Prologue
Manila, Philippine Islands
Feb. 19, 1941
Dear Mother,
They are sending the Army dependents back to the States, which is as it should be, in case anything happens over here. We will have enough to take care of but there are lots of rumors—of course things look hideous, however, I’m not worrying—which would only impair my mind at present, and we have to be on the job. . . .
I have the colonel’s Masonic ring. We never discuss war, as he will not listen to it, and doesn’t want me to cross bridges before we get to them, but underneath I know why he gave me the ring. Any Mason who saw the ring would give me a hand in case I needed emergency help. I am to wear it all the time I am in Manila. Let me know if you are getting my letters. I never know when they will get to you, as mines are planted all around us, so that the Japs [sic] can’t get into Manila Bay.
Don’t worry. I don’t as it can’t be changed. Maybe things will turn out. You be sure to collect my insurance if I don’t get back. I am in good health so far, and in good frame of mind.
Love,
Frances
P.S. Keep personal some things I tell you about the Army. There are plenty of spies here.
When Lieutenant Frances L. Nash took the oath of service in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps on 14 November 1935, there were fewer than 600 U.S. Army nurses on active duty. Seven years later, when she was taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Philippines on 6 May 1942, more than 12,000 women army nurses would be on active duty. All told, by the war’s end, 59,000 army nurses would volunteer to serve in World War II. But on that cold November day in 1935 when Nash became an army nurse, she was one of a relatively small number of women who were taking what we now recognize as a major pioneering step for women in the nursing profession and in the military as well.
Frances Nash was typical of the women who volunteered to enter the Army Nurse Corps in the 1930s and 1940s: she was adventurous, independent, and self-reliant. A feisty, Georgia farm girl, Frances had made up her mind early in childhood to be a nurse, and before she had even finished high school, she applied for admission to Grady Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in Atlanta. After high school graduation in 1929, Frances was off to “The Gradys,” as Atlanta residents referred to the hospital at the time. She received her nursing diploma in 1932, then stayed on at Grady Memorial as a surgical nurse until she joined the Army Nurse Corps in 1935.
Unfortunately for any young woman considering nursing as a vocation in America during the 1920s and 1930s, prevailing public opinion held that women of good character did not become nurses. Women had served as nurses in every war in the nation’s history to that point—from the American Revolution through the Civil War to World War I. Florence Nightingale had done excellent nursing work for the British army during the Crimean War in 1855. Yet most Americans believed that nursing was an unsuitable and somewhat suspect profession for young unmarried women. In her book From Nightingale to Eagle, Major Edith A. Aynes remembered her mother’s response when, in 1928, Edith informed her that she wanted to become a nurse. After telling her daughter that “nurses were not decent,” and that “she would not be able to hold her head up if her daughter became a nurse,” Mrs. Aynes stated that “Nursing was emptying bedpans and doing other disgusting things for people.”1
Not only was nursing considered demeaning physical labor for a young woman, it was also considered a profession that required “unwholesome” mingling of the sexes. In the American society of the day, which was very closed regarding sexuality, the majority of citizens believed that a vocation that often required unmarried women to provide care that could involve exposure to the male genitalia was no place for innocent young women fresh out of high school. In a society with such attitudes, women with “knowledge” of male sex organs were considered aberrant—unfit for marriage and motherhood. Even married women did not discuss sexual matters with unmarried female friends or family, and were lucky to have a married friend with whom to broach the subject.
The undesirability of the vocation was heightened by the fact that nursing often involved rendering personal care and treatment to men and women suffering from taboo illnesses such as venereal disease that were simply not mentioned in polite society. Normal body functions were considered improper topics for conversation with anyone who was not one’s personal physician. Thus, a young woman’s innocence depended on things she did not do or discuss as well as on things of which she had no “knowledge.” Unmarried women with “knowledge” of male anatomy, the sexual nature of marital relations, or venereal diseases were automatically suspect in an atmosphere that treated such topics with the utmost secrecy and reluctance. Knowing of these “sinful” matters was itself proof of indecency.
Aside from this negative public attitude was the additional hardship of the exhausting training nurses had to undergo. Civilian hospitals used nursing students as free labor and required long hours of work on hospital wards. But since a hospital provided room and board at usually no significant cost, many women who were unable to afford a college education decided to enter nursing school in order to get some type of professional training and a means to earn a living.
For Frances Nash and others who graduated from nursing schools in the depression of the 1930s, however, jobs were not easy to find. Hospitals hired very few nursing graduates since the supply of free student labor seemed endless. Most registered nurses—those who had graduated from a three-year nursing school—were forced to seek private duty at a time when few American families could afford to pay for such care. Waiting lists of nurses looking for private duty assignments were often two-hundred-hopefuls-long and the periods between paychecks forced many nurses to seek other work to support themselves. When a private duty job did materialize, it came with twelve-hour shifts and a salary of about two dollars a day. Registered nurses who were lucky enough to be hired by a hospital or clinic found themselves working twelve hours a day and on call for the other twelve hours. In small clinics and rural hospitals run by one or two physicians, one registered nurse was usually the entire nursing staff, working virtually twenty-four hours, seven days a week. When a day off was required, a licensed practical nurse (i.e., a nurse who had not graduated from a nursing school and was not a licensed RN but instead had only ten months to a year’s training in more restricted areas) might be brought in for that time, with a quick return of the graduate nurse to her regular relentless hours.
In spite of all these conditions, young women like Frances Nash flocked to nursing schools, and after graduation devoted themselves to their patients’ care for an average salary of $70 a month (16¢ per hour) for twelve-hour days and only the occasional day off. In the midst of the long bread lines of the Great Depression, 16 cents an hour sounded like a gold mine to the unemployed, especially given that the national unemployment rate was, on average, 25 percent. In Atlanta, the unemployment rate hovered in the range of 25 to 30 percent for whites, and 70 to 75 percent for blacks, so twenty-one-year-old Frances considered herself quite lucky to land employment at Grady Memorial Hospital in 1932 after graduating from its nursing school.
In the face of staggering unemployment and concerns about a possible approaching war, nursing journals in the 1930s carried advertisements for the U.S. Army and Navy Nurse Corps. Young women like Frances Nash, independent enough to enter the field of nursing despite prevailing public opinion, found it even more daring to join the military nurse corps. If nursing was somewhat unacceptable, military nursing was all the more unacceptable. Still, the military corps promised comparatively good salaries, a chance to serve one’s country, travel to distant places, and gain contact with cultures few civilian women would ever see. Only the most adventurous young women would sign up for the military nurse corps, and only the bravest of those would volunteer for duty in the Philippines, a group of islands in the Pacific on the other side of the world, within just a few hours of Japan by air.
FIVE YEARS after volunteering for the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, Frances Nash again volunteered in the late summer of 1940 for a two-year tour of duty in the Philippines. When Frances told her family that she would be leaving for the Philippines, she met the same concerned comments so many other army nurses were hearing as they delivered their “good news” to parents and friends. “Why are you going to the Philippines?
Lt. Frances L. Nash (Courtesy of Mamie Nash Cason)
America is going to be at war soon, and it’s going to start in that area.” Like the other nurses who’d chosen a Pacific tour of duty, Frances replied that she was an army nurse, and if war came to the Philippines, that was exactly where she should be to take care of casualties.
When Nash and other army nurses arrived in Manila harbor in 1940, they looked more like debutantes than military nurses. They left the ship in chiffon dresses accessorized with matching or complementary high heels, white gloves, and large-brimmed picture hats. Their trunks were free of khaki, since there was no military uniform for the army nurse of the day. Instead, they were packed tight with floor-length evening gowns, fashionable dresses for dinners and cocktail parties, as well as a range of outfits suitable for a variety of social occasions.
The army imposed two sacrosanct requirements on each nurse who served in the Philippines: each had to have completed two years of military service in the United States, and each had to be in perfect health. The health requirements were particularly important since transport ships bringing supplies and replacements arrived in the Philippines only once every three months. A sick nurse who could not perform her duty meant the nursing staff would be shorthanded for as much as twelve weeks. Added to this concern was the fact that tuberculosis, which was feared everywhere, carried a special peril in tropical climates. The heat and humidity of the Philippines acted as a catalyst for TB, an often deadly disease at that time, increasing the number of cases many times over, and compounding their severity.
Since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1899, there were five army hospitals and one navy hospital in the Philippines to support the American troops. Lieutenant Nash’s first duty station was in the heart of downtown Manila at Sternberg General Hospital. The Sternberg, as it was called by most of its staff, consisted of a series of two-story buildings around an enclosed courtyard, in the style of the Spanish architecture that dominated the city. The hospital stood at a busy intersection and was constantly bombarded by the sounds of a large city: fire and police sirens; car horns; screeching brakes; ambulances bringing the sick and injured for medical help to the Sternberg and civilian hospitals; the braying of donkeys and whinnying of horses as they pulled carts between and around motorized vehicles. There was one feature, however, that almost made up for the noise: the Sternberg’s staff was within walking distance of the municipal golf and tennis courts, an up-to-date shopping area, the Army & Navy Club, and the old walled city.
Until America’s entrance into World War II, the Sternberg was the most modern hospital in the Philippine Islands. It had 450 beds, an officers’ ward, an enlisted ward, more than 20 private rooms, a large laboratory area for research of tropical diseases, a barrio ward, excellent operating suites, the most modern X-ray equipment, the services of between fifteen and twenty army nurses, and a civilian physiotherapist and dietician. All military hospitals in the Manila area had to make special arrangements due to the tropical heat and humidity. Nurses on the day shift worked an average of four hours while the afternoon and night shifts worked eight hours each, the one beginning at 1230 and the other at 0030. The shifts were rotated among the nurses to ensure fairness.
Like all working American women at that time, army nurses received much less pay for their labors than their male counterparts. Lieutenant Nash received 50 percent of the salary given to male officers of the same rank. This was due, at least in part, to the fact that Nash’s rank as “lieutenant” was not the same as a man’s. Nash had what was called “relative rank,” a term that had originated in 1920 when Congress passed the Army Reorganization Act in recognition of the twenty thousand women nurses who served during World War I. The act provided that nurses would have the relative, temporary rank of second lieutenant to major. Relative rank conveyed the right of women army nurses to wear the military insignia, but without conferring military status or privileges (for example, nurses did not rate the salute that is the mark of military respect). The inequities of relative rank extended into the area of military pay.
A nurse such as Nash with the relative rank of second lieutenant earned $88.60 a month ($70.00 of this amount was base pay, and the remaining $18.60 was considered a subsistence allowance), while a male second lieutenant in the army received double that amount—$140.00 base pay and $37.20 subsistence allowance, a total of $177.20 plus additional pay for each dependent.
Since relative rank carried no real military status, nurses were not considered to be in need of military orientation or training. So these young women were placed immediately on duty in military hospitals, dressed in civilian white duty uniforms marked only with the military insignia they were ordered to wear on their collars.
Although the nation had not adequately equipped or trained its military nurses at the time it sent Frances Nash and the other nurses to Manila in the summer of 1940, America was, however slowly and incompletely, preparing for the possibility of war there. The number of army nurses stationed at army hospitals in the Philippines was now nearly one hundred, double the usual quota. On orders issued the previous winter from the War Department, dependents of all military personnel serving in the Philippines had to return to the United States. Navy dependents sailed back in March 1941, followed by army dependents in May. In June 1941, Frances was transferred to Fort William McKinley, seven miles from Manila, where she was to set up the surgical unit in what would become, virtually overnight, a hospital. Fort McKinley had been a dispensary for America’s Filipino allies before July 1941, when the Army Medical Department converted it into a 259-bed hospital.
At the same time, the number of ships leaving the United States for the Philippines increased threefold. Military personnel and supplies that used to arrive in those islands once every three months now arrived once or twice a month. Almost every ship that docked brought more army nurses to serve in the fabled tropical paradise.
In September and October 1941, the last two convoys carrying army nurses to the Philippines left San Francisco. As usual, the September sailing of the USS Holbrook was announced in the local newspapers, but the last two ships to carry army nurses into what would soon be a war zone, the USS Scott and the USS Coolidge, were silent sailings—without the dubious benefits of a newspaper announcement. Nurses on the Scott and the Coolidge reached Manila harbor on 28 November 1941, nine days before America would be brought, bloody and angry, into World War II.
It was 7 December 1941 in Hawaii and the United States, but across the international dateline in Manila, it was already Monday, 8 December. Lieutenant Frances Nash and other military nurses awakened to news that would change the world forever: at 0755 Hawaii time, 0355 in the Philippines, naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan attacked the military forces of the United States at Pearl Harbor and sank or damaged most of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet. U.S. forces in Hawaii braced for the Japanese landings they expected to follow the sneak air attack, but Japanese military leaders had other plans.
Less than three hours after the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes struck Camp John Hay, an army post 200 miles north of Manila. U.S. Army nurses in and around Manila were issued outdated World War I helmets and gas masks and told to prepare for the hundreds of casualties that would result if and when Japan struck Manila and its adjacent U.S. military bases. At approximately 1215, 192 Japanese war-planes, bombers, dive-bombers, and fighters flew over Clark Field, 70 miles north of Manila, strafing and bombing U.S. planes lined up in symmetrical patterns around the airfield. Only nine hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. airpower in the Philippines was virtually destroyed without ever having left the ground.
The first wave of the attack lasted fourteen minutes, and left 85 dead and 350 wounded. Stotsenberg Army Hospital was located across the road from Clark Field, and army nurses—young women in white duty uniforms or civilian clothes—ran across open roads and fields toward the devastation, despite the second wave of Japanese planes that arrived only three minutes after the first attack ended. They were the first in a long line of military nurses who would leave safe cover to run to the aid of America’s wounded soldiers in World War II.
After two weeks of intensified bombing and strafing throughout the Philippines, Japanese forces landed at Lingayen Gulf, 130 miles northwest of Manila. The next day, General Douglas MacArthur moved his headquarters to the island of Corregidor and ordered American and Filipino troops to withdraw to the peninsula of Bataan. Most army nurses had never heard of Bataan, but in a matter of weeks it would be in the headlines of newspapers throughout the world.
On Christmas Eve morning 1941, while army nurses were being evacuated from Manila to the Bataan peninsula, Lieutenant Nash was summoned by her commanding officer, Colonel J. W. Duckworth, and given special instructions. “I was told,” Nash recalled, “to prepare myself to be taken prisoner. Five years earlier, I would have laughed at the thought of ever receiving such an order, and answering merely, ‘Yes, Sir.’ ” The colonel told Nash that she was to remain behind in Manila until all staff members and supplies had been evacuated. “In case you are cut off, you must prepare to be taken prisoner,” Duckworth said again.2
Nash spent all of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day working in surgery, and in her spare time, she destroyed any papers that might prove useful to the Japanese. By Christmas night, Japanese troops were drawing closer to Manila, and Nash and other members of the surgical staff were ordered to evacuate to Hospital No. 2 on Bataan. At 2300, they climbed aboard one of the small steamers that were used for transport among the several islands of the Philippines and began their zigzagging trip across Manila Bay. The flames from burning buildings on shore and ships ablaze in the harbor added to the light cast on the bay by a brightly shining moon. What little sleep Nash “got that night, [she] caught stretched out on the top deck, dressed in mechanic’s coveralls, helmet and gas mask” at her side. Her pockets were crammed full of narcotics, stimulants, and enough morphine to provide every army nurse a lethal dose as a grim alternative to the manner of death the enemy had been known to inflict on its captives. As long as the nurses continued to be useful in treating casualties and maintain their dignity, the morphine would remain their secret. Many women wore a hairpiece known as a “rat,” an elongated roll of hair around which the wearer would wrap her own long hair. Nurses hid the tablets of morphine inside the rat and then placed the rat in their hair, in accordance with the fashion of the day.3
During the night, the steamer passed the island of Corregidor and Nash could see fires burning on Malinta Hill. At 1000, the small boat arrived at Bataan’s Lamo docks as a blanket of Japanese planes overhead was strafing and bombing the area. Nash spotted a native scoop on the dock where chickens had taken refuge. Without thinking twice, she pushed the chickens out and squeezed herself in. When the raid eased up a little, Nash and her companions hurried into the jungle, crouching as they ran. For almost three hours, Nash sat in her first jungle foxhole while tree rats scurried about taking an occasional shortcut across the jungle’s newcomers. “You live a million years in each second in a foxhole,” Nash recalled. “There you sit, your mouth open to protect your eardrums. You test your helmet’s chin strap, you absentmindedly brush off the bugs that swarm over you.” 4
From the foxhole, they traveled fifteen miles further into the jungle, where Nash took on the problem of setting up an operating tent under the low-hanging trees. Before she could solve it, Colonel Duckworth’s command car arrived with the message that she was to report to Colonel Duckworth at Hospital No. 1. The colonel told Nash he needed her to set up the operating tent for this, the most forward hospital. Nash followed orders. Hundreds of casualties were already lying on litters on the ground, awaiting surgical help, and Nash went to work immediately. She credited her ability to bring order out of chaos to her training and upbringing. “What I was able to do in those horrible days on Bataan I owe to knowledge I gained at Grady Hospital, and to the hard times,” she said.5
Between Christmas 1941 and the beginning of April 1942, 70,000 sick, starving, and exhausted American and Filipino troops defended Bataan against 250,000 well-fed and battle-hardened Japanese forces. Medical personnel worked day and night caring for thousands of wounded and ill Allied troops, and the wounded Japanese soldiers in their care. Nash recalled, “American medics brought Jap wounded to us. We let them keep all the American socks, underwear and watches they had lined up on their wrists. Made you want to say something bad when you saw the laundry mark on the garment of someone’s name you knew. It meant the person was dead.”6
All of the nurses and medical staff on Bataan worked beyond what might be expected from any human being, but even here, Nash’s dedication to duty stood out like a beacon. In his book Barbed-Wire Surgeon, Dr. Alfred A. Weinstein, who had practiced medicine in Atlanta before he joined the Army Medical Corps, described some of the unique qualities Nash possessed: “Frances especially was a dynamo, driving the medics with her lashing tongue until they cursed her sullenly under their breath—not openly because they were sure they’d get the back of her hand. A strapping brown-haired comely girl, raised on Georgia-grown pork, black-eyed peas, hominy and grits, she packed a mean wallop.”7
Japanese strafing of the hospitals happened so often that Colonel Duckworth issued new orders to surgical personnel who always remained at their posts in the operating-room (OR) tent, despite the attacks. “The C.O. finally issued orders to medical personnel to strap patients on OR tables, turn off the anesthesia machines, and go outside and get in a foxhole or hit the ground flat. We were losing too many medical personnel during these raids. The Japanese could see us, but deliberately continued to fire,” Nash said. “A dead officer was no good to anyone, and there were no replacements.”8
The Geneva Conventions redrawn in 1929 stipulated that, in time of war, hospitals were not legitimate military targets. But as a nonsignatory of the Geneva Conventions, and in flagrant disregard for the red cross on the ground that marked the hospital area, Japanese planes bombed Hospital No. 1 at the end of March. The deliberate attack left many dead, and as usual the bodies were collected and taken into the jungle at night to be buried. The chaplain in charge of the burial detail was told to bring back one dog tag from each body and whatever clothes might still be used by the living who had to return to nearby front lines. One evening, Nash walked out to the burial site to remind the chaplain about the clothing. Although she had seen thousands of wounded and dying soldiers, the common grave site had a deep and lasting effect on her. “I never went back again. Too much for me, got to thinking I might be next.”9
On 6 April, the day after Easter, Japanese planes bombed the hospital again and scored a direct hit on ward tents. The blast from the explosions and shrapnel hit the operating-room area and Nash was knocked down in a corner and covered with medical cabinets and supplies. “When I pulled the cabinets and saline bottles off of me, I was surprised to see that I could walk.” The bombs had re-wounded and killed hundreds. Nash was furious when she saw the carnage. “In that raid, several wards were wiped out completely,” Nash said. “One of them contained thirty or more head cases, boys without eyes, ears or noses. I had never before been so mad at any individual that I wanted to kill him, as I did the Japs. I was so mad that I wasn’t frightened.”10
Only 65 of the original 1,600 beds in the field hospital at Hospital No. 1 were still standing. All patients who could be moved were transferred to Hospital No. 2, and two nurses who were wounded in the bombing were transferred to Corregidor for further treatment.
On 8 April, as many American troops as possible and all of the army nurses who would be needed to care for new casualties were evacuated to Corregidor, where Americans would make their final stand in the Philippines. On 9 April 1942, General Edward King surrendered Bataan. American and Filipino troops left behind and all the wounded in the jungle hospitals became prisoners of the Japanese. The surrender made headlines throughout the world, and stories of Corregidor’s last stand filled the front pages for weeks to come.
On 6 May 1942, General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered Corregidor, and all American and Filipino troops, including Nash and sixty-six other army nurses, became prisoners of war. It was the first day of thirty-seven months that Nash and her sister nurses would spend as prisoners of the Japanese. They would continue to work as army nurses in the prison camps, caring for sick and wounded internees, while American and Allied forces fought their way back to the Philippines to liberate their comrades. But Nash and her sister nurses, along with imprisoned American soldiers, would not be brought home until the war ended more than three years later.
MEANWHILE, thousands of women at home, knowing the terrible fate that had befallen American nurses in the Philippines, nonetheless began volunteering for the Army Nurse Corps. Both young women fresh out of nursing schools and women with years of experience responded to the call of news stories, recruitment posters, and magazine ads. Many would volunteer twice over: once in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, they would volunteer again for overseas duty in frontline hospitals. One of these volunteers was Helen Molony, a tall, redheaded nurse from upstate New York. On the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Molony signed up in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps and volunteered for overseas duty.
Recognizing the contributions women had made in World War I, Congress moved quickly to establish the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in May 1942, and to reestablish the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in June 1943. The U.S. Navy’s bill was passed and signed on 30 July 1942, authorizing the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) and the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. The Coast Guard Women’s Reserve (known as SPARs from their motto, Semper paratus—Always Ready) was authorized and established on 23 November 1942. After the United States declared war on Japan on 8 December 1941, and Germany declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, America began to send its sons and daughters to meet the enemy before they could strike the U.S. homeland again.11
Following Pearl Harbor, the American public was understandably outraged against Japan and calling for action in the Pacific. Yet throughout 1942, only a limited number of American troops were sent to the Pacific—sufficient to at best contain, but not defeat, the Japanese. President Franklin Roosevelt was not willing to launch a full-scale attack against Japan in 1942; rather, the United States agreed with Britain that Hitler had to be stopped first. But after months of debate on the pros and cons of invading Europe, the leaders of both the United States and Britain realized they were as yet unprepared to invade Europe. Britain had been humiliatingly routed from France when Paris fell to the Germans in 1940, and was now fighting German and Italian forces in North Africa. Roosevelt was reluctant to send inexperienced U.S. troops into Europe alone without British support. It was finally decided that the United States would invade North Africa. The North African coast would make an excellent launching area for the later invasion of Europe and Britain was amenable to taking part in this action. Thus, French North Africa was chosen as the site for an Allied invasion code-named “Operation Torch.” It would be America’s first amphibious invasion outside the Pacific and America’s first D-Day (the first day of any military operation or amphibious landing) in the European theater of World War II.
U.S. military planners assigned the 48th Surgical Hospital to support U.S. and British troops in the invasion of North Africa. The 48th team included redheaded nurse Helen Molony from upstate New York, now Lieutenant Helen Molony. She, along with fifty-six other army nurses, would land with the invasion forces on D-Day—not a few days after the taking of the beachhead but right alongside the fighting troops on D-Day itself—which was scheduled for 8 November 1942. It was the first time in the nation’s history that women nurses would land with assault troops on the initial day of an invasion. These army nurses would share all the dangers of the combat zone without the benefit of full military rank, with little military training, and with only half the salary paid to male officers.
War had overtaken Nash and her sister nurses in the Philippines almost unawares, but army nurses like Lieutenant Molony who followed in Nash’s footsteps would go to war knowing what had befallen their predecessors. The nurses who were to land on D-Day in North Africa and those who came after them would travel to the front lines knowing that the Geneva Conventions which were intended to protect hospitals and medical personnel in combat areas could not guarantee that an enemy or wayward shell would not bring them dismemberment or death. Like Second Lieutenant Frances Nash, who clearly accepted that danger when she wrote to her mother, “You be sure to collect my insurance if I don’t get back,” and like Queen Esther, who had answered her country’s call many centuries before, army nurses would give life to the meaning of Esther’s words: “. . . I will go . . . and if I perish, I perish.”