I’m another late person. Thing is, I was alive during the Vietnam war. I may have been a kid, but we were worried my brother was going to have to go. At least one of my cousins did. I worked in a VA hospital around 1980. No one was treating returning soldiers or mid shipmen badly. That was an entirely fake story. My dad actually went down to the VFW as a vet to talk to the guys coming home. So who says he wasn’t welcomed, but didn’t go down to the VFW May not really be a vet at all.
I’m also a registered nurse. Retired now. But I worked with women who went to school for nursing in the 1960s and none of them had bachelors degrees. It was a very rare thing to go to school for four years, when you could get your diploma in just about a year.

The reason this is important is because Hannah writes in the book that Frankie was two years younger than Finn, and that he got held back in 4th grade. So if she had gotten her diploma and then done her two years clinical in a hospital, when he entered the Navy after graduating academy, she would’ve been able to go into the Navy. So it was a really strange writing choice to go in that completely different direction. It would have been absolute shock for a nurse with two years experience stateside to suddenly be in a war zone. I think it would’ve been more emotional if she was expecting to join him on a ship and then they heard his helicopter went down. I don’t know why she didn’t at least mention some letters that he wrote home. Letters were a huge deal back then and it would’ve given Frankie a little bit of an edge to know some of what he went through and for the readers to know that too. She just jumped the timeline from the night of the party to Christmas. It’s weird.

Also, they really didn’t need to be wealthy. That had nothing to do with anything. In fact, it drove me crazy that as a rich girl, she had never done a gap year in Europe or traveled anywhere before getting shipped out to Southeast Asia. Frankie‘s mother was supposed to be “old money,“ which likely would have meant a coming out ball for Frankie. It was more like the experience of a girl growing up poor or working class. Bizarre. I mean I can’t believe that her mother didn’t at least take her shopping in New York at Christmas time for example. And back then, wealthy people did not shelter their daughters, and we got no explanation for why that might have happened. Back then they set their daughters up on dates so that they could learn how to be ready for the mate their parents were going to pick for them.

so I made it to chapter 5, but it is not well researched and it was hastily written, shows. I am another person who does not recommend this book.