When We Had Wings

by Ariel Lawhon

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

“There are some things that are only moral in an operating room,” he told Penny. “At no other time could I tell a person to lie down on a table and allow me to knock them unconscious so I can remove their clothing and cut into their body.” “Nor would you want to, I hope.” A wry smile curled the corner of Penny’s mouth. “Indeed, I would not.” He lifted a wicked-looking handsaw and its sharp, serrated teeth glinted beneath the lamp that hung above the table. “Remember, the mandate to do no harm often requires a kind of harm never allowed outside a room such as this.”

The shelling made them anxious and the silence made them paranoid.

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

“Sometimes love can break your heart,” Maude said. Penny looked at her friend. Tried to smile but couldn’t. “In my experience it’s the only thing that does.”

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.

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.

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.