San Antonio's cultural experience museum..

Life in the Army Nurse Corps
Brigadier General Lillian Dunlap
Birth: January 20, 1922, Mission, Texas

The San Antonio Branch of the American Association of University Women is honored to present the oral history of Brigadier General Lillian Dunlap to the Institute of Texan Cultures for the edification of future generations. General Dunlap is nationally recognized for distinguished service and leadership in the Army Nurse Corps. Because of her many years of active involvement with Incarnate Word College in the Division of Nursing, General Dunlap was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Science and was honored with endowment of the Dunlap Professor Chair in Nursing at Incarnate Word College. General Dunlap has also been active in the civic and business life of San Antonio and has been named to the San Antonio and Texas Women's Halls of Fame.

General Dunlap, when and where were you born?

I was born January 20, 1922, in Mission, Texas, down on the Rio Grande.

Who were your parents?

My mother was Mary Schermerhorn Dunlap, who was born in Elgin, Texas, and my daddy was Ira Dunlap, who was born in Sabinal, Texas.

Did you have brothers and sisters?

Goodness, yes. I have four sisters. I am the oldest of five girls-no boys in the family. My sister next to me is Lucille Dunlap, who worked with Eastern Airlines and retired from Eastern Airlines five years ago. She now lives here in San Antonio. The middle sister, as we refer to her, Dorothy Dunlap Mount, lives in Alamogordo, New Mexico. She is a widow and has four children who live out in that area. The next sister, Mary Bess Dunlap Autry, lives near Pipe Creek and has a bed-and-breakfast right there on the river. And then my baby sister, Carolyn Putnam, lives here in San Antonio and is the secretary to the Commanding General of Brooke Army Medical Center. So, the five of us girls are still living. Mother and Daddy are both deceased.

How long did you live in Mission?

I actually lived in Mission only six months. When I was six months old, Mother and Daddy moved to San Antonio, where Daddy was an apprentice machinist for the Missouri Pacific Railroad in South San [Antonio].

What was San Antonio like when you were growing up?

Of course, when I was growing up, San Antonio seemed like a great city to me. We lived in South San. Well, we've lived all over San Antonio, but we did not have an automobile until I was in high school. Downtown was a great distance, it seemed like, and anytime we wanted to go to town, we'd ride the bus. I know that we always felt safe. Being the oldest of five girls, Mother wouldn't hesitate to let us get on the bus with me in charge of the sisters and go downtown to the movie at the Majestic [Theater]. We got off at Navarro and Houston Streets and walked down to the Majestic. It cost us a nickel or ten cents or something to go to the movies then. Then we'd ride the bus back home.

San Antonio was a lot of fun when I was growing up. We went to the public swimming pools. Our life centered around the home, the church, and the school, because we didn't have much money. My daddy was a machinist. And, of course, with a big family, you always had a bunch of children playing in the yard because they liked Mama's gingerbread better than anyone else's in the neighborhood. But again, we played together, we played in the neighborhood, we were active in our church. We had softball teams and volleyball teams and basketball teams and church picnics and things like that, and then our school activities. So, really, our life centered around family and church and school.

Was religion an important factor in your youth?

Yes. It was an important factor in my youth and continued to be throughout my career. My mother was brought up in the Methodist Church, and my father, in the Baptist Church. As I indicated, we didn't have an automobile, so we usually attended either the Methodist or the Baptist Church nearest where we lived where we could walk to church. So I really grew up ecumenically, as far as being Methodist or Baptist. We would attend Sunday school and then church. You didn't have babysitters in those days. You sat in church and behaved yourself.

Then there would always be youth activities. You would go back Sunday afternoon to youth activities. And church Sunday night. My daddy had a beautiful voice and sang in the choirs, wherever we might be attending church. He and Mother both taught Sunday school classes. I indicated that a good deal of our social life centered around the church because there was always some type of social activity going on.

I was telling someone just the other day about how the women of the church used to get together and make tamales and put them in those great big lard cans. We used to make them, sell [them], and have bazaars. How hard it was to make those tamales . I can remember doing that with Mother-lay out the shucks so they could put the tamal in it. So we, as youngsters, were very active in the church and grew up in the church.

This has been an important part of my life-has continued to be in the military, because in the military we have post chapels, and you have all of the religious Protestant denominations attending the post chapels. You really don't know sometimes whether your chaplain is Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, or what denomination he is. Also, I have, through my schooling, been associated with the Catholic Church, and I think this relationship with the churches has certainly provided me with a more tolerant respect for each individual's own religious belief.

You can appreciate one's religion and one's dedication to that religion, although you may not believe yourself what that individual is practicing. I think this is very important. I got this from my early childhood between the Methodist and the Baptist, going back and forth. Then it has enlarged through my military association with the chapels and my educational association with the Catholic Church.

I really got the impression that you were a Catholic from your association with Incarnate Word College.

It's surprising how many people think so. It was because I went to Santa Rosa Hospital School of Nursing, and this was quite something for my father-a Baptist-to agree to let me go to a Catholic hospital, but our family physician had said that the three best schools of nursing were Baylor in Dallas, John Sealy in Galveston, and Santa Rosa here in San Antonio. Well, of course, San Antonio-it was cheaper for me to go here at Santa Rosa, because it cost $150, and that was an awful lot of money then.

That began my relationship with my Catholic friends, and then the army sent me back to Incarnate Word to receive my undergraduate degree. After I retired they invited me to sit on the Board of Trustees, which I did for ten years. So, sometimes over at the College, they refer to me as Sister Lil. It is surprising how many of my friends think, like you do, that I must be Catholic.

General Dunlap, where did you go to school?

This will make history itself because I went to school in so many different ones here in San Antonio. I started first grade in South San Elementary School. I made the first two grades in one year, so at the end of one year I was ready to go into the third grade. By then my folks had moved into Collins Garden, and I went to Collins Garden Elementary School. Then they moved over on Aberdeen, and I went to Robert B. Green Elementary School. Then they moved out on Ware Boulevard in Harlandale, which at that time was a mile south of Harlandale-way out in the country. We lived on an acre of land, where we could have chickens, a cow, a pig, and so forth. So I went to middle school in Harlandale. Then we moved down to Mission, Texas-back to Mission-for one year, and I was in the middle school in Mission, Texas, for that year. Then we moved back to San Antonio, and I finished junior high school at Mark Twain, then went out to Jefferson High School and spent the three years at Jefferson High School, graduating in 1938.

When I graduated from Jefferson High School in 1938, I was sixteen years old. I wanted to go into nurses' training, but you had to be eighteen years old to enter training, because,to be licensed in the State of Texas, you had to be at least twenty-one years of age.

Sister Mary Andrew at Santa Rosa then agreed to let me come in at seventeen, rather than eighteen, because I already had one year of maturing after high school. So I entered Santa Rosa Hospital School of Nursing. I finished there in 1942 and entered the army. The army sent me to Incarnate Word College, 1953 to 1954, to receive my bachelor's degree in nursing, and then they sent me to the Army-Baylor Hospital Administration program. I did the didactic at the Medical Field Service School in 1958-1959 and the one-year residency at Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Denver, Colorado, 1959-1960, and received my master's [degree] in hospital administration from Baylor University in 1960. Then, since you mentioned it, Incarnate Word awarded me the Honorary Doctor of Science in 1987.

When did you first become interested in a military career?

I had no thoughts of a military career until Pearl Harbor Day. I was a student nurse-a senior-at Santa Rosa. I went on duty, three-to-eleven shift, and the patients were saying, "Isn't that terrible?" What was terrible? We didn't know what had happened. Pearl Harbor. Immediately, our reaction was, "Oh, maybe they'll need us, and we'll get out of nurses' training early." They didn't need us that bad! We had to finish our nurses' training. But since the war was on, I decided I wanted to enter the Army Nurse Corps. We just had Army Nurse Corps and Navy Nurse Corps. My friends used to say I didn't know how to swim, so that's why I went to the Army Nurse Corps.

[When I was] a youngster, my daddy would come out and sing for the patients at the old Station Hospital at Fort Sam Houston, I would come with him. I had seen those "soldier boys" way back then, walking on crutches as patients out there. So, to me, I was going to come into the army, but it was for the war. As I tell people often, I was coming into the army to win the war, then I was going to come back home. I had told Sister Bernice at Santa Rosa I'd come back and work in the operating room when I came back from the war.

Will you please tell us about your military career? It must have been very interesting.

It was indeed interesting. My military career lasted thirty-three years. Now, to tell you everything that happened in thirty-three years is impossible, but I'll briefly outline what it included. I entered the Army Nurse Corps, November 16, 1942, here at Brooke General Hospital as a second lieutenant, because at that time the Chief of the Army Nurse Corps was a major; the chief nurse at Brooke General Hospital had twenty years' service, and she was a captain. Her assistant was a first lieutenant, the operating room supervisor was a first lieutenant, and everybody else was a second lieutenant.

So when I entered the Army Nurse Corps, my goal was to get to be a first lieutenant. I thought I would have reached the top at that point. At Brooke General Hospital, units were being organized for shipping overseas. In February of 1943, I was assigned to the Fifty-ninth Station Hospital. Twenty-three nurses from Brooke General Hospital left by troop train to go to Camp Young, California. We didn't know we were going there. Our orders read an APO number, and we thought it said India, so we thought we were headed to India. We got to Indio, California, and were offloaded there onto ambulances and taken to Camp Young, California, which no longer exists. It was out in the desert between Indio and Desert Center. This was a large training area where the tanks were maneuvering in preparation for shipping overseas.

Six nurses from LaGuardia Hospital in New Orleans joined us. Doctors, male officers, and enlisted men had been at Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, so they joined us, and the Fifty-ninth Station Hospital was activated at Camp Young. We actually were on maneuvers in the desert, taking care of the patients out there for six months. Then our unit went by troop train back across the country to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, and we had jungle maneuvers there, working half time in the hospital and then on jungle maneuvers-jungle training-for four months. Then we went back across the country on a troop train to Camp Stoneman, California. On Thanksgiving Day, 1943, we shipped out on the West Point for the Pacific.

At that time all medical units going into the Pacific would go to Australia for staging before being shipped to where they were needed. The West Point was a luxury liner that normally had, I think, around seven hundred passengers aboard. Of course, it had been converted, and we had ten thousand troops aboard. Now,I could tell you a lot about my shipboard experiences, but I won't go into that, but we were aboard the ship sixteen days.

We were headed for Australia, but three days out of Australia the ship was diverted to Milne Bay, New Guinea. They needed the amphibious engineer troops aboard the ship, right quick-like, up in New Guinea. So we went to Milne Bay. They offloaded those troops, and, in addition, there were two of us hospital units on the ship so they offloaded us also.

It was interesting; they weren't expecting us-these women-so some of the men, the male officers, moved out of their area, which was thatched huts in a coconut grove, and they moved us into those facilities. Of course, they put guards around the perimeter to protect us. We did not function as a unit there. We stayed there until January, and then we went by an army hospital ship along the coast of New Guinea up to Oro Bay and inland to a thousand-bed hospital at Dobadura. I was at Dobadura for one year.

Our unit still did not function as a unit because the men had been sent on to join other units and do other things in medical work. They were needed doing all kinds of things at that time. The policy was to assign you to DS, detached service. Now they probably call it TDY [temporary duty]. At the 362nd Station Hospital, you had nurses from the different medical units throughout the area. We had a thousand beds in ten wards of one hundred patients each. Now, the wards were in the shape of a cross. They poured a concrete slab in the shape of a cross. They put tarpaper siding up about waist-high, then it was open to the top with corrugated metal roofing for the top.

We had ten wards in a semicircle; the operating room, the headquarters, and X-ray and things like that were in enclosed buildings, but the wards were not. Our nurses' quarters were kind of like I think you see horse stalls now at the stables. Two of us lived in a tiny little cubicle, again with a concrete slab flooring and tarpaper waist-high. We did have screens in there and under the metal roof. They look like the stables at a racetrack now.

This was my first experience taking care of war casualties. Or taking care of any kind of casualties because, remember, I came right out of nurses' training. When I was in nurses' training, nurses could not start intravenous; they couldn't do major dressing. You would get the dressing tray and assist the physician while he changed the dressing. You couldn't insert nasogastric tubes or do anything like that. Well, it was a rude awakening, to find yourself in the situation where you were expected to do all of those things because, of course, in a situation like that, your physicians are spending most of their time in the operating room as the casualties come in.

We had a large number of surgical patients-the trauma patients-but we had a still larger number of medical patients because of the environment and the disease in the tropics. We had a lot of malaria, hepatitis, jungle rot (a terrible dermatitis that they had no cure for, and still don't), scrub typhus, dengue fever, all of those different tropical diseases that the troops encountered in the jungles.

You can imagine what I was thrown into, as far as nursing, not having been exposed to any of that, with my limited nursing experience. Our unit was a very cohesive unit with the thirty nurses. I failed to mention-our chief nurse came from Fort Benning. She was a first lieutenant, and the rest of us were seconds. But we were a very cohesive unit. The six who came from LaGuardia in New Orleans were Yankees, while the rest of us were from the Southwest. We never really accepted those Yankees. When we played softball, we'd put them out in right field, because they didn't know how to play softball. But we were together down in New Guinea, then Dobadura, until 1944, when our unit got together for the first time as a total unit and set up our own hospital in Los Negros in the Admiralties.

Los Negros is a little tiny speck that you can hardly see on the map. The larger of the islands is Manus Island. Manus was a navy base where they had floating docks, and ships could be brought to be repaired rather than having to go back to Pearl Harbor. Well, Los Negros was just a little tiny coral rock island, and we set up our hospital there.

The hospital was tents. It was just on the coral sand, no floors in the tents except, again, for the operating room and the headquarters and X-ray and laboratory areas. It was at this hospital that I saw my first gas gangrene. We had studied about gas gangrene a little bit but not much. It was at this point that some of our troops were evacuated to us, who, at the time of injury, had been given the antitoxin for it, but it was outdated, and they developed gas gangrene.

It was on Los Negros that I celebrated my second Christmas overseas. This was a Christmas that is most memorable to me because here you are in the tropics. What are you going to do for Christmas? They don't have pretty Christmas trees over there that you can go down to the market and buy. But we were able to go out and cut some limbs of some trees and put on some branches to make it look like a Christmas tree. To get our decorations, we took the lab slips. You had yellow for urinalysis, red for blood, pink for serology, and blue-greenish blue-or gastric analysis, so you had a different color lab slip for each test. We took those, cut little strips, pasted them with flour paste, made chains, and decorated our Christmas trees. We also found some little balsam-like balls that washed up on the beach. We took those and put hangers on them so we could hang those on the Christmas trees. So we did fix us Christmas trees.

But then we wanted to do something special for the patients. We all had mosquito nets. Each night at sundown, you'd go over to the quarters and put your mosquito net down and spray it. We did the same thing on the wards. You'd put the mosquito nets down around the patients at sundown. The wards were tents; they were open. Our mosquito nets were beautiful army olive drab, but we found out that the navy had white mosquito nets, so we did some bargaining.

Now, over on Manus they had a nice navy hospital in Quonset huts. There were no navy nurses there, as the commander over there would not allow any women on "his" island. But that didn't keep his men from coming over to our island. So we convinced them that we should trade them some of our [olive drab] mosquito nets for some of their white mosquito nets, which we did. We then cut the white mosquito nets up into Christmas stockings, and we had red flannel bandages out of central matériel. So we made a Christmas stocking with the red flannel bandage tie put on them and put them on the foot of each patient's bed when they went to sleep on Christmas Eve.

What were we going to get to put into those Christmas stockings? We had limited supplies at our PX, but they always needed razor blades and shaving cream and cigarettes if we could get them from rations. There were some men on the island from the Seabees. They had a Masonic group, so they brought some cigars and different items like that, and we got some things from the Red Cross. We didn't have fresh fruit or anything like that, but we were able to put something in each patient's stocking so that, when he awakened Christmas morning, Santa Claus had come.

You see, this was something that brought us together as a unit. We were able to be creative, innovative, and share with our patients. It meant so much to them because they were just babies. Most of those troops, you know, were just youngsters. We stayed there on Los Negros until the troops had gone back into the Philippines. They had landed at Tacloban and set up hospitals there on Leyte. Our unit then was disbanded on Los Negros. The men flew with our equipment, and the nurses went aboard a navy hospital ship into Tacloban.

Again, the unit was not together as a unit for a short time. The nurses were sent to a hospital unit at Palau on detached service, and we worked there until our hospital was able to get together again down in Cebu and operate as a hospital.

I'll never forget, when we were on Leyte, again, we had big wards-one hundred patients in a ward-but here the wards were built up, had wood floors, and the tent siding and top, of course. You could let the sides down, but they stayed up most of the time because of the heat. But on night duty-we worked twelve-hour shifts-you had one nurse and one corpsman on duty for each one hundred patients. Sometimes I would cover two wards, so that would be one nurse and two corpsmen to take care of two hundred patients. Many of them were battle casualties, so you did as many dressings-changing dressings-as you could. The day shift would leave the dressing cart as far as they got, and you'd pick up there and go on changing dressings.

Also, penicillin was being used. We had penicillin and the sulfas. But penicillin came in powder form in little tiny 5 cc vials. You had to mix it just prior to giving the penicillin because it was not stable if it was mixed over a period of time. We had patients who were getting their sulfa every three to four hours and penicillin every four hours. This meant that the corpsman would go to the laboratory, pick up the penicillin powder, bring it to the ward, and you'd sit there mixing it, shooting it into those vials, and drawing it up into the syringes. You and the corpsman then would take a tray with your penicillin and your sulfa and your water pitcher. You'd go around to the patients on cots, and you'd punch through that mosquito net. I used to say whatever they'd stick out is what you'd stick your penicillin in. You'd give them their sulfa and their penicillin.

The care of these patients, although under primitive conditions, truly, in comparison to today, was good care. They got the best care. Of course, that's evidenced by the few who died in the situation. We didn't have the evacuation of our patients in the Pacific Theater as they had in Europe because any of the vessels being used over in the Pacific were for troops and supplies. We just didn't have them. So patients who were in the jungle down there in Dobadura could be spinal injuries, amputees, anything that should go back to a general hospital, stayed with us in our primitive jungle hospitals for months. Then they would be evacuated by ship or plane to Australia, where we had larger hospitals.

The same thing happened when we were up in Los Negros. We'd had to wait for ships to come in. There was a Marine airstrip there on the island, so that they did get some patients out that way. But most of them were evacuated by ship down to Australia and from Australia back to the States. In the Philippines there again patients were not evacuated as rapidly as they had been in the European Theater.

In Cebu we had our hospital set up in a great big old barn [that] had been built with a real tall tin roof but was a closed structure. Again the operating room, laboratory, and headquarters were all in closed buildings, but the rest were in tents. They had concrete slabs with the 2 x 4s holding up the roof or some tentage. Cebu was my first experience at taking care of civilian-Philippine civilian-casualties.

I can remember one Sunday afternoon some of the Japanese had gone on the island of Los Negros, and mostly on this island there were just old men, women, and children left. They had really been tortured. We began to get these patients evacuated to us at our hospital, and most of them required surgery. They could not speak English, and we couldn't speak their dialect. They had been so tortured that when we would try to start intravenous [IV], come at them with a needle or a procedure like that, they thought we were getting ready to torture them. We did have some Filipinos working with us who were able to interpret to them that we were trying to help them.

As an example of the type of patient we had, I can remember one pregnant woman, and she was probably six or seven months pregnant, so she was quite pregnant. They had cut the nipples off her breasts. She had stab wounds in her breasts and in the back, flesh stabbings, not into the chest itself. One little girl, whose name was Ingresia-patients' names always stick with you, certain ones-tiniest little thing, and she was so infested with worms, gastric worms. She had abdominal stab wounds, and we could see the worms coming out. She would cough and cough up worms. They had taken bamboo and ran that under her little fingernails. They had taken her earlobes off, just snipped off with their bayonets the little tips of her earlobes.

There were many, many casualties, and we worked and worked and worked, until we got them all taken care of. Then we had them hospitalized there with us until they could be moved to the Filipino hospital on the island in Cebu, but it was overcrowded, and they didn't have the facilities to do the type of surgery that we were doing.

Also there were a lot of land mines, and you know how youngsters would go out and play in the fields. They would step on the land mines, and they would explode. We had two of the cutest little boys about three and four years old who had stepped on land mines. It injured one's hands, and the fingers were practically all amputated. We just fell in love with those two little ones.

The policy was, after they had been stabilized, we were to move them on into the Filipino hospital if they could accept them. Periodically we would have inspections from our headquarters to be sure that we were moving our patients out as we should. Any time the inspector would be coming, we would put big bandages on these little boys so that we could justify not moving them out to the Filipino hospital. We wanted them to stay with us so we could take care of them.

Another experience I had there began to make one ask what's this all about. We had a professional experience, taking care of not only our American battle casualties but the Filipino civilians who had been tortured by the Japanese. Then we were ordered to set up a Japanese prison ward, because a large number of the Japanese had been taken prisoner and were shipped down to our island. We had to set up many wards; I can't remember how many, but there were a number of wards to take care of the Japanese.

Now, these Japanese had been in the jungles for years, and they had all kinds of medical conditions, the same types of things that our own troops had: malaria, hepatitis, dengue, scrub typhus, and every type of jungle or tropical disease you could think of. In addition to that, there was much malnutrition, but they received the same type of care that our patients received as far as surgery and medications.

We found that they didn't want to eat the same kind of food that we ate. When they first came in, they would take the food in big containers from our mess hall down to the wards, which were prison-type enclosures. They would take them down there to feed them, but they didn't want our food. They wanted rice and fish. So, we were soon fixing up big kettles of rice and fish for them, which they ate. We had some women among them who had been along with them as nurses, although they were not professional nurses. We had one who was pregnant. She delivered her baby in the hospital down there. The Japanese women had taken the materials we could give them to make a layette for the little baby born in our hospital. So in Cebu I was able to take care of our American troops, the Filipino civilians, and the Japanese prisoners.

This kind of brought the whole picture together, because it was there in Cebu that the war ended. We celebrated V-J Day, and, of course, then we began to get rid of our Japanese prisoners; they were moved out. The procedure for rotating home at the end of the war was based on the number of points you accumulated. You had so many points for serving in a combat area, so many points for this and that. You had to have at least sixty points to be able to rotate home, because troops were moving on, and our unit all had more than enough points to go home, but we didn't have replacements to come in, so we had to stay until November of '45. Some of our nurses shipped out together. We flew to Manila, and people said, "Oh, you've been in Manila," but not the Manila today or the Manila before the war, because it was all leveled. It was bombed out, destroyed, so I don't remember ever seeing the beautiful Manila that people talk about.

We got on a little Victory ship, the Kaiser Liberty ships that they had built during the war. I called it a bathtub. It was the Marine Jumper . We sailed from Manila and landed in California at San Pedro. In San Pedro they put us on trains and took us out to Camp Anza. It was Thanksgiving Day. We had a Thanksgiving Day aboard the ship, and then we had the second Thanksgiving Day as we arrived late [at the camp] in the evening. The cooks running the mess hall were German prisoners. They had saved Thanksgiving dinner for us, so we had our second Thanksgiving cooked by German prisoners.

You know, as you think over the years, the different relationships that you have encountered, it's astounding. We stayed there only long enough to be in-processed, and then those of us coming to Fort Sam Houston boarded a troop train, came on down to Fort Sam Houston, and at that time you were given forty-five days' [rest and recuperation].

They were demobilizing quickly. We had sixty thousand army nurses on duty at one time in World War II. They had to demobilize quickly, so many of the people who wanted to stay in could not stay in. When you reported in at Fort Sam Houston, you were sent out on your leave, and many of them then received orders while they were home, discharging them from the service.

Of course, San Antonio was my home, so I was on leave here. I had had malaria when I was in New Guinea and recurrent malaria throughout my time in the Pacific. While I was on leave here, I had a malaria attack, went out to Brooke General Hospital one night to get some Atabrine because that's what we did, just take more Atabrine. But, no way, I was stateside. I'd been taking Atabrine and staying on duty but, no way, here. When they found a positive smear for malaria, I had to be admitted to the hospital here for malaria. I've often said the reason that I wasn't discharged when everybody else was being discharged so rapidly was because I had to be hospitalized. As a result of that hospitalization (which had a few complications), when I was discharged, I was put on six months' temporary duty, and, at the end of that time of temporary duty here at Brooke, I was extended to regular duty.

I stayed here at Brooke until 1949, working on the different wards. I was privileged in 1947 to help set up the Surgical Research Unit, now known as the Burn Unit. Major Edwin Pulaski, who later became a colonel, and Captain Charles Matthews and Captain Sally McAllister brought the unit from Holleran General down to Fort Sam Houston. At that time we were studying osteomyelitis and diseases such as that. While working with that unit, I got a little taste of some research, taking care of the patients. That's when they were studying the penicillins, streptomycins, Furacin (which isn't used anymore, I don't think, but it was just being developed), bacitracin, and many of the drugs that were still in the research stage were used by the unit. We became familiar with research protocol and the importance of the nurse in reporting and recording observations.

In 1949 I received orders to go to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, again. I had been at Brooke General Hospital for three years, and I thought I was counted like the inventory there and that Brooke couldn't get along without me. But I soon found that Brooke could get along without me as I had been promoted to captain and was sent to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas.

I had been stationed at Brooke General Hospital from 1946 until 1949, when I received orders to go to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas. Of course, I didn't know where that was. It sounded like it was way out in the hills, and, sure enough, it was. I was transferred to Chaffee, and Major Dorothy Ainsworth was the chief nurse there. When I arrived she greeted me very friendly, and I thought, at least I am going to have a good chief nurse, and I did.

Until this time I had always been in the clinical area in nursing, but this really was the beginning of my move into administration because, when I reported in, Major Ainsworth assigned me as head nurse of one of the surgical wards. I worked on the wards, taking care of the surgical patients and doing my rotations through day, evening, and night, as you do in nursing. The assistant chief nurse was going on a month's vacation-or leave, as we say in the army-and Major Ainsworth asked me if I would like to come into her office then and serve as her assistant while the other one was on vacation. Of course, I was scared but honored.

I went into Colonel Ainsworth's-I'm calling her colonel because later she was promoted to colonel, but she was major then-office and worked with her through that one month. When the assistant chief nurse returned, Major Ainsworth decided she wanted to keep me as her assistant. So, the one who was returning was made the supervisor of the outpatient clinic. I needn't tell you that this created a little conflict there because I was always one of those "young nurses." Today I don't know if I'm one of those "young nurses" or not, but then I was always one of those "young nurses," and there was a great deal of resentment and hurt by that individual.

I can appreciate it-what happened-but I had nothing to do with it, other than Major Ainsworth wanted me in there to be her assistant. So I stayed as assistant chief nurse there at Chaffee. In October 1949 the decision was made to close Camp Chaffee, and Major Ainsworth received orders to go to Fort Benning, Georgia. I was left to be the chief nurse.

What an experience! A young captain, my first chief nurse experience, and, as they were closing the hospital, there would be a decrease in the number of patients. We would close the wards with the old cantonment hospitals like they had at our posts, like at Hood and Chaffee and all of the old posts-the temporary hospital wards-they were cantonment. You had three or four parallel ramps, and each ramp was a third of a mile in distance. The administrative part of the hospital was at the front; my office was up in that area. Well, as we began to close Chaffee, we would gradually close wards, and in those days the chief nurse was charged with all of the property in the nurses' quarters, and also I was charged with the property on the wards we were closing.

The nurses used to kid me. "I think you come pull us out of bed every morning and count the linen to be sure nothing has happened to it." I was scared. I had heard all of these stories about how things disappeared, and then I'd be responsible for it, and I knew I didn't have any money to replace all of that property. Nothing disappeared.

Also, I ran into an experience as we were closing the hospital. There were items that we could not turn back into supply. For example, if you had a bottle of one thousand tablets of aspirin in stock bottles like we had on the ward and we had opened it, we couldn't turn that back in. Well, now those aspirin were good. Catheters that we used when we catheterized a patient were also good. We didn't have all the disposables like they have today. Well, it seemed such a waste, to just throw it away, and that's what we were expected to do because we couldn't turn it back in to supply. But we were able to make contact with the hospitals there in Fort Smith, Arkansas, which is near Camp Chaffee, and give some of the items to the hospitals there that really wanted them, because it was expensive to buy those items.

As we were closing the hospital, I had a most unique experience. The staff would be reduced, and we got to where we had the commanding officer, who was a surgeon, and then a young captain surgeon. We also had a major who was the chief of medicine, and then a young captain medical officer. These were the only four doctors left, and I had eight nurses-myself and seven other nurses-to run the hospital. Truly, we were supposed to just take care of emergencies and provide support for the troops left at the post as it was being closed.

As you know, in the military you have sick call, and there at Chaffee there were these little dispensaries all around the post in the different units where sick call was held by a physician at regular times. We didn't have the physicians to hold sick call at the dispensaries. So a staff car would pick me up in the morning, and I would go out and hold sick call in the dispensaries.

Today they talk about the extended role of the professional nurse. Well, I didn't know it, but I was extending my role as a professional nurse because I would see the troops as they would come in on sick call. Many of them I could take care of myself. If there were any question in my mind as to the condition of the soldier, immediately we would send him right on, put him in an ambulance, and send him right up to the hospital where the doctor would see him in the outpatient clinic. Someone was looking after me, because we didn't have any problems with that type of arrangement.

The sergeants there at sick call used to say, "Boy, things are changed since you are out here, young captain. These big old guys come in here. They are going to ride the sick book, but they see you in here, and they know they're not going to put anything over on you, and they go back. They're not going to try to convince you that they are sick." It was quite an experience. I would go out, hold sick call at six o'clock in the morning, then come back in to the hospital, making rounds down the ramp as I made my way to my office. I would be in my office in the morning then and taking care of the paper work or personnel or anything I had to do and then have lunch. In the afternoon I would go down to the outpatient clinic and hold outpatient clinic with the physician. The two of us would hold outpatient clinic all afternoon, and then I would make my way back up the ramp in the evening. I got back to the office and took care of anything that had come in during that time and then go to quarters.

We had an operating room nurse and a nurse anesthetist for a while, and then they were reassigned, so we really were not supposed to do anything but truly emergency surgery. We had some emergency appendectomies and trauma injuries. We did still have a ward set up for [obstetrics], but it was only for emergencies, those who couldn't get in to a hospital. We did deliver a baby but in the operating room. We talk about the expanded role of nursing. Well, I'd already held sick call, I'd been the chief nurse, and I'd run the outpatient clinic with no operating room nurse and no nurse anesthetist.

When we'd have an emergency, I would go to the operating room-and I'm not an operating room nurse. I had my basic operating room experience at Santa Rosa during my nursing days but not post-graduate work in the operating room. If the patient had a spinal anesthesia, he would be given that by the young captain doctor, and I would sit at the head of the table and be the nurse anesthetist, monitoring the patient's blood pressure and so forth during the time that the surgery was going on. The young doctor would scrub up then with the commanding officer, and they would do the surgery. If the patient had to have general anesthesia, the young doctor would give the general anesthesia, and I would scrub up and assist the doctor at surgery. Expanded role? Yes, I was expanded!

We gradually reassigned the nurses from the hospital there; we were down to four of us. At Christmastime 1949 I said that I felt that the nurses should be off because they lived around Arkansas and Oklahoma-they could get home. One lived up in Missouri. So I let them all go, and I covered the hospital by myself. It was lonely. It was the most lonely Christmas I had. I wasn't so far from home, just Arkansas and Texas, but it was such a lonely Christmas. The commanding officer and his wife, and they had a little girl, invited me to come over and have Christmas dinner with them in their quarters, which I did. There was a song, "I'll Be Home for Christmas"... I think it was Dinah Shore who sang that. I'll never forget how I kept hearing this over and over and thinking, "But I won't be home for Christmas."

Chaffee was closed January 3, 1950. Prior to leaving we set up one of the buildings like a clinic, where they could continue to provide sick-call-type care for any of the troops left there to do what we referred to as "housekeeping details"-that just means to keep the post open. And that was my responsibility, working with the young medical officer to get that clinic set up. We had a dental chair there and a little laboratory facility. On the third of January, Chaffee was closed. I walked out of there, got into my little car, headed down to Fort Smith, filled the tank with Texaco gas-and the attendant at the station said, "Captain Dunlap, don't worry. Chaffee's going to be open again."

Sure enough, it reopened in August of '50, but I wasn't there. I left the third of January and came on back home to San Antonio for vacation. At that time I went into Fourth Army Headquarters. Lieutenant Colonel Augusta Short was the chief nurse for the Fourth Army, and Chaffee came under Fourth Army. So I went to give her a report of what I had done in closing the hospital.

I had had close contact with her because at Chaffee we had some beautiful blonde metal furniture in nurses' quarters, and I was determined that that furniture wasn't going to disappear, that it would stay in nurses' quarters. So, when I'd got ready to turn it in, I sent her a copy of my turn-in slip. She, in turn, sent it to the chief nurse at Fort Sill, and the chief nurse at Fort Sill requisitioned that furniture for their nurses' quarters, so we were able to keep that beautiful furniture in nurses' quarters and not have it disappear in other areas of the post.

I reported in to Colonel Short and had orders to go to Fort Hood. I went on up to Fort Hood after my leave time. Fort Hood is one of those old cantonment hospitals. When I reported in, the chief nurse was Major Falcon, Gay Falcon. They said, "Oh, she's over in the mess hall eating. Why don't you just go on over, and you can meet her over there." When I got to the mess hall, they said, "There she is." Gay was just barely five feet tall, and she had had some jaw surgery and had a bandage on. Well, here was this tiny thing whose head just barely came above the table. I thought, "That's my chief nurse?!"

Well, she was my chief nurse, a tremendous chief nurse, and certainly well respected by all of the professional staff at Fort Hood. At Fort Hood I was assigned to a surgical ward and did the regular rotating shift on the surgical ward. I made a lot of friends at Hood because we found that when you were in an isolated station...you don't think of Hood being so isolated now in 1990, but Killeen was just a little tiny town with two streets, really, and you truly were isolated out there.

When you are in a situation like that, you really become a family, looking after each other. If someone had a car and had a day off and was heading in to Killeen or to Temple or Waco, they'd say, "Anyone want to go?" We'd go. We had a nice golf course, and some of us would play golf after we got off work in the evening. It was a beautiful experience because we'd usually be the last ones on the golf course, and we'd get on the back side just as you'd hear the church bells over in Killeen, the Angelus being played, and jackrabbits jumping across the golf course, and things like that. [When] we finished playing golf, we'd go to the drive-in and have a club sandwich and a glass of iced tea with a great big piece of lemon that we always shared. We had picnics, steak fries-we would take steak and go out to Mayfield Park.

We did things like that together, and some of the friends that I made at that time are still some of my very best friends over these many years. We had a new chief nurse-Elizabeth Hanna, who is deceased now-but Elizabeth Hanna was a Southern lady from Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and Colonel Hanna was one who really had an influence on my career by the example she set as chief nurse.

I was only at Fort Hood a few months, and Colonel Short called up giving orders for me to report down there to her office on TDY, temporary duty. This was 1950. She wanted to start a recruiting program because we didn't have full-time recruiters then. She wanted to start a recruiting program for people to come on active duty, but also for the reserve units because our reserve units were so low in staffing.

That's the assignment she brought me down to do. I had never done any public speaking. I'd been a clinical nurse in the hospital. I had no experience like that. But Colonel Short is a person that I give credit to for being my mentor and certainly the role model for my career. I worked with her down here for four months TDY, and she told me what she wanted me to do, and I did it. When I finished that, I went back to Hood-was there only a short time and got orders for a PCS, permanent change of station, to come back to Colonel Short's office at Fourth Army Headquarters for a permanent assignment.

Again, I was brought in to run a recruiting program. I was responsible for recruiting all of the Fourth Army: Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Louisiana. This meant that I traveled to all of the schools of nursing, to the state nurses' conventions, tried to meet with the reserves and with registered nurses to recruit them to active duty. In those days we didn't have Southwest Airlines flying into all these little places, so I drove. That was the only way I could get about on trips like that. I was still a captain, and I could tell where the best club sandwich and glass of iced tea was because that's all I could afford when I would go into these towns on recruiting. This was the beginning of recruiting down in this area on a permanent basis, and I was assigned to the surgeon's office.

In some of the other army areas, they were assigning them to recruiting, not as we know it today, but at the headquarters there was an office responsible for recruiting. This became a philosophical debate as to which would be the better way. I personally felt that being assigned in the surgeon's office stressed the professional aspects of recruiting, because those were the relationships that I had. So that's the way we had it in the Fourth Army.

Of course, today there's a whole Recruiting Command, and the Recruiting Command is responsible for recruiting for all of the army or all of the air force, and so forth, but this was the early beginnings. We didn't have logistical support, such as training aids. Today, in recruiting, you see all these beautiful brochures, the movies, and the videotapes that they put out. You go to the conventions, and you see the beautiful displays. We didn't have any of that.

I was responsible for my own displays and posters or anything else that I wanted. My dear daddy helped me make what we referred to as the "birdcage" because we took the stand of Mama's birdcage, cut it off, made a box, and cut two windows out of either of the four sides. I put colored transparencies in those windows, and then, with the light behind it, that was a view box. I would take that around to the state conventions, you know, for my display: the "birdcage" display. I made posters myself.

I know one year I took Christmas cards that I received from around the world: different nurses stationed different places. I made a poster out of those with a map-a cutout of the map of that particular country around the world-and I took that with me to the schools of nursing. We were able to get into the schools of nursing in what they referred to as professional adjustments, which was like career planning. I could present Army Nursing as one of the fields of nursing that they would have an opportunity as graduate nurses to pursue.

I was at Fourth Army in that job for three and a half years. During that time Korea started, and so we truly had to recruit for the Army Nurse Corps. We also had to be involved in the recall of our reserves back to active duty. We found that the reserve situation was not ideal. Many of the nurses had gotten out of the service. They had kept their reserve status, but they had married and had children. In those days you couldn't be married and have children and be in the military, so we called them up and they couldn't come. That was quite an experience. It helped me in later years as I was faced with other situations like that, writing regulations, and coming up with policy.

While at Fourth Army Headquarters with Colonel Short, I had several unique experiences, and I'd like to share just a couple of them with you. One was the establishment of the Women in the Uniformed Services Recruiting Team. I was recruiting for army nurses; the navy needed nurses-their headquarters for recruiting was in Dallas-so there was a navy nurse covering almost the same area as I was covering.

The air force needed nurses. They did not have someone assigned full-time to nursing, but they would have a nurse from Wilford Hall [Hospital] go out and speak for air force nurses. We needed women in the Army Medical Specialists' Corps, which at that time was all women. These were the dietitians, physical therapists, and occupational therapists. And we needed women in the line, as we referred to it then. They were the WAC, the WAF, the WAVES, and the Marines.

Each of us responsible for recruiting would be making contact with our schools of nursing and in colleges and universities, asking for time to come in to speak to the students. This was too much. They didn't have that much time for the students. So it would just depend on your contact and whether you would get to go in and someone else didn't. Under the guidance of Lieutenant Commander Roby Layton, who was a WAVES officer at the headquarters in Dallas, we decided that we would organize a team. We got the sponsorship of the Business and Professional Women's Club [B&PW] to start it here in Texas, so we had the WAVES and the navy nurse from Dallas. From Fourth Army Headquarters, we had Major Moseman, who was a dietitian Colonel Short had brought into her office, and myself. We had a WAC officer, Major Zeef. We got a Marine officer from Recruiting down in San Antonio, and then we got a dietitian and nurse from Wilford Hall to join us to make up our team. The Business and Professional Women's Club of Texas sponsored us.

As an example, we would be going to Lubbock. Well, the women in the B&PW would make the contacts there-arrangements for us-where we would stay, to appear on radio talk shows and TV, to speak at the different civic luncheons, breakfasts, anyone that would listen to us, to visit the schools of nursing, to go to Texas Tech (they didn't have a nursing program out there at that time) but to talk. So we would spend five days together as a team in that city under the sponsorship of the Business and Professional Women's Club.

This was looked at by our people in Washington because at this time the Secretary of Defense was General George Marshall, and the Assistant Secretary of Defense was Anna Rosenberg. They decided that they would establish the Defense Advisory Committee for Women in the Service, known as DACOWITS. They selected outstanding women throughout the country just to serve on this committee. Lieutenant Commander Layton and I were invited to come to Washington and to present the program that we had established down in this area. Today, and we have seen this develop over the years, the team concept of recruiting is something that is accepted.

People were wondering how could we have army, navy, and air force nurses going in together to talk about nursing. Well, we could-we offered some of the same things, but our programs were different. I used to say if you want to nurse on a ship, go to the navy; if you want to fly, go to the air force; and if you want to nurse in the mud, come to the army. We were very good friends. This way, though, we had the support of the Business and Professional Women's Clubs, and we really did put it on a professional level. We did that throughout Texas. Then the B&PW in Oklahoma decided that they would support us also. We went to Oklahoma on this type of assignment. This was an exciting time, and, of course, as you reflect back on what you were doing then and how recruiting has developed today, you take a great deal of pride and certainly a lot of comfort in knowing how it is so much better today than it was then.

It was found that when the officers would be sent to some of our senior service schools from an assignment at headquarters, they were kind of lacking in their map-reading, because you get map-reading early in your career-your basic and all-and they haven't had this for many years. So, the order came out that every officer assigned to Fourth Army Headquarters had to pass a map-reading test.

Well, now, Colonel Short and I had never had map-reading. All we knew was the Texaco map that we could follow as we traveled around, so we were going to have to take this map-reading test. We took it; we didn't pass it. I was traveling around recruiting, so I was able to take it then by extension. As I would be driving around, I would be thinking about, now that's such and such, and that's such and such, as far as a map. And you had aerial photo map-reading too; so, anytime I would fly, I'd be saying, now let's see, that should be a creek down there, and that should be this and that, and I was trying to think about my map-reading. Eventually we passed and were able to continue in our assignments there.

Also, while I was there at Fourth Army Headquarters, I made many contacts with the professional organizations because I would meet with the Executive Director of the State Nurses' Association and then attend the state conventions. Therefore, I really got to know many of the nursing leaders throughout the area, and I had the opportunity to go with Colonel Short to Atlantic City for my first American Nurses' Association convention. I'll never forget that for a glass of orange juice and a piece of toast I had to pay $3.50 at the hotel. To me, that was just terrible, you know, coming from here. But I did attend my first American Nurses' Association convention in Atlantic City at a most historic time.

Prior to that convention, we had five nursing organizations, and the decision was made that we would merge our nursing organizations: the National League of Nursing and the American Nurses' Association. I was there at that most historic moment, when that decision was made. That has certainly impacted on the profession of nursing over these many years.

As I was finishing my tour at the Fourth Army, the opportunity was made available to me to go on to a civilian university, to complete my undergraduate degree. The army was starting a program...sometimes today we think about bootstrap as one of the recruiting programs, but this was one of the first programs where they would send army nurses to a civilian university, full-time, and pay all of their tuition and expenses while you continue to draw your regular salary. It was your duty that you were there for the full time.

Five of us from San Antonio from Brooke [Hospital]-or should I say Fort Sam Houston-were selected to go to Incarnate Word College. Colonel Naomi Jensen, who was the chief nurse at Brooke, was one of them. Captains Phoebe Paul, Joyce Thornton, Gay Falcon, and Peg Marr, and I were the five selected to go to Incarnate Word for one year to finish off our undergraduate degrees. This was quite an experience. Now, here we are, a little bit older, going to college. Today you don't think anything about older people-how do they refer to them, being in school-but this was something.

Us old ladies...let's see, 1953, and I was born in '22, thirty-one years old. That was an old lady, you know, to be going over there with all those young freshmen. I didn't have to take freshman English, because I'd taken that in summer school, but I had to take sophomore English. We had quite an experience our full year there.

I was elected the president of the Professional Nurse Club over there. Each year Incarnate Word had a harvest festival, which was a fund-raising activity, and each club had responsibility for one aspect of that harvest festival. The Professional Nursing Club had charge of bingo. Well, this brought laughter because I hate bingo. I would never play bingo in the army clubs, but here I was at Incarnate Word and president of the organization that had to put on the bingo. We did. I got as the caller a young neurosurgeon over there at Brooke-a captain who later became a major general and in the Surgeon General's Office. But we really had wonderful opportunities at Incarnate Word. Our nursing education was rounded out, all of us having come from good three-year schools of nursing and then going back to Incarnate Word and finishing under Sister Christiana and Sister Charles Marie.

When I finished Incarnate Word in 1954, I received orders to go to Germany. I was assigned to the Ninety-eighth General Hospital at Neubruck, Germany. Now, no one knew where Neubruck was. It was a joke that it was at the end of the line, the railroad line. Well, it was, no joke; it was at the end of the railroad line because the train went out of Frankfurt. We flew into Frankfurt and then were processed and got onto the train and went to the end of the line at Neubruck because it was at the Saar border and they stopped there to spend the night. The train would go back the next day.

Colonel Ainsworth, who had been Major Ainsworth and my chief nurse at Chaffee, was chief nurse at the Ninety-eighth General Hospital at Neubruck. The Ninety-eighth General Hospital was a thousand-bed hospital, and we were a medical center. In Europe they had helicopters and hospital trains. They would evacuate patients to the specialty centers, medical centers. We had orthopedics, neurosurgery, radiology, and ENT [Ear, Nose, Throat] specialties at Neubruck.

When I reported in, Colonel Ainsworth said, "Lil, I hate to do this to you, but I need a head nurse on the dependent ward." The dependent ward at Neubruck meant that you had all the women and children on that one ward, except obstetrics or psychiatry, and she said, "I hate to do it to you, but I need a head nurse down there." So I went down as head nurse of the dependent ward, and, although she offered to move me after two years, I said, "Oh, no, I'll stay." I liked it.

Again, I was getting back into clinical nursing. It was a learning experience because I'd been out of it and there were so many new medicines. On this ward we had medical and surgical-all the patients, all the clinical services-and it really gave me an opportunity to again be a clinician and take care of patients, in addition to being the head nurse of the ward and responsible for administration. They had German nurses who were working as nursing assistants because their educational background was not comparable to ours and [they] could not be employed as professional nurses. Then, of course, we had our American officers and enlisted personnel.

It was during this time that there was a big change in the Army Nurse Corps, thanks to Colonel Ruby Bryant, who was chief of the Corps. Up until then the enlisted personnel were assigned to the troop commander, and he made out their time, and he had authority over them. We made out their time on the ward, but, if he needed them to pull CQ [Charge of Quarters] or mop detail or something, they might not show up for duty one day, and you'd think, "Where is so and so?" Well, they needed him over at the troop command.

With the change in regulation in the organization, the nursing personnel had functional control over those personnel assigned to the ward, and this certainly had a big impact on our ability to provide better quality nursing care, patient care, with our enlisted personnel working with us.

I met many friends, German and American friends, during that assignment and had the opportunity to travel. We could take leave. If we were not on leave, we could not be greater than two hours' distance from the post, in case we had an alert. We had alerts all the time-practice alerts. They'd come around and pound on your door in the morning, any time of the night or day, and you'd have to report down to your ward and be ready to function in the event it was the real thing. Thank goodness, it wasn't. Now, I didn't have the problem because I have curly hair, but some of them went down with their hair still in the rollers and scarves over their heads. I think some of the men went in with uniforms over their pajamas. They didn't have time to change.

During our leave time, I was able to travel throughout Germany. I loved Switzerland, got down there six times, got to Italy, and went to Paris. My mother came over to visit me, and I drove up to Ostend, Belgium, and left the car, went across on the ferry, met her in London. She froze to death over there, and she couldn't get iced tea in London. She couldn't understand why.

Then we went back to Brussels, and we met Joyce Thornton, the army nurse who had been in school with me. She was chief nurse at Bremerhaven. Her mother had come over to visit her, so the four of us met in Brussels. We drove up to Holland, all through Holland during tulip time. My mother's ancestors were from Schermerhorn village in Holland, so we went to the very northern tip and found little Schermerhorn village and went into the old church. We could see the stone floors with the vaults underneath of John and Jacob Schermerhorn and all of them, going way, way back.

Then we went back down to Germany, into Austria, to Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and back up to Neubruck. Joyce and her mama went to Bremerhaven, and Mama stayed with me at the hospital for a couple of weeks. I had to go back on duty so I could get some more leave time. While we were there, Mama cooked Mexican food for all of the nurses there. They just loved her and her Mexican food. Then I drove Mother over to Paris. We had three days together in Paris. I put her on the plane, and she flew back home. I really had an opportunity to travel while I was over there. Three or four of us would get together, and we'd drive and really see the country. It was a wonderful experience.

I was in Germany three years, and during that time I was promoted to major. When I returned in 1957, I was a major and received an assignment to go to Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

You make up preference statements, three preferences, and I had requested to be assigned any place in the United States where I would be near a university offering a master's degree in nursing so that I could go on my off-duty time to work toward my master's degree. I received orders for Fort Jackson, South Carolina. At that time there was not even an undergraduate program in nursing in South Carolina.

Dr. Amy Viglione was working on establishing a program in Columbia, South Carolina, at the University of South Carolina. But I was told I would go to Fort Jackson, so I went to Fort Jackson. The chief nurse there was Colonel Elizabeth Hanna, the one I had had at Fort Hood that I mentioned before. She was only there a short time because she received orders to go to Fort Sam Houston. But, when I reported in, she said that the Chief of the Army Nurse Corps wanted me to call her. I did, and she said that I could go to either a civilian university for my degree, or I could come to Fort Sam Houston to the Army-Baylor Hospital Administration Program. Which did I want?

I didn't know anything about the Army-Baylor Program, but I found out about it and decided that's what I would like to do. So I was at Fort Jackson from September-October of 1957 until June of 1958, and during that time I worked on the ward again.

Jackson was an old cantonment hospital, and we had an isolation area, two wards-one where we had patients with polio, and we had iron lungs there. We had hepatitis patients, tuberculosis patients, and we had measles. Fort Jackson was a training center, and many of the young recruits just coming in had never been exposed to measles, and they would come down with the three-day measles. So we had a constant turnover of measles patients. Of course, we had mumps, and many of these young men had not been exposed to mumps when they came, so some of them were quite ill. We had a number of upper respiratory infections, too. I was quite busy working in the isolation area, again in the clinical area.

I had a most important learning experience. If I keep referring to role models, it is because I feel so strongly about how people have impacted on one's life, and they are truly role models, although at the time we may not think of them as such. Colonel Hanna, the chief nurse, was such a beautiful person. I mentioned earlier she was a Southern lady, and she spoke like one, but she was such a beautiful, kind, smart, articulate person. Everybody loved her. I found that people there at Fort Jackson wanted to do everything they could for nursing. They weren't waiting for nursing to ask for something. They wanted to see what they could do for nursing because of Colonel Hanna; the respect that they had for her was great. Of course, that rubbed off onto her nursing staff, as she was the leader. She received orders to a change of station, and the chief nurse who followed her was entirely the opposite.

I could see the change in the attitude and the relationships between nursing and the rest of the hospital. Instead of people wanting to do everything for nursing, they were beginning to resist and making it more difficult to get things done, not because of any dislike of the individuals whom they had supported before but because of the relationship with the chief nurse. I have said so often in my teaching experience that this probably was one of the best examples for me. I learned more from a negative experience-and it's the only one that I truly feel that I had-but I learned so much from that negative experience that it impacted on my behavior for the rest of my career as much as some of the positive experiences that I had.

I enjoyed it there at Fort Jackson because it was a good clinical professional challenge and we had wonderful people to work with. I loved the South and was able to get down to what is now Hilton Head-it hadn't been developed yet. We went out there one time and looked at the land, and they explained to us how they were going to develop it. If I had had a thousand dollars, I could have bought a lot. But who had a thousand dollars to buy a lot?

I was at Fort Jackson only until June of 1958, at which time I received orders to come back to Fort Sam Houston to the Medical Field Service School to be a student in the Army-Baylor Hospital Administration Program. This program was set up to provide the didactic experience here at the Medical Field Service School and then a one-year residency at a military hospital someplace in the United States.

We had to enroll in the graduate school of Baylor University. We had professors who came down from Baylor for our classes. Upon completion of our didactic experience here, we then had to take our orals with professors from Baylor coming down. During the experience here at Fort Sam Houston, we had to go out and do a study, which would be equivalent to the preparation of a dissertation.

I went to Corpus Christi. One of the Medical Service Corps (MSC) officers and I went to the City-County Hospital there in Corpus Christi. We were there for two weeks. We were given assigned studies to conduct. I was to evaluate the staphylococcal infections in the obstetrical department, and he was to evaluate the emergency room. They were a little surprised when they would see me around on the three-to-eleven and the eleven-to-seven shift, but, if I was going to evaluate, I had to do it on all shifts.

Upon completion of those two weeks, we wrote up our study, and that was submitted to Baylor. Upon completion of our nine months here in the didactic work, we then received orders to go for the one-year residency. I went to Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Denver, Colorado. Now they call them Army Medical Centers, but they were general hospitals then.

Another one of the MSC officers, Floyd Berry, who was a sanitation officer, went out there with me. When I reported in, I was the first nurse to come there to do a residency, and there was some question as to how my residency would be conducted. The chief nurse wanted me assigned to her, and I didn't want that. I wanted to be assigned to the executive officer as a preceptor, just like the other student would be. I got my wish, and we then were asked how much time we felt that we needed in each of the areas, because it was a rotating residency. I felt that I should not spend more than one month in nursing, because I felt I knew something about nursing.

I wanted to learn about the rest of the hospital. So, we rotated through the different areas: logistics, patient administration, professional services, and all aspects of it. Each area we went into, we had to write a paper about that particular area-identify a problem within that area and write a paper that was submitted to Baylor during the residency. I really felt that was wonderful groundwork for my career later on because I learned how hospitals operate. I learned to appreciate the problems that the areas have other than nursing. Supply and nursing always have problems. I learned to work in supply and see the other side of the coin, the same with food service, and to see the hospital as an organization, rather than the nursing service that I had been in.

On completion of the residency, then, we were able to go to Waco and receive our master's in hospital administration from Baylor University. While I was finishing up at Fitzsimmons, my preceptor-who, by the way, was from Edinburg, Texas-asked me, when I told him I was born in Mission, Texas, he said, "Oh, I had a schoolteacher, Miss Mary." Well, to make a long story short, my mother had taught him when he was in the second grade, and he remembered her as Miss Mary. I told Mother about this, and she pulled out some pictures and had a picture of the class. There was little George Schuner in class. Well, she sent the picture to me. Of course, she got the biggest kick out of that. So, my mama had been his schoolteacher when he was a little boy.

He had received a phone call from Washington saying that they were going to send me back to Fort Sam Houston to teach at the Medical Field Service School. I had been told I would probably stay at Fitzsimmons and be either the assistant chief nurse or the nurse methods analyst, and I was thrilled about either assignment. But, when they said I'd be coming back to teach, I said, "No way." I'd never done any teaching; I don't want to do any teaching; I want to stay in the hospital setting.

I came back to Fort Sam Houston and was assigned to the Department of Nursing Science at the Medical Field Service School to teach. Prior to a permanent assignment, you have to go through what was known then as the "charm course" or the Instructors' Training Unit. I managed to get through that and was certified to teach. I was told that I was going to teach nursing research. Well, I didn't have the background for nursing research, and I really had to start working to prepare myself for that.

Wait a minute. Let me backtrack a little. I was told, when I came down, I would be working with the basics, and that wouldn't be difficult, working with them. But I'd only been here a short time, and they said, "No, instead of working with the basics, you are going to be teaching nursing research." After getting over the shock of it, I was trying to prepare lesson plans and get ready for that and was told, then, instead I'd be teaching nursing service administration and supervision. So, I had responsibility of coming up with lesson plans for 168 hours of nursing service administration and supervision in the Army Nurse Corps Career Course.

I taught that course for the five years I was assigned there, and during that time I became the deputy director and, later on, the director of the Department of Nursing Science. This was a wonderful experience, although I had resisted it and didn't want to go into teaching. This, again, was another of those building blocks in my career because during this time I not only taught in the Army Nurse Corps career course, I taught in the hospital administration course that I had just graduated from. I taught nursing hours in that and was appointed an assistant professor at Baylor University in the graduate program there.

Also, I taught some in the basic program. Then they had the Army Medical Department career course for the officers other than nurses. I would give the nursing hours in that course. There were all kinds of short courses there, and I would give nursing hours on those courses. So, during those five years, I really had an opportunity to meet and know and work with so many of the people in the Army Medical Department that, in the years to follow, I would work with again.

After that I received orders to go from Medical Field Service School to Okinawa. Now, I had been in the Pacific in World War II, and I had been in Germany from 1954 to 1957. I really felt they needed me in Hawaii, but they didn't think they needed me in Hawaii. If I had to go overseas, they wanted me in Okinawa.

So I was sent to Okinawa to be chief nurse. This was in September of 1965. I was told by the commanding officer, General McGibony at the Medical Field Service School, that Okinawa was really the country club of the Pacific. He had been commander there. We had built a new hospital, a beautiful new hospital. There were about 150 beds, and we didn't have that many patients there. They had a beautiful golf course, and I would really enjoy my tour in Okinawa. So I left for Okinawa.

I arrived in Okinawa...if you remember the timing here, Vietnam was starting. At that time we only had one hospital in Vietnam; the only off-shore hospitals were the air force at Clark Air Force Base, Camp Zama in Japan, Tokyo, and Okinawa. As Vietnam began to build up, planeloads of nurses would be going to Vietnam, and they would stop in Kadena Air Force Base to refuel. They'd give me a call, and I'd go out to the planes and see them all as they went down or as they came back.

Our hospital expanded from the l50 beds to a 600-bed hospital between October and December of 1965. We did not have an increase in staffing. The morning I went into the commanding officer and told him that he had 599 patients in a 600-bed hospital, we realized we had a full hospital. We were receiving air [evacuations] from Vietnam. We would receive a number of Korean patients from Vietnam. A number of them had traumatic injuries but many with malaria. There was no malaria in Japan, so the Japanese did not want any of the patients with malaria flown to our hospitals in Japan. They would fly them all to us in Okinawa.

Our own troops who had malaria were flown to us in Okinawa, and a number of those 599 patients were patients with malaria. Of course, some of them were quite ill. But others could be out in facilities surrounding our main hospital, although they were still hospitalized and receiving care.

I must say a little bit about the Korean soldiers-the patients. Our troops who fought with them said they were brave soldiers. I can believe it. They were brave patients. We had a language barrier. We were so concerned that we would miss some sign or symptom that would help us in their care. They never complained. We were fortunate. We had one Korean who had been an enlisted medic. He was slightly wounded and was [evacuated] to us. We got him to serve as our interpreter then. We kept him as long as we could so that he could serve in that capacity.

But we worked out in nursing, with his help, cards where we could talk, so that if we wanted to ask the patient if they were having pain, we would put the English question and he would write it in Korean and then responses that might come back. We worked the cards out that way so we could communicate with our patients. Limited, yes, but we were concerned that the patients might be having pain or something and not sharing this with us, and we might have bleeding, ruptured appendix, or anything, and not realize it at the time.

We received air [evacuation] patients in planeloads [at] any hour of the day or night. My tour, normally, in Okinawa would have been eighteen months, but, after [my] being there just eleven months, a call came from the Surgeon General's Office, and they were going to curtail me seven months and send me back to Washington. Maybe it's a good thing they did because, in that eleven months, we had an earthquake and a typhoon. Going back to Washington was like going into a war zone. I must get serious just a minute, though, and share with you some of my feelings about combat nursing.

In World War II, I had been in New Guinea. I had been in "the combat area" and taken care of patients under very extreme circumstances-very primitive circumstances. In Okinawa I was taking care of combat patients but in a sophisticated hospital away from the combat zone. The GI patient is the same; I don't care where the patient is. They look after each other; they are so appreciative of the care that they get, and it really is an honor to take care of the American GI patient.

Of course, we had senators. Just reading in the paper about all the congressmen going over to Saudi Arabia while they are in recess brought back memories to me because all the congressmen wanted to go to Vietnam. They would stop by Okinawa on their way back. We would get the phone call from protocol that Senator So-and-so, Congressman So-and-so wanted to visit the hospital, usually on a Sunday, at a certain time. He would like to see all of the patients from his home state and so forth.

Well, here you are, taking care of patients in a wartime situation, so how were we going to identify all of the patients from Podunk so that that particular congressman could see those patients? My good NCOs [noncommissioned officers] in nursing worked that out with me and with the registrar color-coding. You had bed cards at the foot of each bed, and we coded those, and we kept a roster coding them so that we knew the patients who were from Vietnam first and then, secondly, which state they were from.

So, if the congressman from Virginia wanted to see all of those from Virginia, well, we could have those patients identified and show them. I'm not much of a politician, maybe, but this was something that I couldn't understand. I know that they are elected because of their constituents. It meant a lot to the GI to see someone from his home state, and I know then if the congressman went back and contacted the parents, it meant a lot to the parents. But it was an added dimension to patient care in a combat situation. I'm sure they did the same thing over in Saudi Arabia recently.

I didn't have much time while I was on Okinawa to do any traveling around. We could go space available, but we were so busy. I did manage in February of '66 to go to Bangkok and Hong Kong. Two of the nurses went with me on leave, and we flew to Bangkok and had a wonderful time there. The Deputy Surgeon General of the Thai Army had been a classmate of mine in hospital administration at the Medical Field Service School (MFSS), and he was a most gracious host. Some of the Thai nurses I had as students when I was teaching at MFSS were very gracious, and they took the three of us under their wing and showed us many wonderful good times in Bangkok. We went to Hong Kong and, like everybody else, spent too much money, but we enjoyed it. Those were really the two places I got to visit, other than I was flown from Japan to Tachikawa.

The air force nurses were having a conference there, and they invited me as chief nurse down in Okinawa to go to the conference. I had been told at that time that I'd be going back to Washington, so I had an opportunity to visit our army hospitals there so that I would have an idea of what was going on up there. My job back in Washington was to be Chief of the Army Nurse Corps' Assignment and Career Branch. I really felt I hadn't finished my tour there. I still had seven more months to go, but they wanted me back in Washington.

I arrived in Washington in September of 1966 after a month's leave at home in San Antonio. I had to find an apartment to live in, and who wants to live in an apartment? Not a Texan, anyway, but I learned to live in an apartment. The Surgeon General's Office at that time was in the Main Navy Building, which was where the Vietnam Memorial is now. It was an old temporary World War I building, and if it wasn't a wreck of a building! I couldn't believe it. Here I was going to the prestigious Surgeon General's Office. The office I had as chief nurse in Okinawa was much more luxurious and spacious than what I had in the Surgeon General's Office as Chief of the Army Nurse Corps Assignment Branch.

We had responsibility in that branch for the assignment and career planning for all army nurses worldwide. At that time we had close to five thousand. Just as a sidelight, talking about the kinds of offices-the Surgeon General was getting new carpeting in his office, and the chief nurse of the corps managed to get the old carpeting out of his office down in our office. We just thought we really were uptown to have carpet on our floors. But the contracts for custodial service in the Main Navy did not call for carpet cleaning, other than certain offices. Therefore, on weekends those of us who were assigned there would take in our rug cleaners and vacuum cleaners and clean our own carpeting in the Surgeon General's Office. Now, that's the prestigious assignment we had.

I stayed as Chief of the Army Nurse Corps Assignment Branch from 1966 to 1968. This was the period of time when we had to provide nurses for Vietnam. We had nine hundred nurses at one time over there. The tour was one year. So, the assignment was a continuous process of finding someone who could go to Vietnam, to replace someone who was due to rotate, to replace the one you were going to send over there. At the same time, you wanted to continue sending those for education and training courses as much as you could. This was quite a challenge. In 1968 I was assigned as chief nurse of First Army Headquarters at Fort George Meade, Maryland.

This meant I moved out of Washington (I was living in Arlington, Virginia) out to Laurel, Maryland, and of course, there were no quarters on the post at Fort Meade. The chief nurse at First Army had responsibility for nursing service at all the army hospitals in the First Army area-that's the northeastern part of the country. In addition, I had responsibility for working with the reserve units in that area, and that particular area had the largest number of hospital medical reserve units. This became quite a challenge for me.

The surgeon at the First Army was Colonel Pixley, who later became General Pixley, the Surgeon General of the Army. But, being the leader that he is, he really put emphasis on the reserve units and supporting them, bringing them up to strength, and recruiting for them and their training. Up until this time, the units would come for their summer training as a unit. So, at your hospital in the summertime, you might suddenly be flooded with all these people. You couldn't provide them meaningful training experiences, and it wasn't fair to them, and it wasn't fair to the staff. So we were able to work it out that they would be coming throughout the year in different groups.

Also, the organization of the Army Medical Department was being changed so that the concept of MEDDAC was coming into being. We were very active in developing the MEDDAC concept in the First Army area. It was kind of reverting back to what I did when I was recruiting and visiting all the stations, but at that time I was visiting all the stations as chief nurse, not as recruiter. Also, Colonel Pixley was responsible for supplying a medical person from his office to serve on the IG-Inspector General-Team of the First Army. The responsibility was to go with the IG Team from First Army Headquarters to the different posts throughout the area to complete the IG Team for the whole post.

The medical person had responsibility for doing the IG inspection of the medical facilities on that particular post. As a member of the First Army IG Team, he or she would be coordinating with the team and the surveyors of that particular post. Colonel Pixley had always selected one of the physicians to be the medical member of the IG Team there in First Army.

He called me in and said that he wanted me to be his representative on the IG Team. He felt that my experience in hospital administration and the fact that I was a nurse qualified me to be on that team. His wife had been an army nurse-an operating-room nurse-and Colonel Pixley appreciated the contribution of nursing to patient care. He said if he needed to know anything about what was going on in any other hospitals, he called the chief nurse. The chief nurse can tell what is going on in the hospital. So, with this philosophy he recommended that I be assigned to the IG Team for these visits to our stations, and I was.

My first visit was to Fort Knox, Kentucky. It kind of shook them up there because the commander had been my commanding officer in Okinawa, and he knew me. The executive officer had been a classmate of mine in hospital administration, and he knew me. He felt that I would spend most of my time in nursing on the IG. Well, I didn't spend most of my time on nursing for the IG.

This was quite an experience, working with the IG Team, and I truly tried to conduct the IG in the manner that IG's were supposed to: we didn't go in to inspect or criticize but to identify areas where improvements could be made and to help them realize what the problem was and the resources available to help them improve and to give them encouragement. So, I was the first nurse assigned to the IG Team there at First Army Headquarters.

The men on the IG Team were just wonderful to me. In the evening after we'd all get back, we'd get together to share our notes. For example, if I found anything related to personnel there in the hospital, I could talk with the person who had gone in to post personnel, and we could discuss our findings back and forth. The same thing was true with logistics or any other areas. So this was truly a learning experience for me and one of great value as I was continuing there as chief nurse. I was at First Army Headquarters from 1968 to 1971 and thought I only had a couple more years before I retired.

The chief of the Corps felt that I should move. I had been there for three years, and I had some discussions about my assignment. It was decided that I would go to Walter Reed to be chief nurse. At that time we had Walter Reed Army Medical Center as a headquarters separate from Walter Reed General Hospital. So, I was assigned to be the Director of Nursing Activities at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Chief Nurse of Walter Reed General Hospital. I thought, this is great! The last two years of my career I'll be in what the army considers its top hospital as chief nurse, back in the clinical setting.

So I went to Walter Reed, and what a challenge. What an experience in providing nursing care to support such a big institution. Because we had patients evacuated in there, it is truly a medical center. They come from all over the world there. And, of course, they take care of VIPs-the President, the congressmen-you had a presidential suite and dignitaries from other countries.

Also, there were plans being made to build a new Walter Reed Hospital. The plan was to continue to operate the old Walter Reed and begin to knock down the back wards so that the new hospital could be built. So we got into quite an operation of relocating those wards into the front part of the hospital, as we referred to it. We had to plan on how we would relocate thirty patients from that ward into wards that were already full. I had some real experience in plant planning.

I had only been at Walter Reed a short time when I was called to report to General Westmoreland's office, and I wasn't to let anybody know that I was going there. I put on my Class A uniform, reported over to the Pentagon, and waited outside General Westmoreland's office. He called me in. I visited with him, and when I left I thought, "Well, that was nice, but so what? What's this all about?"

Now, I wasn't so naive. I knew that it was time for a change in the Chief of the Army Nurse Corps. I knew that the senior nurses would be eligible for consideration to be chief of the Corps, but I didn't know the Surgeon General, other than having had lunch with him one time at a luncheon at First Army Headquarters. I really didn't know people in the higher army staff.

I went back on duty at Walter Reed and went on about my business. I received, in several weeks, another phone call that I was to report to General Westmoreland's office. These would always be like four thirty or five o'clock in the evening, you know, and I'm at Walter Reed and have to go cross-traffic to the Pentagon. I should complain!

I went back to General Westmoreland's office, and this time he had with him General Kerwin, who was the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army for Personnel. At this time I was told that I had been selected to be Chief of the Army Nurse Corps and promoted to brigadier general. I was told that I should not discuss this with anybody because it still had to be approved by the Senate, and they did not know how President Nixon would want to handle this.

They knew how President Johnson handled general officer announcements but didn't know how President Nixon would want to handle it. So, be quiet. They said, "Of course, if you have any enemies in the Congress, they can refuse to approve it." They asked me if I had any enemies, and I said, "Nobody knows me, so, if I have an enemy, I don't know anything about it."

I had to go back on duty and couldn't tell a soul. I didn't tell anybody. After that I flew to Dallas to attend the National League for Nursing Convention that was being held, and, oh, how I wanted to tell my family, my friends. I thought, "Wouldn't this be wonderful if this is announced while I'm in Texas," but it wasn't. So, I still had to keep it quiet.

I went back to duty at Walter Reed. When I got back, my assistant said that Secretary Laird, who was Secretary of Defense and a patient of ours up in Ward Eight (the VIP ward), wanted to see me while I was gone. She told him where I was, and he said, "Well, as soon as she gets back, have her come up." So, I went up to see him, and, over a cup of coffee, he showed me the recommendation that he was to send to Congress for approval. He said, "Now, this is going to be gone over."

Again, I was so naive; I didn't know the procedure. I said, "Well, how long before anything happens?" And he explained to me that usually one day in the week is when they consider all of the nominations, and at that time I would be considered along with the rest of them. But he didn't know exactly when that would be. It would be whenever Congress got ready to do it.

So, I went back on duty, and, one afternoon about four o'clock, I was in my office, and I had just made rounds on the wards. I was standing there, going through my IN box and saying to my secretary, "I'll never get through all of this in the IN box." About this time General Jennings, who was the Surgeon General, walked in and said, "Well, you'd better hurry; you only have about five minutes before they're going to announce you are the next Chief of the Army Nurse Corps."

He said, rather than him announce it, he thought it would be appropriate if the Commanding General, General Vordebruger of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, would announce it. "So, he's going to call you up to Headquarters and make the announcement up there." I always kept an extra white uniform in my office, in case something spilled on me, got too wrinkled, or I had to appear at a ceremony. He wanted to be the first to congratulate me, of course, but I couldn't say anything yet.

So, as soon as he left, I got into my white uniform that didn't have a wrinkle in it. The phone rang; it was General Vordebruger. He wanted me to come up to his office. He was going to have a staff meeting. I knew what he was up to, so I finished dressing and started up the corridor. About this time the sergeant came running after me, says, "General Vordebruger wants you in his office right now!" So, I went on up to the office and conference room where he had his staff assembled, and he announced my promotion and appointment. I had been selected to be Chief of the Army Nurse Corps. At that point the news releases were made and, of course, went all over the world.

Now, I had broken a little of that silence to my sister here in San Antonio because I was concerned about my daddy. My mother had died while I was at First Army, and Daddy had a weak heart; he was a very emotional person. He and I could cry at Bonanza . I was afraid that, when it was announced, he would be descended on (which he was) by the news media, and it might not be good for him. So, after Secretary Laird had told me that it was being sent across to Congress, I told him what was happening.

I called Caroline and told her because I was concerned what emotional impact this would have on my father when it was announced. Well, as soon as it was announced, they got it down at Brooke, and phone calls started being made. They called Daddy; they called my sister, wanting to know all about me growing up and all my past history. My sister used to call me, and she'd say, "Sis, so-and-so called and wanted to know this or that." And she said, "I don't know" because she was only two years old when I went into nurses' training, and we didn't grow up together, per se. She'd say, "I have to know about you, so I can tell them." But these were very exciting moments there at Walter Reed, for the Army Nurse Corps, and for my family.

I received a phone call from the officer section of personnel. A warrant officer told me that, as a general officer, I would be entitled, by regulation, to certain things: a general officer flag, an American flag, a flag for the car, one for the boat (I didn't have a boat), a very nice belt-pistol belt-and a .45. He said, "Of course, I don't suppose you want a .45." I said, "Are all general officers entitled to those?" He said, "Yes." I said, "I don't want a .45. May I have a .38?" He was a little surprised that I was going to accept the weapon. But I felt very strongly that women general officers are not different than male general officers, and, by regulation, anything that a general officer is entitled to that I, as a general officer-not as a woman, but as a general officer-should be entitled to those things and accept them.

Well, several days later he appeared in my office, and he brought all the things in-my stationery and all those things-[to] get me ready for when it actually happened. After he left I put the pistol belt over my white uniform (I had the holster with the .38 still in its wrappings), and I walked up to my secretary, and I said, "Ada, now we'll get some action around here." She looked at me, and you could have heard that scream all over Walter Reed, as to what this general was going to be doing here-just [some] of the fun that happened around all the occasions.

I received phone calls from around the world. One sister was in the Philippines, and she and her husband-he was in the air force-heard about it. I received a phone call from Randolph Air Force Base, where two of the young air force officers who had been my classmates in hospital administration called to congratulate. They reminded me that the only way I got through statistics was with their help. I have a lot of good friends.

This was an exciting time at Walter Reed, and I don't know how much work we got done out there for a couple of weeks, but I stayed at Walter Reed only until August. I was to be promoted the first of September, and the Chief of the Army Nurse Corps wanted me to come on into her office and be there the month of August with her. I hold the record for having served the shortest tour as chief nurse at Walter Reed, but I don't mind one bit. I must say, though, that my experience at Walter Reed, although a short period of time, was filled with many experiences and certainly a great deal of professional challenge that would benefit me as I moved on to be Chief of the Army Nurse Corps.

I had a one-month overlap with the outgoing Chief of the Army Nurse Corps, and during that time I had to get uniforms ready because there's a difference in the uniform that the general officer wears. I had to get all the uniforms ready and get the invitations out for the ceremony that would take place when I would be promoted. The promotion ceremony was a very big event, not only in my life but in the lives of my family and friends.

My daddy was still living, so he and two sisters from San Antonio, a nephew, and my sister from Florida all came up for the ceremony. A number of friends from San Antonio, my cousins from Oklahoma City and Fort Worth flew in. I had invited the former chiefs I had served under, who had been my chief nurses during my career, and many of those were able to come. I am indebted to the assistant to the Chief of the Army Nurse Corps, not the assistant chief, but assistant to the chief, Colonel Doris Frazier, because she's the one who really organized and served as project officer for the promotion ceremony.

The Surgeon General's Office was in the Forrestal Building, and the Chief of Staff of the Army, his office, and staff are all in the Pentagon. So, Colonel Frazier was able to convince them that the ceremony should be in the Forrestal Building, rather than across [the Potomac] at the Pentagon. The Chief of Staff of the Army, General Westmoreland, came over to actually do the promotion, along with the Surgeon General [and] Lieutenant General Hall B. Jennings.

The Chief of the Army Chaplains, Chaplain Hyatt, came over to give the invocation, and the Adjutant General came over to administer the oath of office. The Deputy Chief of Staff of Personnel, General Kerwin, also came over. I say, came over, because the Potomac River is in between, and we always referred to "those people on the other side of the river." Sometimes it is kind of difficult to get across those bridges on the other side of the river.

My family and friends had all flown in from different places. I had some staying with us where I lived and then made arrangements at a motel for the rest of them. My roommate from World War II had flown in from Connecticut, and it was just a thrilling experience to see all these people and be able to share the event with them.

On the day of the ceremony, my family and I went up to the Surgeon General's Office. He and his wife and the Deputy Surgeon General and his wife and General Westmoreland were up there to meet us. We visited a little bit and then went to the auditorium for the ceremony. I do have a movie that was taken of the ceremony, which was the first time that had ever happened, so it was quite a thrill to be able to share this.

They made thirteen copies of [the videotape] and sent it around to the different army hospitals around the world so that the nurses could actually share in the ceremony. That meant a great deal to me because otherwise it's just so few people who live in the Washington area can participate, and, because of limited space, not everybody who wants to in the Washington area can be there.

The ceremony, when you are actually sworn in as Chief of the Army Nurse Corps and promoted to general officer, is a very emotional time. Of course, you hear all these nice things said about you, and then it's your time to say something. I got through it, but I didn't think I was going to. Then the reception follows that. It was a wonderful time that I was able to share several days there with family and friends and certainly my co-workers in the Washington area.

After all the festivities were over, I had to get down to work. In the office of the Chief of the Army Nurse Corps, you had the Chief and Assistant Chief of the Army Nurse Corps, and assistant to the chief, and two secretaries. That made up your staff, period. You had other army nurses assigned in the Surgeon General's Office but in the different directorates, like in the Personnel, like the job I had held when I was Chief of the Army Nurse Corps Assignment Branch.

We had nurses in Personnel, and we had them in Preventive Medicine, the Reserve office, the Consultant's office, and Education and Training. Weekly I would hold a staff meeting and have all the nurses assigned to the Surgeon General's Office meet with me. Although I did not have them under my direct supervision, they were part of the nursing team in the Surgeon General's Office. Together we planned what actions we might be initiating. Having been in the Washington area, I was aware of what my predecessor had done. I think it's interesting when you go into an assignment like that, you always build on what has happened just prior to you. You start programs, and you never finish all of them, so the next chief then builds on what you have started.

The chief ahead of me, Brigadier General Anna May Hayes, had had a group of civilian and military nursing consultants take a look-see at what direction the Army Nurse Corps should be going. And, as a result of that, they came up with an idea-I think they called it Army Nursing Contemporary Practice Program, something like that-and it was during this time in nursing that they were talking about the expanded or extended role of nurses. They had explored that prior to the time I got into the Surgeon General's Office. In continuing that, we made some changes. Again, this was just a group of consultants making recommendations. There had been no actions initiated or any additional studies made, so we did them.

As a result of that, we proposed the Nurse Clinician Program-Army Nurse Clinician Program-that now is called the Nurse Practitioner Program. But this was looking in terms of the nurses and an extended or expanded role. How could they function in army hospitals? What would be the preparation necessary?

We determined that we wanted it at the master's degree level. We worked with the Academy of Health Sciences here in San Antonio so that the programs could be set up under their affiliation, but, at the same time, they could affiliate with the University of Texas Health Science Center. The nurses enrolled in the programs which we would be conducting at certain hospitals would be affiliated with the university, and our nurses could receive sixteen semester hours toward their master's degrees.

Of course, if they wanted to go ahead after they finished their particular tour of duty, they could always affiliate back there on long-term civilian training or go on to other universities to finish their master's degrees. Up until that time, the nurses receiving specialty clinical training had no affiliation with a university. They only had so many hours of college work, but it didn't apply toward a degree.

We established programs in the different clinical specialties. We had the Med-Surgery, Pediatric, and the Nurse Midwifery Program. That's a little different. I'll talk about it in just a minute, but we looked at each of our clinical areas to determine the expanded role of the army nurse and the programs that would be necessary to prepare them. We developed those programs ourselves, using our own army nurses who were prepared at the master's level to teach in these programs at our different hospitals under the affiliation of the Academy of Health Sciences and the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

Our Nurse Midwifery Program was different. There was such a shortage of obstetricians, and we had some army nurses who were nurse midwives but were not practicing as nurse midwives. So, we explored with the University of Kentucky. Dean McKenna, who was an air force reserve nurse, and I worked together on that. Using our clinical facilities at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and the University of Kentucky, we were able to set up the Nurse Midwifery Program so that our nurses went to University of Kentucky for the didactic part and were over at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for the clinical experience.

Upon completion of the course and passing the licensing exam, they received their master's degree from the University of Kentucky and then were licensed nurse midwives. This was quite a program for us because it certainly helped at our posts where we had so many deliveries. Many deliveries termed normal deliveries could certainly be done by the nurse midwives. We found that many of the patients who had been delivered by nurse midwives, on the second time, would want a nurse midwife to deliver them because they felt they could relate much easier, and that a nurse midwife took more time with them.

I don't know why patients always feel so guilty when they take their doctor's time, but this is something that you hear, "Well, I didn't tell the doctor because he's so busy." You keep trying to say, "You must tell the doctor the things he needs to know." "But he's so busy. I don't want to bother him with that." Well, they found that they could relate with the nurse midwives much easier. I guess they thought they weren't busy. But this was a program started at Fort Knox. It later on expanded to Fort Campbell and to Fort Hood and then over to Germany.

People often ask, "What was accomplished during the time that you were chief of the Corps?" Sometimes I say, "I don't know...I don't know if anything was." But the development and implementation of the Army Nurse Corps Nursing Clinician Program was one that was accomplished during the time that I was chief. When we got to the operating room, we were exploring how the role of the operating room nurse could be expanded. We found those in the operating room go to work in the morning, get behind the mask, stay behind it until they come from behind it, and go home in the evening.

I think in our hospitals today-and I experienced it recently as a patient-I can see a difference in the approach to operating room nursing. The nurses come and see the patients prior to surgery, visit with them, explain some of the things that they might anticipate, and they make visits after the surgery with the patient.

We also developed the infection control nurse from the operating room nurse. There was such a need for an infection control nurse. We felt the nurse could work in this area with preventive medicine because who was better prepared in the nursing staff than the operating room nurse? As a result of that, the first pilot program was at Brooke General Hospital here, and Colonel Janie Sinclair worked as an infection control nurse. Later on, many years later, she became chief nurse here at Brooke.

This was the beginning of the role of the infection control nurse. She was assigned to nursing but then was working with preventive medicine in our hospitals. I think today she is in preventive medicine with a close relationship to nursing. This was during the period of time there was so much staphylococcal infection in hospitals, and the need for studies in the control of staphylococcal infections was so evident. This is what precipitated the real emphasis in the use of the infection control nurse in our army hospitals.

Another area that I was actively involved in was the educational requirements for an army nurse. We had, originally, graduates of hospital schools of nursing because that's all we had. There were a few colleges of nursing but not many, and certainly not enough to supply the needs of not only military nursing but the whole nursing profession.

Of course, there was the development of the associate degree program. The Army Nurse Corps did not accept graduates of associate degree programs as commissioned officers. Prior to my time, they had a pilot study on making them warrant officers, but that had been dissolved by the time I became chief of the Corps. We were accepting graduates of the hospital schools of nursing and the collegiate programs.

I felt very strongly that the basic educational preparation for an army nurse should be a baccalaureate degree. All other officers had to have a minimum education of a baccalaureate degree, so why should army nurses be different as long as the education was available? Of course, they met a lot of resistance on this. You can imagine the political pressures put on by deans of schools of nursing-doctors who wanted to get a bedside nurse, and they didn't want one of these educated nurses. They wanted a "good old bedside nurse" to take care of them.

I was fortunate that the Surgeon General supported me. I had worked very closely with the National League for Nursing and had served on some of the national committees developing criteria for evaluating nursing services. I worked with the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Hospitals-again, in developing criteria for evaluating nursing services. I had the support of the professional organizations. The American Nursing Association, in 1960, said that the goal for the basic preparation in nursing should be at the baccalaureate level. This was 1971-75 that I was trying to implement this in the Army Nurse Corps. We were able to do it, with some exceptions.

Vietnam was winding down. There was a shortage of nurses, and the exceptions we would make were for those in clinical specialties that we were so short of. If they had progressive nursing experiences, that was the beginning of implementing the requirement. We did not get the regulation changed during my tour, although we were able to function that way.

The next chief was able to get the regulation changed so that today all nurses entering the Army Nurse Corps have a minimum of a baccalaureate degree. As far as the educational preparation of our nurses, again the army has a system where you have to validate all positions for the educational requirement. So we did a review of all the positions of the Army Nurse Corps to determine what the educational requirement would be, beyond the baccalaureate degree.

From this, then, we came up with the number that we felt should have master's preparation and doctorate preparation. The Surgeon General, then, had to defend that position on the recommendations before the army's board. We were able to get additional spaces validated for graduate education. Once you then had them validated for graduate education, you could justify funds to send the nurses for long-term civilian training at the graduate level.

Now, you never had enough funds to send everybody whose position was validated. That was always a challenge to us, but at least we were able to get our share of funds allocated to the Surgeon General to send our nurses on for graduate education. We saw quite an increase in the numbers with graduate education. I wish I had those figures for what the Corps is today. I know last year, when I was in Washington, I think it was something like, maybe, 99.7 percent had at least a baccalaureate degree, and the other percentage are within retirement. Almost 50 percent of the Corps has a master's degree, and a number with their doctorates.

I retired in '75, and here it is '90, and to see how it has come-it has taken a long time-but to see the progress that has been made in the educational professional level of the army nurses today is wonderful.

Another area of real concern to me was the strength of the army nurses in the Reserves. We had so many vacancies in our various units in our professional people. I spent a great deal of time recruiting and, of course, ran into difficulty about the requirement for appointment in the Reserve for the nurses. Would it be the same as for active duty? Would they have to have a baccalaureate degree? That was a constant battle.

Again, we did not get the regulation changed, but we implemented it as much as we could. I know I traveled a great deal, visiting Reserve units and talking, trying to recruit for the Reserves. We were able to see the strength of the Reserve units certainly increase as far as nurses were concerned. Of course, every time we'd make a nice big increase, then they'd up our requirement of spaces, so you felt like you never would accomplish your goal. But a good deal of time was spent working with the Reserves, recruiting and providing the training for the Reserves.

Also, as chief of the Corps, I had many staff meetings to attend, being a member of the Surgeon General's staff and representing army nursing at professional meetings. The Defense Advisory Committee for Women in the Service meets twice a year. I served as a resource person for that particular committee, which was a wonderful experience-having been in on the beginning of that when I was a young captain and then to be able to serve as Chief of the Army Nurse Corps.

One of the duties of the Chief of the Army Nurse Corps is to be responsible for nursing services, not just the Army Nurse Corps. The Army Nurse Corps was concerned about the recruiting, the education, and the utilization of army nurses. But, also, I had the responsibility for nursing services worldwide. So, I became real active in the recruitment, certainly the training and education of our enlisted personnel, and the utilization of the enlisted personnel in our army hospitals.

One of the programs that we were very active in was the medical corpsmen, then it became the clinical specialists or the "Ninety-one Charlie" that is preparing enlisted personnel to serve at the practical nurse level or, as here in Texas, the vocational nurse level. That course, too, is given here at the Academy of Health Sciences for a portion of it, and then they go out to the different army hospitals for the Phase II [clinical phase] of it. Upon completion of the course, I think it is about forty-two or forty-six weeks, the soldiers can take the State Board Licensure exam and become licensed practical or vocational nurses. They are the right hands of our professional nurses in our hospitals and are in great demand in active duty.

Again, the reserve units have authorizations for "Ninety-one Charlies," but they had so few in their units, so we were trying to work out programs where the reserve units could send some of their people to the "Ninety-one Charlie" program. We ran into difficulty. They couldn't be away from their jobs in civilian life for that length of time. There were many, many problems we had to try to resolve, to be able to recruit and train our "Ninety-one Charlies."

Working with the enlisted personnel is always a real challenge, but it's a real joy, too, because they are such fine young men and women, so eager to learn and to go on. Many of them want to go on to be professional nurses, doctors, or on into the professional field. They are certainly a very important part of the nursing care team. I enjoyed working with the enlisted personnel in this area.

Also, so that I could see what was actually going on, I made staff visits to our hospitals worldwide. Now, of course, I couldn't get around to every hospital every year. I'd never be in the office. I think the assistant chief thought I wasn't there anyway. But I did make staff visits to hospitals here in the United States, and then in 1972, I went to Europe-to Garmisch-to speak at the Medical-Surgical Congress. Then I visited all of the army hospitals throughout Europe. That included going to Ethiopia because we had Asmara Hospital there, and it wasn't too long after that we gave that hospital to the navy. But that was quite an experience.

Then in 1974 I went back to Germany and made my staff visit, but I also visited the Pacific. I went to Hawaii, Okinawa, Japan, Korea, Alaska, and back to Washington. That was quite a trip too. I could spend hours just talking about each one of these trips and the nursing care that was being given at these different stations. But, you know, you kind of get into a routine on these staff visits. You meet the commanding officer for an entrance interview, then you meet the post commander, then you meet the commanding officer of the medical facility, then you tour the facility, and visit with the people. You speak to the nursing staff, and then they have some kind of reception or party for you. Often it was the "Army Blues" that they would have. I was always so proud to see them, so handsome in those "Army Blues."

Staff visits are essential. You are able to meet the people. They meet you and know that you as chief, are interested in them and what they're doing. And you are able to support your chief nurse and your nursing services out there. If there are areas of concern, you can discuss those with your commanders and see if things can't be resolved.

I enjoyed the staff visits. They are exhausting, because everybody wants to talk to you. You set up individual interviews if anyone wants to talk to you. You set those interviews up so you will have a chance to talk with them, and it is very demanding of your time and energy. When you come back to Washington, you should take a rest, but you don't. You head right straight back to work again. But I certainly had an opportunity to see portions of the world I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Here in San Antonio we are quite interested in the Health Services Command. The Health Services Command came into being in 1973. I can remember when the Surgeon General had appointed a group to study the organization, or reorganization of the Army Medical Department. As a result of this study, it was presented to us that the Health Services Command be organized and located here in San Antonio. Emphasis was being placed on getting the concentration of military out of the Washington area. Now I think they are trying to get them back.

In the reorganization, the Health Services Command would be organized here at Fort Sam Houston. I was active in not only the staff work prior to the actual organization being activated down here, but also in the selection of staff and fighting for the places as I wanted nurses at the h