From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile”

“To call a woman a nurse…is to give her more than a moniker. In an ironic way, the ethos of a nurse is like that of a soldier. Research has shown that soldiers fight not for their country or for a cause, but out of love for their comrades. They care deeply about the men in the mud beside them, and they are willing to risk all and endure anything to prove it. This same ethic – call it an ethic for the other person – is instilled in every nurse….We can learn many lessons from such women…. First, that loyalty, sacrifice, obedience and discipline are genderless.”

“Some wards looked like tropical greenhouses, with beds set between trees and under palm fronds, a tangle of vines hanging close overhead. Other wards looked like hobo camps, with clothes hanging from tree limbs or bushes, and with pieces of poncho or shreds of canvas stretched between stalks of bamboo. The mess hall resembled a scout-camp dining hall without a roof, its long picnic-style tables and benches stacked row after row under the acacias.”

“By February 1 [1942], Hospital #2 had a nursing staff of fifty-three army officers, twenty-one Filipinos and eight civilian nurses. Despite the withering workload, moral was high. Many of the women had grown up on farms or in towns like Bible Grove, Missouri, and Prairie Lea, Texas. They had labored in the fields, made their own clothes, and read by lamplight, and they knew how to live lean, without amenities, and were accustomed to hard work. The army had given them luxuries and a new life, and now it was time to pay the army back.”

“Each day they carried out the banal duties of battlefield nursing. They washed their patients down, scrubbing off the dirt and sweat of war with water from the Real River. Then they cleaned out the abrasions and lacerations, scrubbing the men with green soap before they sprinkled sulfa powder on their open wounds. They changed thousands of dressings, often giving morphine shots beforehand to ease the pain they would inflict when they lifted bandages from incisions and burns, bandages bound to raw flesh by blood and pus dried hard as glue."

“At night they worked under blackout conditions, using flashlights or kerosene lamps painted blue. After a few hours of stumbling around, their eyes would become accustomed to the night, and they learned to recognize light and dark spots on the jungle floor. Sometimes animals wandered around in the darkness. Wild pigs would brush against their legs, and geckos, those small lizards with suction-cup feet, came diving out of the trees. A large caraboa [water ox] appearing in the dark like an apparition was beast enough to frighten anyone. One night a nurse hiking between beds was smacked in the forehead by a snake swinging from a branch.”

“No one talked about a relief convoy anymore. Optimists became realists, realists pessimists. ‘I put my cards on the table,' Cassie said. ‘We were losing on Bataan. There was no convoy. We were indeed expendable. You’d have to be pretty dumb not to know that this was it, buddy.’”

Josie Nesbit [the nursing second-in-command and the most stalwart of characters, a mother figure to her nurses] was ordered to report to Colonel Gillespie. “Tell your American nurses to get down here to my office by twenty hundred hours and only take whatever they can carry in their hands,” he said.

The instructions stopped Nesbit cold. “What about my Filipino nurses?” she demanded, almost insubordinate.

“Only the American nurses,” the colonel said, cutting her short.

Nesbit had made the Army her life. She obeyed orders and respected authority, but now, for perhaps the first time in her career, she challenged the chain of command.

“If my Filipino nurses don’t go,” she said, standing squarely before her superior officer, “I’m…not…going…either.”

“As the weeks passed at Santo Tomas, the sixty-four army nurses and eleven navy nurses quickly came to see that for all its apparent amenities – the food stalls, the entertainment, and daytime shanties – STIC [Santo Tomas Internment Center] was still a prison, a place of the keepers and the kept. It was also clear now that any hope for a quick victory had been an illusion. The war was going to last a long time, weeks giving way to months, months adding up to years. And soon the sixty-acre campus would feel as small and confining as a postage stamp.”

“…the seventy-five women who had survived the shooting, the bombardments, and prison camps, the famine and disease…were left in a kind of limbo.... Physicians and psychologists working with former prisoners of war focused exclusively on the health of men, not women. The boys, they said, needed ‘lots of tender loving care.’ The girls, meanwhile, were never mentioned.”

“Their wartime illnesses – tuberculosis, fungus infections, intestinal disorders, severe dental problems, just to name a few – often became chronic and, in many cases, disabling.”

“In ways that perhaps only old campaigners would understand, the Angels’ debased physiology was less disabling than the deep and unsettling melancholy that soon began to take hold of them.”

“There was no escaping the faces of the dead – dead comrades, friends, lovers, and, especially, the patients, all those men they had left behind. Many of the women felt they should have stayed longer in the jungle and begged to be imprisoned with the sickest of the sick, the worst of the wounded.”

“Psychiatrists seemed to assume that the nurses’ training and experience had somehow left them immune to the psychological ravages of combat and imprisonment…. One researcher postulated that the nurses’ emotional problems would be ‘less complex in many ways’ than those of other veterans….In other words, their status as clinicians and the hard work and long service in the cause of human suffering had left them less vulnerable than the average soldier.... In fact, the opposite was true: they felt too much.” [Emphasis mine]