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Thanks for asking, jaycee! I think this is the rough draft, cause he told me he added some at school, but this is the jist of it. The actual nurse he based his story on lives here in town and she’s like most of the heroes of WWII. Old and quiet, and very normal looking and seeming, and then you ask a question and—bam! You find out they did something like being the first married woman in the Army Nurse Corp, and that it took petitioning the president’s wife to make it happen. We have a lot of retired vets here, and we lose more all the time. I’m so glad a lot of them come in and sit at the garden center and gab on a regular basis. You find out the most interesting stuff!

HAve a great day!

The Kiss

It was the summer of 1942 when my grandfather was drafted and sent to the South Pacific. “Letting him go was the hardest thing I ever had to do,” said my grandma. She was a nurse at the local hospital at that time. “It was a different time back then,” grandma would say, a time when everyone was patriotic including herself and the rest of the nurses at the hospital. Being patriotic, they decided that they would try to get into the Army Nurse Corps, only to find out that married women were not allowed in, and all of the nurses at the hospital were married.
The women brainstormed and came up with the idea to write a letter to the president’s wife. They were desperate to do something for their country and also to get closer to their husbands. Teddy Roosevelt was the president at the time and the first lady was Eleanor Roosevelt, the very person who received the letter, and it was she who decided that it was time for women to make a stand. She ran it by Teddy and two weeks later the group of nurses were on a plane to France where they would be working for the Red Cross.
It was a nasty place my grandma described, right in the middle of a big field. The smell was horrible and there were flies and varmints everywhere. Everyday a train would stop by the operation to drop off wounded soldiers and to pick up the ones that were ready to go back to the battlefield. The whole time all this was going on grandpa was on the frontline fighting for his life on a small island in the South Pacific called Iwo Jima.
My grandparents were as far away from each other as they ever could be. They stayed in touch by sending letters. They only got mail once a month, and while grandma was in France she received about a dozen and a half letters. They would write about their love for each other and not being able to wait to see each other again.
Finally the war was coming to an end and grandma was flown back to America, New York to be exact, where she was born and raised. Now that she was back the anticipation grew more and more each day for grandpa to come back home. One day she received a letter from grandpa and he said they were almost done in the South Pacific and he would be leaving on a ship in about a month. It took about a month to get back to the United States on a ship so grandma knew she had only two months to go until grandpa would be back.
At last the day came when grandma got that phone call from grandpa, the one that told her he was in California and he was catching the next train to New York. Two weeks later he arrived in Times Square and as soon as he got off the train he looked and looked for grandma. The streets were so crowded with soldiers and nurses, all celebrating the end of the war, all with the same uniforms on.
He had almost given up looking for her when he heard his name being called from far away.
“Jim!”
He looked around as he heard his name called again and then he saw her. He ran to her as fast as he could and picked her up and hugged her, until they just about squeezed the breath out of each other. Then he leaned her way back and kissed her. A famous photographer caught that kiss on camera, and although it is known around the world it means much more to my grandparents than any one could ever imagine.