Dear John,
Every year on Memorial Day, I think about my mother. She was a nurse in the U.S. Army in World War II, stationed at a large field hospital in Cirencester, England some 80 miles west of London. She had fought hard for her education: the oldest of seven children growing up on a farm in Oklahoma during the depression, she had to move in with an aunt in a nearby town so she could finish high school, and then managed to work her way through nursing school before joining the army.
At some 23 years of age, she arrived at the 188th general hospital—it was a collection of Quonset huts—just two months before the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The hospital’s first patients, all D-Day casualties, were admitted on June 14, 1944. The doctors and nurses of the 188th would go on to care for a total of more than 11,000 casualties before the end of the war. A little over 50 years later, I was able to travel with my mother to Cirencester, where we made our way to the open field on the outskirts of town where the hospital once stood. There were a few Quonset huts still remaining, and in the town, which had officially “adopted” the 188th during the war, we visited the small museum created in its honor, complete with old photographs, some of the crude medical implements of the time and old news reports. On the army’s website, she is listed with the other nurses, as “Second Lieutenant, Hughes, Edna M., ANC, N-776510.”
Like many other WWII veterans, my mother never talked much about the war or the horrors she witnessed in her time at the 188th hospital, but it profoundly affected the course of her life. She said that it was the suffering of the many young soldiers gravely injured in the war as they endured operations under the primitive anesthesia techniques available at the time, that spurred her to decide to become a physician, an anesthesiologist. It would take her another 8 years following the war to realize her dream, having been turned down for medical school at first because the few “slots for women” were already filled. She would spend her life advocating for her patients and for more women in medicine—always speaking up for nurses when the mostly male ranks of doctors often discounted their critical role in patient care.
I’m also thinking of the many women in the military today who, like my mother, want to serve their country—but instead are facing ever more punitive and discriminatory challenges created by the Trump administration’s actions. As Shoshanna Ehrlich reports, women in the armed services are now denied a full range of reproductive care in military hospitals anywhere in the country or the world they are stationed, and are denied leave time and a travel stipend should they need to “cross state lines to obtain an abortion or other reproductive healthcare because it was banned or unavailable where they were stationed.” Leave and travel funds had been the policy during the Biden administration, but that was reversed in late January by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as part of his campaign fighting “wokeness” in the military. Condemning Hegseth’s action, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and officer, responded, “We ask our servicewomen to put their lives on the line while serving across the globe to protect our country. They shouldn’t have to risk their lives while stationed in a state with severe abortion bans ...”
Then in April, Hegseth announced he had “proudly ENDED” the Pentagon’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) program, claiming it was “yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops — distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.” The WPS program, which as Ms. has reported, was meant to advance women’s participation in peace-building and conflict prevention, was created by a law written by GOP lawmakers and signed by Trump himself during his first term. Multiple studies have shown that including more women in peace negotiations increases the chances that a peace treaty will succeed. In short, as our analysts conclude in the article below: “Failing to recognize WPS’ critical importance works to the detriment of American interests, and to the American people.”
And finally, although Memorial Day is an American observance, we’re not forgetting the courageous women fighting and dying on the frontlines of armed conflicts around the globe—including Ukraine. And the millions of women and their families at risk in the many war-torn countries and regions throughout the world.
For equality, peace and justice,
