The Army took its time writing it down.
That’s often how it goes for the nurses and the women and the ones who weren’t carrying rifles.
But the men I kept alive did not wait for paperwork.
When they built this installation years later, they named the hall, and they bolted my name to the wall, so that every soldier who ate there would pass beneath it.
I became a school nurse after the war, and I tended scraped knees for thirty-one years in a little Tennessee town.
I never stopped wearing the pin.
Chapter 4: Attention
The room was still standing when the senior man in it walked in.
The Command Sergeant Major had been at the far end of the hall, and he crossed it now in the complete silence, and he did not look at Doyle at all.
He stopped in front of my table and came to attention and held a salute longer than courtesy required.
