“This is a shitload of work,” Barb said.
“Fortunately, I know how to fix stuff.” Frankie turned, smiled. “My friends and I spent almost two years rebuilding a bunkhouse.”
“It’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“Look at the map. Missoula isn’t far. Hospitals and a college, too. It’s closer to Chicago than San Diego is. I know I can find an AA meeting here, get a new sponsor.”
“You’ve made up your mind.”
Frankie turned off the radio.
Quiet.
She looked at Barb, smiled. “I have.”
Thirty-Five
WESTERN MONTANA
SEPTEMBER 1982
The invitation came in a smudged white envelope that was postmarked August 28 and stamped WASHINGTON, D.C. Someone had written across the back SAVE THE DATE.
You’re invited to a reunion of the
36th Evac Hospital staff
following the unveiling of the new
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
on November 13, 1982
Frankie’s first reaction surprised her.
Anger.
Now a memorial to the men who had died?
Now? More than a decade after they’d been unceremoniously buried and forgotten by their fellow Americans?
As hard as Frankie had worked in the last eight years, and she’d been dedicated to the endeavor, she’d never quite been able to completely dispel the shame her fellow Americans had made her feel over serving in Vietnam, nor her anger at how the government had treated the veterans who returned broken in body or mind or spirit. 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.
Her own government had done that to her. Maybe if the politicians in Washington, D.C., had built this memorial as an apology to a generation of servicemen and -women and their families, she might have felt differently, but no. The government hadn’t moved to honor the veterans of Vietnam. The vets themselves had had to make this happen. Those who remained honoring those who had fallen.
She heard Donna come up behind her. Pause.
Donna had worked here at the ranch for more than seven years now. Frankie still remembered the cold day Donna had driven up to the front door, her fake black hair every which way, her skin pale from alcoholism, her voice barely above a whisper. I’m a nurse, she’d said. Cu Chi, ’68. I got your name from the VA. I can’t …
Sleep, Frankie remembered saying. That was all. Enough. Everything. She’d taken Donna by the hand and led her into the farmhouse. They’d sat in a pair of folding chairs in front of the fire and talked.
A rap session, Jill at the center had called it. It helps sometimes to feel you’re not alone. They’d been there for each other, she and Donna, often held each other upright. Donna had urged Frankie to fight for the reinstatement of her nursing license, and the fight had proven to be healing. By the time she’d officially been granted the right to be a nurse again, Frankie felt strong enough to try.
That had been the beginning of the ranch. She and Donna had joined forces, using the money from the Coronado cottage sale to make improvements.
In Missoula, both of them took nursing jobs at a local hospital. After work hours, Frankie attended night classes at the college toward a degree in clinical psychology, and a year later Donna did the same. When they weren’t studying to become counselors or working shifts at the hospital, they remodeled the house and repaired the outbuildings and attended regular meetings.
That first summer, Frankie’s friends and family had shown up to help. Mom and Dad, Barb and Jere and their growing boys, Ethel and Noah and their two kids, Henry and Natalie and their rowdy sons. They took over bedrooms and pitched tents in the grassy backyard. They worked together during the day and sat around a campfire at night, talking and laughing and remembering.
As soon as they got their master’s degrees, Frankie and Donna put up flyers at the nearest Veterans Administration office that said: To the women of Vietnam: We lived through it over there. We can live through it here. Join us.
A year later, Janet had shown up, her face blackened by bruising, her quick laugh too sharp to be anything but a substitute for crying. Janet stayed for almost a year.
From then on, the ranch they called the Last Best Place became a haven for the women who’d served in Vietnam. They came, they stayed as long as they needed to, and they moved on. Each left an imprint somehow, a path for women like them to follow. They left art and easels and paints. Knitting needles and skeins of wool, short stories and memoir chapters and musical instruments. They worked during the day—hammering nails, painting walls, feeding horses, tending the garden. Whatever needed doing.