This morning the dogs visited friends, so they didn’t
get to go to Memory Gardens until this evening.
We went around 5:30 pm because it rained and wasn’t 93 degrees. They did their routine, dragged me (I want to
say kicking and screaming to the garden) but I’ve come to love going to the cemetery
as much as they do.
Beanie chased a hole-rat (my new name for those
ground hogs who make tunnels) and was only three inches in the rear before the
blasted pest disappeared down a rather large hole. Some of their burrows have very roomy
entrances. If they aren’t careful, the
dogs will be able to get more than half of their little terrier bodies inside one—which
means the chances of Buster or Beanie actually catching a rodent goes up by at
least two may be even three percent.
As we continued our circuit around the grounds, we
met a garden employee. I’m going to call her Liz, the Event Planner. When I have a better chance of actually sitting
down and chatting with her, I’ll spend an entire blog entry on how much she
impressed me. But even though tonight’s
topic isn’t on Liz, I did find out that Memory Gardens has over 7500 “live-in”
residents. There are enough stories for
five or six decades-worth of blog entries, and every week I note there is at
least one if not two funerals. Each tenant
has a story; some are good, some are not so good, and some are most likely
boring. I’ll try to avoid writing about
those; but to date I haven’t heard a blah one or had a boring walk yet.
Earlier today, I got to thinking about another
veteran I met about a week ago. Her name
is “Gracie,” and she arrived in the park in the first part of the 21st
century. She didn’t die in combat, or a
car accident or in a violent way—at least I didn’t get the impression she had. By the dates on her granite pillow, she lived
into an advanced age and at one time in her life she had been a U.S. Army Nurse
during World War II. When I noticed her
service I couldn’t help thinking about the 1970-80’s television show “M.A.S.H”
(short for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) starring Alan Alda. When I Googled “MASH units,” I was disappointed
to learn those didn’t come into existence until 1946, operating mainly during
the Korean War—the last MASH was deactivated in February of 2006.
In my dad’s war, the one that began on an infamous
day and lasted until August 9th, 1945, I had the impression that Gracie
worked in dozens of places, starting in North Africa, then traveled all over Western
Europe—I’m sure she loved the travel and all the sight-seeing. In comparison to nurses in previous wars, she
worked closer to the front than any of her contemporaries realized—those facts
most likely weren’t “news-worthy.” She
either worked in a “field” or “an evac (evacuation) hospital,” a woman who had
volunteered, trained, and gone to war right beside the well-trained men who
thought they were too tough to die but did in large numbers, while women like
Gracie fought with all they had to save them from lethal projectiles, poisonous
vapors, or deadly aerial missiles. (I
bet more than one politician in Washington D.C. prided himself on thinking as
he signed war-time legislation, that he hadn’t allowed a single women within a
hundred miles of combat. Like Hell!)
Because of my father’s gory war-bed-time-stories,
over the years I have read hundreds of fictional and non-fictional books on
World War II let alone all the other historical time periods. In those factual accounts, I learned many Army
field hospitals or Red Cross units were frequently attacked by both the Germans
and the Japanese. (In the Pacific
theater—as if war was a place reserved for paying spectators, hundreds of U.S.
Army nurses became POW’s, ill-treated and even executed by a culture who
believed that if a prisoner allowed him or herself to be captured, instead of
committing ritual suicide, then he or she deserved to be treated as cruelly, as
demeaning, and as humiliating as possible; and if such care turned fatal, so be
it—a prisoner’s fate didn’t deserved anything close to being humane.)
It might not have been regulation, but if the enemy
attacked a field hospital overflowing with wounded and dying G.I’s, I wouldn’t
doubt that one of those ballsy, strong-willed, American nurses didn’t pick up a
M1 rifle in order to protect her patients—not unlike a mother grizzly defending
her cubs—and everyone knows the last thing a person wants to be is between a
momma bear and her offspring. The same
rule applies to a stupid German SS trooper who thought shooting up a U.S. hospital
would be a lark to tell his bodies about.
That is until a madder-than-hell first lieutenant nurse hitched up her
kakis, slid a round into a rifle, and carefully blew his freakin’ head
off. She then set down the smoking-hot-muzzled
weapon, wiped a blond curl behind an ear, (not looking at the dead guy again),
and returned to her dozens of patients in order to check pulses, IV drips, rows
of stitches, and blood pressure stats on metal or rough-hewn clip boards.
American Army nurses were rare species prior to December 7th, only about 1000 of them were stationed in a dozen places such as Virginia, Hawaii, and the Philippines. By the end of the war, there were over 50,000—one of them was Gracie. By 1943 there were even 160 Black nurses in the Army Nurse Corps.
All of these magnificent women saw the worse war had
to offer—blood, guts, and arrogant doctors who thought they knew everything,
who rarely listened to a head nurse who knew a patient’s slow pulse indicated his
quickly repaired aorta had ruptured and blood was flowing into the pericardial sack
like spill-water from the Hoover Dam. If
the s-o-b of a surgeon didn’t crack the poor soldier’s chest in the next minute
the G.I. would be returning state-side alright—in a body bag—they didn’t always
have coffins. Sometimes they didn’t even
get to be buried in the country of their birth.
These nurses didn’t work twelve-hour shifts like
they do today. No, sometimes they worked
three to four days taking one minute breaks—resting long enough to swallow a
cold cup of awful tasting java and take a squat in a foxhole—not really caring
if some Marine private ogled her bare bottom before returning to the operating
tent.
When the adversary’s bombs ignored the big red
crosses on top of the tents where the rows of bandaged soldiers lay dying on
cots that had seen use in 1918, these women in white surgical gowns would throw
themselves over these poor men and their gaping wounds, sometimes taking the
shrapnel that would have finished the G.I. off for good. I couldn’t find the number of Army nurses who
were actually wounded in this world-wide conflict, but in those four years in
which they rarely if ever got home for a few days of R&R, they received 1,619
medals, citations, or commendations. Out
of those 50,000 women, 201 were gently laid in flag draped coffins.
When I read Gracie’s head plaque, I straightened my stooped
shoulders, gave her a grin only another woman would understand, and saluted like
my daddy had taught me when I was four years old.
“Gracie, old gal,” I said as the dogs actually stood
quietly, “you must have been one-hellava-dame.
Good-goin’ girlfrield.”
As I walked away, I thought I heard her actually chuckle.
No wonder I'm on Prozac!
One of many I call best Friends--Cathy Black
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