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 to him. I said yes. She didn't. He died three days later. I wrote her a letter anyway. I don't know if she ever received it. I kept nursing because someone had to. I married a doctor I met in Manila in 1945. We were married for fifty-two years. He used to say I was the bravest person he ever met. I told him he was wrong — the bravest people were the ones on the stretchers.