Chapter 7. Inside the 95th

Up early for breakfast—big, with dried eggs in the mess hall—we now could quickly splash ourselves with cold water nearby in our steel helmets and jump into our clothes.  Such a treat to have a little cold water nearby.  For the first weeks the head nurse had issued the order that day and night, even dashing to the latrine, we had to put on our steel helmets.  This meant that the liner had to be kept in the helmet at all times so we couldn’t wash ourselves or our clothes in the helmets.

Finally she admitted she had misunderstood and that the order held only during periods of air raid warnings.  “Head” was given to hearing things wrong from above.  Earlier she dunned each of us women $2 for a lunch which we could see was worth about 20 cents.  Seems she had thought “2 bits” was the same as “2 bucks.”  We always obeyed the Colonel, but remained “of little faith” whatever she pronounced for the duration.

Day after day we Red Cross workers wore our grey cotton seersucker long-sleeved dresses, tan cotton stockings and black old lady shoes to work.  I could vary the costume however by flaring one of several flowered handkerchiefs I’d brought in the right hand pocket.  Most of the time we used our army issue khaki overcoats, but we also had heavy wool dark grayish-blue winter suits and hats.  For summer we had light grey, light-weight wool suits with matching hats.  If we still had rayon stockings from home, we could wear those.  England had no “silk” stockings by 1944.

For meals we stood in line and ate with whichever doctors and nurses turned up in the officer’s mess. There the conversations helped us keep up with gossip, as did those in the barrack where each of us slept near different nurses.  Lots of battlefront happenings came from the GIs at the rec. hall and in the wards and from the weekly Stars and Stripes, the official military newspaper.  The good old British Broadcasting Co. was probably the best source.  In the rec. hall we often all stood by for the latest information

Back to the mess hall, one of my most vivid memories of war days came from my first lunch in the mess hall.  Mary, the Red Cross secretary, and I sat down with two surgeons.  First thing, one said to the other, “We’ve got a PROBLEM! What are we going to DO with the leg we just cut off?”  Instantly, Mary stood up and screamed “You can’t talk like that!” and stomped out of the building sobbing.  It took just a day or two for the Red Cross to find a new location for Mary—in a recreation program in London where she wouldn’t run into things like this.  And we had been warned at Red Cross training that some of us would find unexpectedly that we would not be able to tolerate some aspect of conditions around us. They had promised trainees that changes were possible under those circumstances.  “How unfortunate that the military is not in a position to make such personnel adjustments,” I used to think as I was at a loss to know how to help the hundreds of NP cases we met.

Our visits to each of the 10 hospital wards were always far too few.  For the wards with l00 of the most recovered guys we often just picked up the games, comic books, puzzles used by GIs who had moved on, and left tobacco and personal supplies that the nurse in charge asked for before sneaking out because wards with the sicker GIs needed us more.

We carried our basket of “games and other goodies” and went from bed to bed in mid-recovery wards, often stopping to visit, leave some craft material or get someone started on a project, write a letter or spot someone needing social worker help.  Sometimes we would engage groups of patients in the ward in a group game—usually bingo!

The Recreation training in Washington had stressed that looking into the eyes of a disfigured or person disabled was absolutely essential.  “Just look straight into his eyes.  See nothing else.”  In the recovery wards they said to remember that the crying and screaming well might be from drugs not yet worn off.  These difficult to execute, but simple rules helped a lot.  So, as heart-breaking as it might be, I found rewarding the difficult ward visits even if it was just saying a “hello” with a smile, holding a hand, or asking a question.