When We Had Wings

by Ariel Lawhon

I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light. —Helen Keller

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it. —Rabindranath Tagore, Collected Poems and Plays

The incessant toggling between hope and despair was nearly as exhausting as the unrelenting monotony of camp life.

Courage isn’t having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength. —Theodore Roosevelt

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all. —Emily Dickinson

Hope hadn’t killed David; evil men had. Hope had been his companion until the very end. And even then, hope had escorted him from this life to the next. Hope had done that. Not fear. Not defeat. Not gunshot wounds.

She’d seen in this war the very worst one human could do to another. But she’d also seen the very best. Perhaps only the people who see the very worst get to see the very best.

Or maybe it was just that because she’d seen the worst, she’d been able to recognize the best. That

Hope, she was discovering, could do that. It could let a person see the glorious light of the sun from even the darkest corner of a dungeon—even if within the dungeon there was no way out. Even if the dungeon was the last place you’d see this side of heaven.

Here is the truth: General Douglas MacArthur allowed these women to be taken captive. He had an opportunity in April 1942 to evacuate all Army and Filipina nurses from Corregidor and out of the Philippines, but he chose to take other military personnel instead. As a result, the nurses were imprisoned by the Japanese and spent more than four harrowing years in various camps. The U.S. government could not explain the general’s choice, so they hid it instead. The fact that every one of those nurses survived the war and came home is nothing short of a miracle. For the related benefits of vital research, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan by Elizabeth M. Norman, The Indomitable Florence Finch: The Untold Story of a War Widow Turned Resistance Fighter and Savior of American POWs by Robert J. Mrazek, and This Is Really War: The Incredible True Story of a Navy Nurse POW in the Occupied Philippines by Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi. In these books, we discovered stunning accounts and invaluable details that inspired the characters of