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...