The 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division on the day they took the mountain, west of A Shau Valley, called Dong Ap Bia, or Hamburger Hill. A Huey evacuation helicopter lands on a tiny clearing on “Hamburger Hill” as a wounded American soldier is rushed aboard. Men of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division are trying to take the bomb-scarred, blood-soaked mountaintop from North Vietnamese forces. (Jim Clare/Stars and Stripes)
Kristin Hannah’s book “The Women” is an unforgettable tale of a U.S. Army nurse serving in the brutal Vietnam War. It’s also about friendship, love, betrayal and the disturbing treatment of the veterans — especially the women — when they returned home.
The book is historical fiction, meaning that fictional characters act within actual historic events, placed in Vietnam from 1967 to ’69 and later years in the U.S. Hannah spoke with veterans for details to make the scenes realistic; they insisted she use the actual names of places and battles.
Published in 2024, “The Women” has been on the New York Times Hardcover Best Seller list for 53 weeks. As of Feb. 23, it was in fifth place, out of 10. With hundreds of thousands of readers — likely reaching at least a million by now — I feel the need to speak out.
As much as I liked the novel overall, one aspect was jarring and felt wrong — her depiction of Stars and Stripes’ coverage of the war.
A wounded unidentified African-American soldier is put on a stretcher and carried to a Huey to be evacuated off of the blood-soaked mountaintop — called Hamburger Hill. (Jim Clare/Stars and Stripes)
Marines retrieve the body of a Marine. A USAF cargo plane was making a low level drop over the Marine fortress of Khe Sanh at less than 50 feet altitude. (John Olson/Stars and Stripes)
Marines carry wounded to helicopter pad on Khe Sanh base to be evacuated. The base was hit by North Vietnamese mortar and artillery fire killing and wounding several Marines. (John Olson/Stars and Stripes)
Life Magazine photographer Co Rentmeester’s left hand is being examined by a nurse at a U.S. Army hospital after being hit by a bullet while covering the fighting in Saigon May 6th near Tan Son Nhut. (John Olson/Stars and Stripes)
Consider this on page 138 (of my paperback edition): “There were more than 450,000 American men in Vietnam now and God knew how many deaths and casualties. You certainly couldn’t find that answer in the Stars and Stripes,” Hannah wrote. I counted about half-a-dozen unflattering mentions of the newspaper. The supposition was that since Stripes was a military publication, it published only the Defense Department version of events.
This is not the Stars and Stripes I know today. But, being a journalist, I set out to learn the truth of coverage 58 years ago. It is widely acknowledged now that the government misled the public about the war. Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense from 1961-68, confessed in his 1995 memoir that he was “wrong, terribly wrong” about the war in which 58,000 American troops gave their lives.
But back in 1967 — when Hannah’s main character Frankie McGrath goes to Vietnam as an Army nurse — did Stripes deliberately withhold casualty numbers and battle losses as the book implies? No.
In fact, for example, the Feb. 13, 1968, edition of Pacific Stars and Stripes devotes nearly half a page to “Casualties in Vietnam” with names listed by military branch and categories such as “Killed in Action” and “Died of Wounds.” This was a few weeks into the Tet Offensive. The rest of the page contains war stories from the Associated Press and United Press International wire services.
I thank Catharine Giordano, assistant managing editor for Stripes archives, for finding that page for me and providing other valuable material.
Consider this article by Robert Hodierne for The New York Times in 1970: “Stripes was the one place that G.I.s could sometimes read about the shooting, bleeding, bombing, gassing, dying and killing.” Staff was military and civilian; reporters would come back from the front to Saigon and send their stories direct to Stripes’ office in Tokyo, uncensored by the military. “No other military journalists in Vietnam can claim that privilege.”
Sometimes the unfiltered coverage was raw. Read what Sgt. Gene Young wrote in Pacific Stars and Stripes on May 14, 1967. The dateline is Lai Khe, Vietnam; Young described the 1st Infantry Division searching for a supply center and finding the Viet Cong.
“We decided to go around and come into the area from behind. Just inside the jungle we found more bunkers and a cooking fire still burning,” Young wrote. “They opened up with an automatic burst that stitched Skaggs right up the back, but he didn’t realize he was dead. Skaggs started firing his gun and sank slowly to his knees and he held up his chin as his life and his bullets ran out at the same time.”
Vivid, chilling. More than half a century later, it’s difficult to read this eyewitness account by a Stripes reporter. Withholding the truth? Just the opposite.
How could Kristin Hannah write that “The Stars and Stripes reported no American casualties yesterday. [But] Seven men died in OR One alone”?
So I tried to ask her. “The idea you reference came from the research she did — via print publications as well as interviews she conducted,” Dori Weintraub, vice president of publicity for the publisher St. Martin’s Press, responded.
I could stop here — but then I would be ignoring the full truth. And journalists don’t do that.
During the 1967-’69 timeframe in Hannah’s book Stripes reporting in Vietnam was comprehensive and uncensored. But that changed in 1970. One of the newspaper’s military critics, Col. William Koch, a persistent complainer about word usage who suggested stories be reviewed by information officers (Stripes’ editors refused), took over as editor. He “says he wants his reporters to stop concentrating on news and do features,” Hodierne wrote in The New York Times.
Fast forward to today. Could such manipulation happen again? An emphatic no.
Although it can be hard to understand how a news organization that is partially funded by the Defense Department — and is part of that department — could be editorially independent, Stripes is.
The top position of publisher is required to be filled by a civilian. Stripes’ mission is to fully inform U.S. troops stationed around the world without bias. It must be a trusted source of information.
And in the early 1990s, Congress mandated the position of ombudsman to protect the First Amendment rights of Stars and Stripes and ensure it is free from government interference. That is what I do.
Read “The Women” to learn about U.S. Army nurses in Vietnam. But keep in mind the difference between fiction and truth.
Email the Stripes ombudsman at smith.jacqueline@stripes.com. Looking for Stars and Stripes’ historic coverage? Subscribe to Stars and Stripes’ historic newspaper archive! We have digitized our 1948-1999 European and Pacific editions, as well as several of our WWII editions and made them available online through https://starsandstripes.newspaperarchive.com/
