She drifted back toward him, sat down on the ridiculous couch. “No one gives a shit about the women.” Frankie lit the cigarette, drew smoke into her lungs, and exhaled.
“Why do you say that?”
“I went to the VA for help. Twice. They brushed me off, told me to run along, that I wasn’t a real vet, I guess.”
“Why did you go to the VA for help?”
Frankie frowned. “I don’t know. I just…”
“Just what?” Henry asked gently.
She felt his scrutiny. This was no idle question. He was asking a question Frankie had barely asked herself. She had never answered it aloud, not to anyone. She didn’t really want to answer it now.
But she was in trouble here, disintegrating, losing pieces of herself. She needed to reach out to someone with her truth. “Well. It’s been a rough patch. I almost killed a man because I drove drunk. Then there’s the baby, the miscarriage … Rye coming back, lying to me. Our affair. And now I’ll lose my nursing license. There’s nothing of me left.”
“That’s all the middle, Frankie. You’ve had trouble sleeping for years, trouble with nightmares. You used to scream in your sleep,” he said. “Before the baby, the miscarriage … before Rye.”
Frankie nodded.
“What about surges of irrational anger? Irritation? Anxiety?”
Frankie couldn’t look at him.
“Vietnam,” he said. “That’s why you went to the VA. You know Vietnam is the beginning of it all. Do you have memories that are more than memories, that feel like you’re there again?”
“You mean, like…”
“Like a flashback in a film.”
Frankie was stunned. She’d assumed it happened only to her, that she was crazy. “How do you know that?”
“The Fourth of July party, remember?”
She couldn’t answer.
“It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a bit controversial, they haven’t added it to the APA manual yet, but we’re seeing similar symptoms in your fellow vets. What you’re experiencing is a familiar response to trauma.”
“I didn’t see combat.”
“Frankie, you were a surgical nurse in the Central Highlands.”
She nodded.
“And you think you didn’t see combat?”
“My … Rye … was a POW. Tortured. Kept in the dark for years. He’s fine.”
Henry leaned forward. “War trauma isn’t a competitive sport. Nor is it one-size-fits-all. The POWs are a particular group, as well. They came home to a different world than you did. They were treated like the World War II veterans. Like heroes. It’s hard to underscore too much the impact of that on one’s psyche.”
Frankie thought about all the yellow ribbons on the tree branches in 1973. They hadn’t been there when she came home. Hell, they’d had parades for the returning POWs. None of them had been spat on or flipped off or called a baby killer or a warmonger.
“And they were pilots, for the most part, so their war experience was different than the soldiers or Marines on the ground. In captivity, they banded together, held rank, communicated in secret, all of which strengthened their commitment to each other. We don’t really understand PTSD yet, but we know it’s highly personal. What about your friends, fellow nurses?”
“We don’t really talk about it.”
“The war no one wants to remember.”
“Yeah.”
“I talked to Barb this week,” he said. “She told me about the fighting around Pleiku.” He leaned toward her. “Nothing you feel is wrong or abnormal. It doesn’t matter what your friends did or didn’t experience. You’re allowed to be uniquely affected by your wartime experience. Especially you, someone who was idealistic enough to volunteer. You have nothing to be ashamed of, Frankie.”
Ashamed.
It hit Frankie hard, that word. She had let herself become ashamed; maybe it had started when she’d been spat on in the airport, or when her mother asked her not to talk about the war, or maybe as news of the atrocities began coming out. Almost every civilian she’d met since coming home, including her own family, had subtly or overtly given her the message that what she’d done in Vietnam was shameful. She’d been a part of something bad. She’d tried not to believe it; but maybe she had. She’d gone to war a patriot and come home a pariah. “How do I get back to who I was?”
“There’s no going back, Frankie. You have to find a way to go forward, become the new you. Fighting for who you were at twenty-one is a losing game. If that’s what you’ve been trying for, no wonder you’re struggling. The naive, idealistic girl who volunteered for war is gone. In a very real way, she died over there.”