Elizabeth M. Norman (45 page)

Answer: “Well”—she glances about as if she should check—“Everything is fairly nice and peaceful around here.”

•   •   •

A
FTER ALL THE
parties and speeches and homecoming hoopla were over, E
LEANOR
G
AREN
took out her checkbook and sat down to pay off an old prison-camp debt. She easily could have forgotten the obligation; the internee businessman who’d lent her the money, Carroll C. Grinnell, an executive for General Electric in Manila, had been murdered by the Japanese just before Santo Tomas was liberated. But Eleanor was no deadbeat. Grinnell’s two-hundred-dollar food loan had helped save her life, and repaying him—or in this case, his company—was a matter of honor. So she made out the check, slipped it into an envelope and sent it off to New York. A few weeks later when the treasurer of General Electric mailed her a note of thanks, she felt relieved. Now there was nothing from the war left hanging over her—nothing, that is, save the weight of her memories.

Her first postwar duty station in 1945 was on Ward D-9 at Birmingham General Army Hospital in Van Nuys, California. Most of her patients were wounded veterans, and it was easy for Eleanor, a combat nurse, to strike a rapport with them. Soon she became one of the most popular nurses on the ward, and in October 1945 some of her patients decided to show their gratitude by, literally, putting her on a pedestal.

The Mutual Broadcasting System had just launched a new radio show on Sunday afternoons called “Queen for a Day,” a program to celebrate women and, in doing so, provide an advertising venue for women’s products. The producers apparently decided to give one of their Sunday shows a nursing motif, the “Florence Nightingale Queen for a Day,” and they invited the patients at Birmingham General to vote for their favorite nurse.
²⁰
The boys on D-9, of course, knew exactly the nurse they wanted, and they must have lobbied the other wards to go along because before she could say no, thank you, Eleanor Garen found herself in a makeshift studio in the hospital’s auditorium, sitting on a “throne,” a huge, gilded chair with clawed feet and lion’s head arms, a fake diamond tiara on her head and a red velvet robe with white fur trim draped over her shoulders.

Jack Bailey, host of the program, extolled Eleanor’s work and achievements, then a line of beautiful models paraded in front of her wearing the clothes she’d won, including a $4,000 chinchilla coat. Eleanor was a bit embarrassed by the whole thing; the long months of speeches and rallies and awards that had followed her homecoming had left her feeling a bit used and somewhat cynical. “It was all just propaganda,” she said, “but I went along with it.”
²¹

In some ways the propaganda was pointless, for in the fall of 1945 the armed forces were beginning to demobilize, and the Army Nurse Corps was forced to consolidate its ranks. This downsizing reduced both positions and promotions, particularly the number of supervisory and management slots available at military hospitals.

Eleanor was sure that her war experience would expedite her captaincy, but her superiors at Birmingham General refused to promote her. What had she done? she wondered. Had she made a mistake? Or did someone resent all the publicity she’d been getting? Without a promotion, she thought, she might be forced to leave the service.

The months that followed left her restless and edgy. She turned to friends and relatives with political connections and asked for help, but there was little anyone could do.
²²
In the meantime some of those close to her were urging her to prepare herself to leave the service. By the spring of 1946 she’d reached a breaking point and was so depressed she had to see a psychiatrist.

The promotion, of course, was not the principal source of Eleanor’s trouble. Her disquiet really came from the war. She simply could not reconcile the sacrifice she’d made—the suffering that had earned her the sobriquet of hero—with the indifference and anonymity she was experiencing in everyday life:

“During the last year of the war you’d go out the front gate at the hospital to catch a bus and everybody’d stop and pick you up, just strangers giving you a ride. But after the war was over, nobody would stop.”

She wanted recognition, her just rewards, and yet she wanted her privacy too, no more hoopla, no more saccharine celebrations. And this conflict, this ambivalence, crippled her.

“I wanted to get away from it, all that kind of bologna,” she said. “People kept saying, ‘You have to forget about it,’ and that’s what I tried to do—forget about it. But I wasn’t able to and when I tried to talk about it, a few people said, ‘Oh, you’re bragging,’ stuff like that. I said, ‘No, I’m not bragging, I was there. That’s three years out of my life. Why can’t I talk about it?’ Even other nurses weren’t willing to listen. Nobody was.”

Then came word that the army had given her a permanent commission, and in February 1948 she was assigned to the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt, Germany.

Europe was just the tonic she needed. She toured the museums of Paris, picked tulips in the Dutch countryside, ate bratwurst in the beer halls of Munich. Two years later she was stationed in Hawaii, back in the tropics again. She returned to college too, studying philosophy and
psychology at the University of Hawaii. Then in 1959, at the age of fifty, Eleanor Garen finally decided she’d had enough of the army and retired with the rank of major. Her last duty station had been El Paso, Texas, and with her monthly benefits of $393.75 and some savings, she bought a little house there with a garden in back.

She was happy in El Paso, traveling and doing volunteer work, most of all reading. Then without warning her old troubles returned. A niece recognized that Eleanor was suffering from depression and helped her find an analyst.

“I tried to forget the war for so long, but I got so discouraged and everything and so depressed,” Eleanor said. “I finally admitted to feeling guilty that so many men on Bataan were killed because the army didn’t want American women falling in Japanese hands. I was thinking those boys died there so miserably and they lived so terribly. It was really awful.”

In time her melancholy passed and she stayed in El Paso until 1985 when, at seventy-six, her failing health forced her to give up her house and return to South Bend, Indiana, and a small apartment in Saint Paul’s Retirement Home. She filled her little rooms with her books and some native art from the Philippines. She seemed content there, telling her old friends and Santo Tomas comrades:

I am doing the “ages of dinosaur” because I passed my 80th birthday. It is hard for me to get around, and oh! to remember. Sometimes my memory is clear as a bell and I can laugh over the fun and funny things we did together. Other times, I can’t even remember you when I run across your names. It just seems to come and go. So you see, I really do miss the keen memory I always had. At the present time, I am on oxygen. What a task! Little prongs in my nose, and of course, the tube that is so long. With it I go from room to room. I use a walker in the apartment but have a wheelchair for longer distance which they have fixed with an oxygen tank. The dining room is on this floor where I take my meals. Getting to sit at the table is a real treat.… My life is quiet.… The best thing to wish for is good health.
²³

Now and then a few of the men from a local veterans group would drop by to talk, and Eleanor would spend hours arguing with them about the battles in the Pacific, War Department policies and the strategy of the Japanese. “The way I looked at it,” she said, “I wasn’t defeated, I was captured. I didn’t surrender; the army surrendered me.”

Then around Christmas 1992, her mind began to falter. She started to forget faces and names, and the nursing staff at the home reported that Eleanor seemed to be living in the past. She would talk about “buckets of blood” and “tunnels,” submarines and gas masks. Her family and the staff at the home worried that she had lost her mind, but three weeks later she returned to the present, unaware of what had happened.

“Glad I do not remember too much,” she wrote a friend. “What I hear, the flashbacks were really bad. Guess I did give them a bad time.”
²⁴

In November 1993, she developed an upper respiratory infection, which strained her aged heart and lungs. Her niece wanted to send her to a hospital for treatment, but Eleanor, for reasons she never made clear, refused, and on November 26 at the age of eighty-four, Eleanor Garen died in bed.

She had told her friends and relatives that if someone wanted to assign her an epitaph, it should be something simple, something like “I just took care of the men.”

A
FTER HER LEAVE
, H
ELEN
“C
ASSIE
” C
ASSIANI
made her way to the Army Redistribution Center in Santa Barbara, California, to rest and recuperate with other veterans recently returned from combat. In the mornings she would listen to reorientation and career lectures; in the afternoons she would play golf, tool around town or sit by the sea. She was also spending a lot of time with a fellow New Englander, an artillery officer who had served in North Africa, Sicily and France, Edward Nestor.

Nestor was smart, handsome and easygoing, and soon he and Cassie were inseparable. By the end of their leave, the Angel of Bataan and Corregidor and the young captain had fallen in love.

On November 3, 1945, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, Cassie and Ed were married. The wedding party included two of her comrades, Phyllis Arnold and Rita Palmer, and some “surprise” guests from Santo Tomas as well. An army chaplain and three missionary priests who had been in prison with Cassie had learned about the wedding and, with the help of the priest performing the ceremony, had secreted themselves behind the altar. Just as the priest began to perform the Nuptial Mass, the three walked out on the chancel and seated themselves, their presence a gift to a nurse they greatly admired.

In the years that followed the Nestors began to build a life together. Ed earned a degree from Harvard Business School and went to work for various companies, while Cassie stayed home to start a family.

Month after month they tried to conceive, and month after month
they failed. Cassie, naturally, wondered if the privations of prison camp had left her barren, but instead of consulting a doctor, she and Ed decided they would visit an adoption agency.

“We were getting to be old, thirty-two years or something like that,” Cassie said. “We thought, ‘The heck with this, let’s adopt.’ And soon they were the parents of a baby boy they named Mark.
²⁵

After Mark, they adopted Peter, and the family seemed to be thriving. Then Ed received a letter that, in Cassie’s words, made the family’s heart drop.

America was at war in Korea and the war was going badly. The government needed more men. And Ed Nestor had in his hand an official letter calling him back into uniform.

The news cut Cassie to the quick. She knew the risks of combat; she’d seen the slaughter. She also worried that once Ed was gone, the courts might see her as a single parent, void the adoption and take Peter away.

As it turned out, the judge in the case understood the circumstances, and as Ed prepared to report for duty, the judge waived the customary one-year waiting period for adoption and Peter legally became their son. Ed went to Europe instead of Korea, and eighteen months later he was mustered out of uniform. Soon the Nestors were preparing to bring home their third child, Sarah.

In the years that followed, Ed made a number of profitable investments and was able to retire early. The family settled into an elegant nineteenth-century stone farmhouse on two bucolic acres in Pennsylvania near Valley Forge.

There Cassie became the epitome of postwar womanhood—the happy homemaker, worrying about her children’s colds and eating habits, squiring them to Little League games and soapbox derbies, cooking, cleaning, making cookies and cakes for PTA bake sales.

In 1980, with her children grown and gone, Cassie felt her days were empty and, at the age of sixty-three, she decided to take up nursing again. She registered for a refresher course at a local hospital, relearning the sounds of the heart and the rhythms of the body. But medicine and nursing had changed; it was no longer the hands-on profession Cassie had grown to love, a job that required instinct and judgment, a fine touch and an adroit ear:

“I walked into an intensive care unit and I was shocked. Machines ran everything, even the intravenous fluid lines. The nurses seemed like paper pushers. Well, this was not for me. No! I would be a fish out of water. I wanted contact with patients.”

With her recertification in hand she began to look for a job. At first she thought of a nursing home—they always needed more staff—but the prospect of such work depressed her. Then she spotted a classified ad asking for a private-duty nurse to care for a Vietnam veteran in the last stages of multiple sclerosis. She thought, That’s just about my speed at this stage of the game, and she started work the next week.

The patient’s name was Charlie. He was completely paralyzed and in need of a lot of care. Cassie fed him and bathed him, administered his treatments and changed his sheets. In their quiet moments she would sit next to Charlie, hold his hand and talk with him. When he lost the ability to speak and had to take food through a tube, she would gently stroke his arm and tell him about her day. Five years later “sweet Charlie finally died,” and when Cassie went home and sat down and thought about all that had passed between them, she could not help but remember the boys on Bataan. “I felt I had really done something pretty good again,” she said.

Cassie and Ed are still in their stone farmhouse. In recent years Cassie has suffered a mild stroke and developed a cardiac arrythmia. She cannot seem to summon the energy that animated her middle age and kept her on the move in later years, but she still sews and recently was making curtains for Sarah’s new house. She also insists on working in the garden and cleverly positions chairs at various spots in the yard so she can rest when she begins to wear down.