Torn by Love: My Mother’s Dilemma As a Combat Nurse in Patton’s Army

War shows up in the oddest places, such as the time my mother was so angry with my dad because he’d gone to his barn on the afternoon of my older brother’s high school graduation. The barn stop made Dad late for the ceremony. My mother became enraged and she made a fool of herself.

She hated my dad’s barn. She never would go there and anytime anything came up about that barn, she’d scream. I never understood why, until she was 92 and she told me about a different barn in the war. The barn where she almost died of dehydration, the barn where her friend had to shoot two Germans while a third German boy under her care lay comatose.

During my formative years, I recalled that my mother was obsessed with Kleenex tissues. I’d find them wadded under her pillows, stuffed in her bath robe, and folded in her nursing uniforms’ pockets. Finally, I understood. The army never had enough Kleenex for the boys.

I also discovered why she always had a fear of getting cold. That fear became extreme by the time she came to live with me during her last decade of life. She refused to disrobe for a shower until I could show her that the shower’s steam had permeated the entire bathroom.

One day she said, “I know you think I’m crazy for asking you to waste all this hot water before I get in the shower. But during the war, I never could get warm.”

She dreamed a lot about the war when she lived with me. It was in the afternoons that I would ask her the war questions, but there was one day that she slept until supper. While I heated some soup, she said that she’d just seen her father in a dream. He was “wearing that tweed suit,” the one he’d been wearing the day she saw him from the streetcar window.

“What day was that?” I asked her.

“The day I was riding on the streetcar to Fort Snelling to join the service,” she responded. “I saw him out of the corner of my eye on the sidewalk. He was strolling about, greeting everybody. Oh, he never met a stranger in St. Paul. He was just going about his day. And there I was, going to Fort Snelling behind his back. He was my best friend. I’d never lied to him.”

I asked her why she hadn’t discussed such a big life decision with him. She was holding her soup spoon, and her hand started shaking. “Oh, I couldn’t talk with him about it. He would have said no, and that would have been that. I wouldn’t have joined.”

Then she put down the spoon and gazed out the window. I was curious what she was thinking at that moment. Maybe she wondered what her life’s choices would have been if war hadn’t come calling.