The Cherry Ames Page: War Nurse, page 8

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Cherry Ames, War Nurse
Fiction Meets Reality, page 8

In this section

Brave Nurse

Going Home

Brave Nurse

When Cherry is excitedly preparing to enter the Army Nurse Corps, she realizes that "being an Army nurse might involve more than a smart uniform and handsome soldiers and sailing away to exotic lands" (Army Nurse, p. 13), and she finds herself a little scared. She tells her friend and mentor Dr. Joe: "I'm not frightened of bullets or

Figure 8

maybe going hungry or ... or any physical danger. I'm frightened about something that's in myself--or perhaps isn't in me" (Army Nurse, p. 29).

She hoped with all her heart that she would measure up to the unknown responsibilities she had sworn to undertake. Many lives hung in the balance. Searchingly, Cherry asked herself, "Am I not too young? Too inexperienced?" But many other Army nurses were as young and green as she, yet they were doing a magnificent job all over the world. "I hope I'm as good as they are, as brave and skillful. If only I could be sure ..." But there was no way to know except to test herself against the steely reality. And that most serious of all tests still lay ahead. (Army Nurse, p. 124).

When Cherry is tested under fire, during a nightmarish Japanese bombing attack on Island 14, she discovers that she does indeed have the reserves of strength and courage to do her duty to the soldier patients who are depending on her for care and protection. As shells from the Japanese bombers explode on the beach, Cherry, heedless of her personal safey, bravely jams on her helmet, gathers her fellow nurses, and dashes toward the hospital tents:

She ran, with the three nurses stumbling behind her, through a wild confusion of flying dirt and smoke and whistling shells. She was not thinking; her previous military training automatically thought for her now. Her fear was a live, useful thing that drove her to animal caution against this crashing world. She had to marshal the nurses. Here was the terrible emergency for which they had drilled and organized. They had to get to the patients--to carry them out of the ward tents and into slit trenches. Were any of the tents hit? (Chief Nurse, p. 175)

Because the Japanese strafing hinders the removal of wounded to the evacuation hospital, a team of medical personnel prepares to go to the wounded instead. Cherry is determined to get to the patients who need her. But:

As she quickly collected supplies, Cherry realized fully for the first time that she was going right up close to those bombarding Jap ships, right under those bombing Jap Nakajimas, within range of Jap soldiers themselves armed with rifles and bayonets--and that she very easily might never come out of it alive.

"I can't!" she thought wildly. "I can't! I'm afraid!" Then she caught herself sharply. She raged at herself. "You have to face these dangers. If we don't go over there and act as a field hospital, men will die. Whether you can or can't isn't even a question--you must! What did you have all that military training for, Ames, if not just exactly for this? You know how to take care of yourself under fire--you're trained for it! You're a soldier as well as a nurse, and don't you forget it! And don't you forget those wounded men! They must be saved!" (Chief Nurse, pp. 193-94)

Like the real nurses who served during World War II, Cherry does her duty. Later, when she works as a flight nurse, she flies five combat missions into enemy territory, and her unarmed plane, filled with patients, is attacked by German fighter planes:

Up front a gun went off with a terrific bang. The Germans were trying to get the pilot or the C-47's engines. The suffering men in the litters were pale and sweating, their eyes distended.

"S O S. C-47 approaching Cologne. Fighter protection. Urgent."

Their ship lurched and rolled sideways. Everyone not taped into litters was thrown. Cherry got to her feet, feeling a pain in her back, but with her attention fixed on a casualty who was growing hysterical. She gave him a hypodermic. Now, if ever, was the time to keep her head. Bullets whistled, and engines roared outside the plane. (Flight Nurse, pp. 171-72)

Cherry is decorated for her performance on that flight. The general who presents the medal says: "For distinguishing herself by meritorious achievement while participating in an aerial flight, to Lieutenant Cherry

Figure 9

Ames, the United States Air Medal. Her professional skill, courage, and high sense of service reflects great credit upon herself and the Armed Forces of the United States" (Flight Nurse, p. 213). She also receives two other commendations during her army career.

One does what one has to do. One does not shirk one's duty, despite one's own fear. "We'll do it," Cherry says confidently. "We have to and we will" (Chief Nurse, p. 23). During the war years, some 57,000 women served as army nurses, 11,000 as navy nurses, and countless others as civilian nurses, Red Cross volunteers, and nurse's aides. Other women enlisted in the armed services, left their homes to work in factories, sold war bonds, or served in other important ways during World War II. For their meritorious service during the war years, approximately 1,600 military nurses were decorated. These brave women were among them:

Annie G. Fox, of the Army Nurse Corps, head nurse at the station hospital at Hickam Field at Pearl Harbor, received the Bronze Star for her outstanding devotion to service during the Japanese bombardment in December 1941.
Navy nurse Ann Bernatitus served gallantly on Bataan, and was the only navy nurse to escape from Corregidor before it fell. In 1942, she received the Legion of Merit for "extraordinary fidelity and essential service."
Elsie Ott of the Army Nurse Corps cared for five patients during a pioneering journey from India to Bolling Air Field, in Washington, D.C., in January 1943, proving the feasibility of air evacuation. She was the first woman to receive the Air Medal for meritorious achievement.
Nurse Edith Greenwood risked her life repeatedly to rescue patients from a fire at a military hospital near Yuma, Arizona. In 1943, she received the first Soldier's Medal ever awarded to a woman.
Aleda E. Lutz of the Army Nurse Corps flew 196 missions as a flight nurse during World War II. She died during an evacuation effort over Lyon, Italy, and was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in December 1944. The Veterans' Affairs Medical Center in Saginaw, Michigan, is named in her honor--the only VA Medical Center named for a female veteran.

During World War II, 201 nurses died while serving in the army. Hundreds of others were wounded or interned in prisoner of war camps.

Going Home

When the war ended, the job of the nurses did not. Many soldiers returned home scarred by the war, both physically and emotionally. They did not know how they would fit into the peacetime world again, return to the lives that had been disrupted by the war. Some bore permanent scars of war and would have to adapt to physical handicaps--lost limbs, paralysis, disfigurement. They needed both medical care and rehabilitation to deal with their changed circumstances.

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As Cherry returns to her hometown of Hilton, she realizes, "This was home but changed while she was away--grown a little strange" (Veterans' Nurse, p. 8). The town is smaller and shabbier than she remembered it, the stores need paint, the cars on the street have patched tires:

But people walked along at an easier pace, their faces relieved and relaxed--now that the war was over and won. ... Headlines on the newsstands still gravely underscored the long, hard work of making this peace a permanent peace. But there was a new happiness here at home.

"It's an end and a beginning," Cherry realized. "We'll have to get our wounded veterans cured--start our lives and work all over on a peacetime basis. This war has left us plenty of responsibilities." (Veterans' Nurse, p. 4)

Still in the army, Cherry is assigned to a veterans' rehabilitation hospital near her hometown. One of her patients, a teacher in civilian life, has lost his right hand, and worries that the children will be repelled if he returns to teaching with an artificial hand; he has a baby daughter he's never seen. Another, only nineteen years old, has a broken back and is immobilized in a full body cast. An older man in a wheelchair has a fractured kneecap. Another's shattered arm is in a cast. A twenty-two-year-old man has lost his right leg--and before he joined the army, he used to operate a woodworking machine with a foot treadle.

In the crowd of arrivals were men on stretchers, raising their heads from their pillows, some with Purple Hearts pinned on their pajama coats. There were some ambulatory patients: a tall parachutist on crutches with a leg gone and a quick where-am-I? glance; a man with an arm held rigid and high in a plaster cast who insisted on walking by himself. Here were youths who had stepped on a land mine at Anzio, felt the German 88 in Normandy, or caught a Jap bullet in the Pacific. Cherry's heart contracted.

"Even though they're finished with war on the battlefields," she realized, "the war is still a very personal thing to them--their fight to recover." (Veterans' Nurse, pp. 29-30)

Part of the difficulty for the wounded soldiers is the attitude of the civilians around them: their curious stares, their oversolicitousness, their pity. A soldier who has lost a leg tells Cherry: "You'd think I was a freak. ... I ordered a soda and started to light a cigarette and a woman rushes over to light it for me. For heaven's sake, couldn't she see I have two hands--even if I only have one leg!" (Veterans' Nurse, p. 104).

Cherry and the other nurses, the Red Cross volunteers, the occupational therapists, the counselors, work to help the veterans readjust to peacetime and become healthy and self-supporting again. They are paying a debt that is owed to the soldiers who fought the war to preserve the freedoms of home.

When Cherry's enlistment "for the duration of the war plus six months" is up, she looks around at the unfinished work, the soldiers who still need care, and considers reenlisting:

Searchingly Cherry thought back over all her Army nursing days--in many lands, in many and thrilling types of nursing. She had worked hard and faithfully, earned a decoration, kept a consistently high record. ...

The very fact that the Army Nurse Corps told her she was free to go proved that an era was over, that times were changing, from war times back into the ways of peace. Perhaps she should recognize and accept the changed tempo, move along with the times. Perhaps it was a mistake to cling to a part of her work that was done now. (Veterans' Nurse, p. 209)

Like the other returning soldiers:

She too had seen war. She too had learned the full value of home and of this free, beautiful, friendly country. Perhaps ... now that the war was over, she should turn her attention and her energies to working here at home in civilian life. Even one single nurse could do a great deal toward keeping the nation healthy. If war had taught her anything, she reflected, it was to value and preserve and strengthen the ways of peace. To keep the peace! (Veterans' Nurse, pp. 210-11)

It is time for Cherry to move on. World War II had changed the world, and it had changed the perception of nursing, and of the role of women in general. Both military and civilian women had accepted new tasks during wartime, and had been able to perform them with great distinction. They had found sometimes unimagined strength and courage as they faced myriad hardships during the war, and they had coped nobly. When the war ended, they could feel justifiably proud of their accomplishments.

As Cherry says in Veterans' Nurse (p. 216), "An end is also a beginning ... I'm going on from here. To what, I don't know yet--but I'm going on."

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Figure 8: Frontispiece by Ralph Crosby Smith, from Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, copyright © 1944, Grosset & Dunlap.
Figure 9: "For Your Country's Sake Today--For Your Own Sake Tomorrow." Poster by Steele Savage, 1944. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.