Elizabeth M. Norman (44 page)

In her spare time she helped organize several reunions of Santo Tomas internees: “Most of us try to remember the good times we had in camp and erase the bad times. If you thought of the sad things all the time, you’d be a mental case.”

As for her “big sister” and namesake, Cassie, Terry went to see her right after the war, then a number of years passed without contact between the two. Finally in 1994 she traveled to Pennsylvania to spend a week with her friend.

They talked, went to lunch and argued politics. Less than a year later, at the age of sixty-nine, Terry Myers Johnson died from sclero-derma, a fatal disease that attacks the internal organs.

“What a shock!” Cassie said. “I can hardly believe it, such a vital woman. Knowing Terry, she would never tell me she was sick. When I saw her last summer, she said she’d had no problems since liberation, but I can’t help but wonder if she knew she was dying and made the trip to see me to say good-bye in her own way.”
¹⁰

•   •   •

J
OSIE
N
ESBIT
, Maude Davison’s second in command and, by most lights, the Angels’ real shepherd and good counsel, came home and married Bill Davis, a man she had met in prison camp.

Though she rarely let on, Josie’s life with Bill was often filled with his troubles. In 1964, fifteen years after they were married, Bill’s employer, a scientific research firm, retired him on a disability. “It all dates back to him being a prisoner of the Japs,” Josie told an army interviewer in 1983 collecting the women’s stories for the government.

“He still has horrible dreams that they’re after him” and believes that they’re “still going to get him,” she said. “He won’t go out of the house.”

Despite her husband’s recurring emotional problems, Josie remained loyal to Bill, managing their life together and telling anyone who would listen, “I depend on him because he remembers things and I don’t. He is my helper and protector.”
¹¹

Strong and self-possessed, Josie spent her dotage on the move. Well into her nineties she continued to drive her own car on errands and to activities at church. And she was still the Angels’ cynosure, their mother confessor, steady hand and conscience. Every year she remembered to send “my girls,” as she insisted on calling them, birthday cards and Christmas greetings. And the women counted on these regular missives to remind them of what they once were.

In March 1992 many of the surviving Angels gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their capture, but Josie, then ninety-eight years old, was too enfeebled to make the trip.

“My heart and spirits and love are always young,” she said in a note she sent in her stead. “They are big enough to embrace all of you.”
¹²

Josie Nesbit Davis died on August 16, 1993, four months before her ninety-ninth birthday, from respiratory failure brought on by a stroke. By her own arrangement, her ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean somewhere off the California coast near San Francisco.

R
UBY
B
RADLEY WAS
on duty at the camp hospital on the morning of December 8, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Camp John Hay in northern Luzon. A short time later she surrendered and was interned at Baguio, then, in 1943, she was transferred south to Santo Tomas. There she quickly earned a reputation as one of the most durable and reliable women in camp—also one of the most patriotic, a bit of a jingo, perhaps,
but one with an abiding sense of humor: “I used to tell everyone to roll with the punches, so to speak. When faced with worms, say, ‘Aha! Protein! Just what my country and I need at this moment. This I will eat for the good of my country.’ ”
¹³

She was also something of a philosopher as well, though she let no one see it: “I sometimes used to wonder—when an individual returns to the world of free people, will he be able to forget everything he has experienced, will he be embittered, broken and disillusioned, or will he have enough strength to find purpose and meaning in life again.”
¹⁴

Her source of meaning was the army. After liberation, Ruby spent a few weeks with her family in Spencer, West Virginia, then reported to her first postwar duty assignment—Fort Myers, Virginia. There, circumstance cast her in a classic military conundrum—the old salt under the thumb of a young and insecure tenderfoot.

Bradley was a thirty-seven-year-old first lieutenant; her supervisor was a twenty-five-year-old major. The major had no public profile and little experience; Bradley was a decorated war hero with eleven years in uniform. The young major’s first move was to billet the former prisoner of war in a tiny, claustrophobic attic above the main nurses quarters. Then she prohibited Bradley, one of the most experienced nurses in the army, from dispensing medicines; imprisonment, the major claimed, had left the old salt too “unreliable” to handle medications. Finally the young supervisor assigned the veteran lieutenant the most onerous of hours, a day-night split shift. Bradley took about two minutes of this, then put in for a transfer.

In October 1945, she was promoted to captain and a year later became chief nurse at McGuire General Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. After that the army sponsored her at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she earned a baccalaureate in nursing administration.

Smart and tough, Bradley often drew on the lessons she had learned under fire and during her captivity. One day at Fort Eustis, Virginia, for example, she was assigned to supervise a ward of paraplegics, men damaged in combat, always a difficult group for nurses to manage. Ruby walked onto the ward just as aides were handing out breakfast.

“Good morning,” she said cheerily, surveying the rows of beds and the faces of the men.

Maybe he was just trying to test the new nurse or perhaps his loss had finally brought him to a boil—whatever the case, one of the young paralyzed soldiers took his tray of food and hurled it to the floor.

“Good morning? What’s so damn good about it?” he said, seething.

Ruby reeled to face the young man. “You listen to me,” she said, looking down at him. “Where I came from, anyone would have been glad to get a bit of this food. In prison we got up hungry and went to bed hungry; we stayed that way. You’re getting better care here than I could give my patients in the war. Most of them are gone. There isn’t anyone in this hospital who wouldn’t work to the bone to take care of you. But I’ve never heard one of you say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I’m glad for my life.’ You’ve got a future ahead of you. Many don’t. You can do a lot for yourself. The time to start is now!”

In July 1950, Bradley was ordered to report to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to take over as chief nurse of the 171st Evacuation Hospital, a unit headed for a “police action” in a cold and dusty place called Korea.

Ruby was off to war again. From August till December, the evacuation hospital shifted its position along the front lines, treating wave after wave of casualties. “It got to the point,” Ruby remembered, “where I didn’t want to see another drop of blood.”

From Taegu the hospital moved to Pyongyang, then up to Kongyang, and just as the unit was settling in, the Chinese formally entered the fighting. Hundreds of thousands of “Chi-com” (Chinese Communist) troops joined by North Korean regulars came sweeping across the 38th Parallel—and the 171st Evacuation Hospital was right in the enemy’s path.

Quickly aircraft and ambulances started to evacuate patients and staff. Bradley sent her subordinates out with the first round of evacuees and stayed to supervise the withdrawal of the rest. “Some of the girls who came back [to help] said they could hear the North Koreans going by. We were really that near [the fighting]. We were right up there [and by this time] we didn’t know how to get out.”

Headquarters, meanwhile, suddenly remembered Ruby had once been a prisoner of war. “Now, I didn’t know this till later on,” she said, “but they said [to whomever was in charge], ‘You get her out of this. We can’t have that happen to her again. Get her out as fast as you can.’ ” As her evacuation plane taxied down the runway, Bradley could hear the sound of sniper fire just outside the aircraft door.

In 1951 she was named chief nurse for the Eighth Army, supervising the work of some five hundred army nurses at various hospitals and aid stations across Korea. Along the way she was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and in June 1953, with the Korean truce talks under way at Panmunjom, she was handed orders for home. The commander of the Eighth Army, General Maxwell Taylor, decided to give her a big send-off. He had been so impressed with her three years of combat service in
Korea, he ordered a full-dress military review and parade for her departure, the first time a woman in the American military had been so honored.

Bradley again returned home a hero, and the government and many other organizations showered her with rows of medals and honors. Ralph Edwards, a television personality who wore his patriotism on his sleeve, made her a guest on his popular program,
This Is Your Life.
¹⁵
Afterward the National Broadcasting Company established a scholarship in Ruby’s name at her alma mater, Philadelphia General Hospital.

On March 4, 1958, Ruby Bradley became one of three women in the army of the United States to be awarded the permanent rank of colonel, an extraordinary achievement for any woman.
¹⁶
In the years that followed she won more medals and more honors, and finally, in 1963, Colonel Ruby Grace Bradley, fifty-five years old, retired from active service, the most decorated woman in American military history.
¹⁷

She hung her uniform in a closet and immediately went back to work, this time quietly and inconspicuously as a supervisor for a private-duty nursing service in Roane County, West Virginia, where she had purchased a small ranch. She stayed on the job for another seventeen years, then, finally, she decided to stop. Periodically after that, the army and various veteran organizations would call on her to speak at their dinners and banquets and official ceremonies.

These days she stays close to home. Cataracts keep her from driving at night and long-distance flights leave her exhausted. When strangers ask to drop by for a talk, she hangs an American flag out front to mark the house for them. She is always well turned out for these sessions—hair brushed, lipstick neatly in place, medals set out on a side table in case anyone asks. She likes to joke with her interviewers—“Please don’t say I served in the Civil War”—and when she is asked to sum up her professional life, forty-five years in the service of the sick and injured, she sits back and smiles.

“That’s easy,” she says. “I want to be remembered as just … an army nurse.”
¹⁸

A
T FIRST MARRIED
life left R
ED
H
ARRINGTON
cold.

She and Page Nelson had settled in Washington, D.C., near his work at the Department of the Treasury and his family in Virginia, and Page, busy boning up on all the laws and regulations that had changed during the war, no longer doted on Red the way he had at Los Banos.

“He always had his nose in papers, which irritated me,” she said. “We were kind of chewing on each other.”
¹⁹

Red decided to take up nursing again. She’d had her fill of blood and guts and, looking for something less sanguine, she took a job in a clinic at the Federal Map Service, handing out pills for headaches and colds. After a few months of this, husband and wife found their balance and settled down to domestic life, weekends picnicking in Virginia parks and on Saturday nights dancing at nightclubs in the capital.

In 1946 Red became pregnant and, like many of the Angels, immediately began to wonder whether the malnutrition she had suffered during the war would affect her fetus. She was so worried about her protein deficiency she stuffed herself with steaks and cheeses and drank gallons of milk. In fact she took in so much protein she became edematous and her arms and legs swelled with excess fluids. Her doctor finally corrected the imbalance, and she gave birth to a healthy son.

Three more children followed, and in 1948 Red and Page bought a large, comfortable farmhouse in suburban Virginia. They rarely talked about the war; occasionally they might recall something humorous, some little burlesque or absurdity of prison camp life, but for the most part their days at Los Banos were behind them—at least in conversation.

In truth the experience had shaped them in deep and abiding ways. The Nelsons encouraged their children to bring friends home for dinner, and these visitors soon learned the family’s one inviolable rule: they could eat as little or as much as they liked, but no one
—no one!—
was allowed to leave anything on the plate.

Many years later, when her children had families of their own and the Nelson grandchildren came for a visit, the rule still held. “You know what, Grandma?” one of the little ones once said. “I never knew anybody that could get a plate as clean as you do.”

Page eventually retired, and Red spent a good deal of her free time working for the Red Cross, scheduling blood drives and the like. For a while she took care of Page’s ninety-three-year-old mother.

The Nelsons are still in the same house, and when a visitor approaches on a warm fall afternoon, Red, now eighty-five years old, sometimes waits on the open front porch.

Visitor: “How is everything going, Mrs. Nelson?”