When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Alex had six months of nursing school left and the country was at war. Alex had only one goal after that, which she discussed with no one. She knew what the reaction would be, but she had a mind of her own, and knew how to get what she wanted.
She graduated from nursing school. She was twenty-one years old, and two days after she graduated, she enlisted in the army as a nurse, with the army nurses’ corps. With a war on, it seemed the only right thing to do. She told her parents the same day, and her mother cried all night. Her debut was almost four years behind her by then. There wasn’t a single man in her world that she wanted to marry, and she didn’t see why she should. She’d been happy living with her parents at home in New York all through nursing school. She had gone out with all the men she wanted to, at least once, and found none of them particularly interesting. All she wanted to do was be a nurse and take care of the wounded sent back from the war. There were many of them and would be more. She had a particular interest in psychiatry, which sounded even worse to her parents, if she intended to work in mental hospitals after the war.
She was told when she enlisted that she would take a four-week military nurses’ training course, to learn the military protocols and how the army worked. Since she had expressed an interest in psychiatry, there was an additional training course for that. Then she would be sent to the base where she’d be stationed, to work at a hospital there. It was exactly what Alex had wanted, and she had no regrets whatsoever. Her sister came in from Connecticut to try to talk her out of it, and she explained to Charlotte that it wasn’t something she could change her mind about, like a dinner party. She had signed legally binding documents, and if she passed the physical, she would become an army nurse.
Charlotte went back to Connecticut in a huff, and her father resigned himself to the inevitable. It didn’t seem like a noble choice to him, but more like youthful folly, and he just prayed that they didn’t send her anywhere dangerous and just kept her in the States. He thought it likely they would. He had read somewhere that the army didn’t know what to do with their nurses, and were keeping them in the States for the time being. But he wasn’t pleased with what she’d done. And more than his wife and older daughter, he fully understood that the papers Alex had signed were legally binding, and she would have to go through with it, much to his dismay.
The day Alexandra left for her army nurses’ training class was a day of mourning for them. Her father came alone to see her off at the station. He wished her luck, and she saw with surprise that there were tears in his eyes as the train pulled away. She wondered at times how she came to be related to them. She always felt like a stranger in their midst, and more than ever now.
* * *
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After Lizzie Hatton passed the army physical, and was notified, she left for her four-week training class in early March. She managed to squeeze in a few days in Annapolis with Audrey and her mother, who was bedridden now and could no longer get up. Ellen had trouble breathing, and Audrey lived in terror that she’d catch a cold, which could kill her. She slept in the same room with her now, on a cot, so she could hear her mother breathing at night.
Lizzie promised to write from her training class, and she was shocked when she got there at how busy they kept her. They wore overalls that were too big for all of them, and had been made for men. The first thing the nurses had to do was alter them so they fit. It was a rigorous course, mostly to get them in better physical shape, and teach them army rules and protocols. They watched countless training films. Lizzie liked most of the women she met. Some of them were rougher than the women she was used to, but they all had nursing in common, and had chosen to be there. The four weeks flew by. At the end of it, Lizzie was given her orders. She was to report to the Presidio army base in San Francisco, and would work at Letterman Hospital there. It was said to be one of the best army posts in the country, and the women who had been assigned to less desirable locations envied her. The only thing Lizzie didn’t like about it was that it was so far from Audrey, and she wouldn’t get back often to see her. But other than that, she was excited to leave for San Francisco. She managed to spend one night in Annapolis with Audrey, then went home to Boston after that for a two-day leave, and showed up at her parents’ home in uniform, which upset her mother. The uniform wasn’t flattering, nor was the color, but she looked serious and official. She had chosen to wear the regulation trousers with it, which were easier to travel in, instead of the skirt, and her mother thought they looked awful. Her brothers were in the army by then too. Henry was in basic training at Fort Ord in Monterey, and Greg was in Alameda, waiting to be sent to the Pacific.
It was emotional for all three of them when she left her parents, but Lizzie loved San Francisco when she got there. It was a little gem of a city, next to a shimmering bay with strong winds and cool weather, and the new Golden Gate Bridge joined the city to the more rural Marin County. The hospital where she was going to work was efficient and modern. She was assigned to a dorm just for nurses, and there were always groups of women coming and going, or standing around having a smoke and a cup of coffee during their time off. The atmosphere was congenial and the nurses were quick to tell her the best places to visit on her days off.
Lizzie loved exploring the city, and the friendly attitude of the nurses she met there. Her letters to Audrey were full of enthusiasm, and she said she loved her job. The wounded were already returning from the Pacific by hospital ship, and the beds were full at the Presidio hospital. She felt that she was finally doing something useful and meaningful. The men being sent back from the Pacific were severely wounded, and many of them traumatized by what they’d been through. The fighting in the Pacific was savage. She spent many a night trying to comfort men suffering from shell shock and nightmares, in particular one who was barely older than she was. He had grown up on a farm in Alabama, and his wounds were severe enough to keep him in the hospital for quite some time, but not damaging enough to get him released from the army. She took care of him for a month, before they sent him back to active duty, still suffering from the trauma he’d experienced previously. The night before he left, he asked her to marry him, and she told him that she didn’t want to marry. The man she’d loved had died at Pearl Harbor.
Her trauma patient was being sent to a base on the East Coast, and from there back into combat, this time in Europe. He was twenty-four years old, only a year older than she was, but he seemed like a child to her, as she tried to calm him the night before he left. It seemed cruel to her to send him back into battle, still so shattered by what he’d lived through before. He was leaving in the morning. He cried when he talked to her that night. Her heart ached for him. She had never seen anyone so ravaged and distraught, and it illustrated the cruelty of war so clearly to her.
“Don’t make me go back into battle without telling me you love me,” he begged her, and she felt sick listening to him. He needed someone to care about him when he left. It seemed like so little to give him. But she didn’t want to mislead him, or encourage his romantic delusions about her.