I enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor. I was 23, working as a typist in Sacramento, and I knew I had to do something. They sent me to Guadalcanal in February 1943 — the worst assignment of my life and the most important. We set up a field hospital in a coconut grove. The noise was the worst thing. You couldn't sleep because the fighting was twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We treated burns from the USS New Orleans, shrapnel wounds, dysentery, and malaria. I had one boy — I won't say his name — who was seventeen and had both legs gone. He asked me if his girlfriend was going to write...

I was born in Java, which was Dutch East Indies at the time. In 1942, the Japanese took me and 50,000 others and put us to work building the railway between Thailand and Burma. They called it 'the Railway of Death.' I was seventeen. I lasted 22 months. I survived because I was small and could fit into places where others couldn't — inside culverts, under railway cars. The Japanese engineers didn't bother with safety measures. If you fell, you were replaced. I watched men die from cholera, dysentery, malaria, tropical ulcers, and simple exhaustion. I saw men eaten by tigers at night. I worked w...