fin is killed, and Frankie finds herself in Vietnam—not at a hospital far from the fighting but at an Evac Hospital for the very seriously injured. Her new roommates, Barb Johnson, an Afro wearing young Black woman from Georgia, and Ethel Flint, who lives on a farm in Virginia and plans on going to vet school, immediately step up to give her the support and encouragement she so desperately needs. Nothing Frankie saw in her pervious job as a nurse prepares her for the constant waves of dead and dying or for operating during rocket attacks. As the months pass, she begins to have doubts about the war; is "all the death and destruction the way to stop communism?" Then there's an unexpected meeting with helicopter pilot Rye "Riot" Walsh, Fin's best friend, and the beginning of a romance. When Frankie returns home in 1968, she's shocked by protestors at the airport who spit on her and call her a "baby killer." She's barely home when news of death leaves her emotionally shattered, and Barb and Ethel arrive to take her away to heal at Ethel's farm in Virginia. When she returns to California, there's a new romance and engagement to psychiatrist Henry Acevedo, a shocking surprise, yet another tragedy, nightmares, and a descent into drug and alcohol addiction. There is, of course, a happy ending and a new life in a most unexpected place.