I won’t dress it up and I won’t make it gory.
What matters is this: the order came to pull back, and there were forty-three wounded men on litters who could not be moved fast enough, and someone had to stay with them.
I stayed.
I’m not telling you that to sound brave.
I stayed because I was the nurse, and they were my patients, and a nurse does not leave her patients in the dark to make the math easier for everyone else.
It was a long night.
I did the work I’d been trained to do — pressure, airways, keeping men warm, keeping men calm, keeping men here — by flashlight and then by feel, one soldier at a time, until the sky finally went gray and help reached us.
Forty-three men went in on litters that night.
Forty-three men came out at dawn.
A week later, what was left of that battalion lined up in the mud, and their commander pressed a small brass pin into my hand — a blue shield, a white heron — and told me I was one of them now, for the rest of my life, whether the Army ever wrote it down or not.
