My mother’s dilemma as a combat nurse in wwii

On her 90th birthday, my mother gave me a red, bound volume of hundreds of war letters that she’d written to her family from 1943 to 1945. She also entrusted a tiny diary, its cover a faded

blue with a red crest containing the words, “My Life in the Service.” She claimed that she wanted me to “edit” her war archives “for the family.” But the letters were obviously sugar-coated.

And she’d ripped out a section of her service diary — the part that chronicled her personal life of the last five months overseas in post war Germany. To “edit” as she’d requested, I needed

more information to fill the gaps in her war story that she’d deliberately left out. I insisted that she leave Virginia and come to live with me in San Antonio, Texas. For the next two

years, I uncovered most of what she’d omitted. And, finally, I learned why she’d torn out a significant portion of the diary. It had chronicled her love affair with a surgeon, a man who was

not my father. She’d fallen in love with my dad 18 months before, when they were aboard RMS Andes, heading to Liverpool in February 1944. It was a time of innocence, but the couple had some

idea of what they were to face in the coming months. _You can subscribe here to AARP Experience Counts, a free e-newsletter published twice a month. If you have feedback or a story idea then

please contact us here._ They were in love, so in their minds it was irrelevant that they had only spent ten days together, crossing the Atlantic. Why not go ahead and secure their future

with a promise that after the war they would marry? But once the _Andes_ docked, their lives took separate paths. In August 1944, my mother was assigned to the Third Army, my father to the

First. And it was during that last year of her service that she met the surgeon — the man she’d written about in the discarded pages of the diary. By December 1945, my mother must have had

some understanding that even humans who survive war physically can’t expect to emerge unscathed emotionally. So, she made a deal with herself. The only way she was going to have a normal

post-war life was to choose my father over the surgeon. Her time with my dad had been innocent, free from war. But the time she spent with the surgeon was amid the carnage of conflict. If

she chose the surgeon, she’d never be free from that war. What she didn’t understand when she made that deal with herself was that no matter how hard she suppressed that war, it was still

there, just underneath.