Sen., Daniel Inouye was seriously wounded in action in Italy in April 1944. In his autobiography, JOURNEY TO WASHINGTON, he gives tribute to an Army nurse who helped him in Leghorn, Italy:
"I wish I could remember her name--I'll never forget her face--but all I remember is that she came from Eagle Pass, Texas, and as far as I was concerned she was the best damn nurse in the United States Army. In a single moment she had made me see the job that lay ahead of me, and in all the weeks that followed she found a thousand subtle ways to help me master it."

I am author of NO TIME FOR FEAR, VOICES OF AMERICAN MILITARY NURSES IN WWII, published by Michigan State University Press. It contains oral histories of more than 100 Army and Navy nurses who served overseas in the 1940s. When I asked if they remembered any specific patients, each nurse instantly brought up at least one that had stayed in their memory for many years. "I wonder whatever happened to that boy," they would say, or they told me about keeping up correspondence with a patient they had cared for.
For sure, these nurses never forgot the young men they met during war. All the military men who passed through overseas hospitals in the wartime should take comfort knowing how important they were to these nurses.

Diane Burke Fessler