Free Elizabeth M. Norman by We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan

hours about their families and their men.
    T HE SITE FOR Hospital #2 had been selected for its dense jungle canopy, its level ground and the availability of water—the swift, clear Real River. The only “roads” were a carabao trail connecting the site with the rest of the peninsula and a footpath that ran east to west. There were no open fields and no buildings. Just jungle, a canopy of acacia and mahogany and bamboo, draped with thick vines.
    Everything had to be brought in or built. Quickly the medical crew found tools and transportation, and engineers cut a one-lane dirt road to carry patients in and out. Two bands of intrepid officers and enlisted mencommandeered some trucks and, before the Japanese occupied the city and established a siege line on Bataan, dashed back to Manila in advance of the invaders to scrounge for surgical supplies, medicine, generators, tools and food. (One surgeon led another group north to Stotsenberg and, with the enemy closing in fast there, he snuck into the base hospital and made off with a critical piece of equipment—an operating-room sterilizer.) 4
    Of all the early efforts, however, nothing was more important than setting up the kitchens. Napoleon is believed to have said that his army marched on its stomach, and every military commander since has at one time or another echoed that assertion. Nothing, say those who have been to war, not the stifling sun or monsoon rain, not the mud, mosquitoes or maggots, not even the relentless enemy, affects the morale and performance of a fighting force as much as its food.
    War is hard labor and no one works well without being fed. Bad food, monotonous food or severely reduced rations only add to the numbing fatigue of combat or the labor of tending the sick, the injured and the dying. Sometimes the only act of ego, save sleep, that the nurses and doctors were allowed was their meal. For them, as for all soldiers, mess call was a ritual, a time when comrades gathered together for a few moments of peace and, by breaking bread shoulder to shoulder, reaffirmed their community, their identity as a group. The mess hall—in their case a jungle clearing—became a kind of sanctuary, a formal break in the hard routine of war, a break too from the continual discomfort, unease and self-denial that began at first light and ended only with sleep.
    The nurses helped set up the first kitchen at Hospital #2 and pitched in to serve one of the first meals: tea, biscuits and slumgullion stew, a concoction of meat and whatever other edible ingredients the cooks could find. Helping out on KP (“kitchen police”) put the nurses shoulder to shoulder with ordinary soldiers. None of these men, of course, were accustomed to working alongside women, and a few of the grizzled sergeants were unsettled by the idea of “soldiers in skirts.” One day on KP one of them told Sally Blaine that he “didn’t want any damn woman in my kitchen.” 5
    After the kitchen was established, the staff had to find the furnishings basic to any hospital, especially beds. Hospital #2 started with five chairs found in the brush, eight refrigerators and thirty tables, then a local planter loyal to the Americans hired carpenters to build what the Americans needed, and they fashioned almost everything from bamboo: messand dining tables, medicine cabinets, nurses’ desks, chairs, beds, trays, brooms, fly swatters, laundry baskets, wastebaskets, serving spoons, urinals, storage cabinets, benches, linen closets, ashtrays and floor mats. 6
    The staff stuffed rice straw into mattress covers, which made surprisingly comfortable beds. Chinese and Filipino civilians caught in the retreat volunteered to set up a laundry on the Real River. They boiled the linens in oil drums and strung several hundred feet of clothesline along the riverbank. At another spot along the river, engineers built a dam to divert water to a 3,000-gallon high-pressure filter and chlorination system.
    Sanitation, a problem for