Elizabeth M. Norman Read Online Free PDF

Later Major Hubbard came down from Stotsenberg and told me Glen had suffered a basal skull fracture [at the base of the skull where the basic function of breathing is located], but that he’d be all right. Wonderful news! NO sleep tonight. UP and down stairs during several alarms. 3
    On the day before Christmas the army nurses at Fort Stotsenberg prepared to evacuate the battered base. As they rushed to ready their patients and pack a few belongings, Cassie was told to report to a sergeant waiting for her in front of the hospital.
    The soldier was standing beside an ambulance. He smiled politely and told her he had been ordered to prepare her for a “special assignment.” Then he held out a pistol and a green army sock filled with bullets. “Take them,” he said, climbing into the ambulance and motioning for Cassie to get in next to him.
    “What’s going on?” she demanded. 4
    A few minutes later, the sergeant stopped the vehicle in the middle of the jungle and hopped out. He was going to teach Cassie how to fire the weapon, he told her, and for the next few minutes he went through the basics, then he pointed at a clump of large banana blossoms and told her to start shooting.
    This is movie stuff, she thought, but went along with it all even though “I didn’t believe I could do much damage.”
    When they got back to the base, she discovered the reason for the dramatics: she’d been put in charge of a hospital train that was to ferry the wounded from Fort Stotsenberg to Sternberg Hospital in Manila, and “they told me I had to be armed to defend myself and the patients.”
    Defend the patients? To hand a pistol to a healer was a desperate step for a desperate army, and Cassie was afraid. The nurse in her would do her job, no question of that, but she did not know whether she could play the soldier too and pull the trigger.
    As she boarded the train “carrying this gun and bullets in a sock,” she felt a little “stupid,” so she set the weapon aside, checked her thirty patients, then settled in for the ride. The windows were open and the cool sea air filled the car.
    As the train approached the city, she looked intently out the window, surveying the side streets for signs of trouble. She was looking as well for the three ambulances that were supposed to be waiting somewhere along that stretch of track to ferry the patients to Sternberg.
    Suddenly the train jerked to a stop. Out the window she could see people fleeing. Then came the wail of an air-raid siren. Overhead appeared a large formation of enemy aircraft, another bird of prey, this one bearing down on the train.
    The patients, many of them still in shock from earlier attacks, heard the drone of the planes and panicked. They began to yell and shout and struggled to free themselves from their bloody litters. One man with a tightly bandaged stump of a leg was struggling to right himself. Another recovering from multiple shrapnel wounds in both legs was pleading with the others to drag him to safety. An officer who had been diagnosed with shell shock and had been quiet now began to sob and laugh like a madman.
    Cassie shoved her way through the panicked car and positioned herself at the exit. No one, she yelled, was going anywhere! And she ordered the men back to their seats and litters and told her orderly that if anyone tried to leave the car he was to use his weapon to stop them.
    The bombers, as it turned out, had another target. When the dangerhad passed, Cassie checked the wounded to make sure their sutures were intact, quieted the shell-shock patients and settled the car down for the rest of the trip.
    When they finally reached Manila, she happily turned in her pistol and sockful of bullets, and in the weeks that followed, the war pushed the incident from her mind. Then one day in the field a month or so later, her supervisor approached, holding a piece of paper.
    H EADQUARTERS P HILIPPINE D EPARTMENT
IN THE F IELD
    February 6, 1942
SUBJECT: