The new Midway (2019 or so?) gets back reviews because of the wooden acting, the cliches, the nurses with Hawaiian blouses and pouty lips, etc.,
I don't like to post personal things online, but I'll share this. I had a family member that was an Army nurse in World War II. Being a lover of history, I would try to talk to her about her experience, but she generally didn't want to discuss it. Finally, late in life, she started to open up about it.
She wasn't a battlefield nurse; she worked in an Army hospital. Her duties were a rotation thru three wards: the burn ward, plastic surgery, and the German POW ward. She remembered one of the patients, who was disfigured from facial burns, telling her "You don't seem scared to look at me Lieutenant, like the other nurses seem to be." She said, "Oh why would I be afraid of you. The only patients that scare me are the POWs. I'm worried that one of them might grab me as a hostage and try to escape—but I know that you'd protect me." She said he smiled at that and that what she told him was true; she always was concerned that a POW might grab her in an attempt to escape.
She also told me about reading "Dear John letters" to patients who were disfigured in the war and had a wife or sweetheart write to say that they loved them, but just couldn't face seeing them this way again. I responded that it was horrible for them to turn their back that way on a loved one. She surprised me by telling me that it wasn't for me to judge these women. She had talked to some of them after a visit and they truly did love the man they just saw and that was
why they couldn't bear to see them this way again and be reminded of how much pain and suffering had been inflicted on their loved one. She said that she could bear it because she was a nurse that was trained to temporarily care for their wounds in the hospital. She said that the wives and sweethearts had no way of knowing or predicting how they might react to the situation in which they now found themselves—that no one did. She said, matter-of-factly, that I would learn that there are some things in life that one person can deal with that another can't and that it didn't make one of them a bad person or one better than another. I let that sink in awhile and realized that she was right.
She told the men she read the letters to the same thing. She reassured them that there was hope for finding someone else, that wouldn't be remembering what their life together was like before the war, who would accept them as they were now and look to their future. She was a wise woman in many ways. And though she didn't face a battlefield, she faced other challenges in life that made her a hero to me.
That wasn't political, but since this is a photo site... She pulled out an album and showed me a funny picture of her sitting in a trash can on base wearing army fatigues. In another, she looked very sharp and crisp in her dress uniform accepting her commission into the Army Nurse Corps. And the final surprise was when she died, we discovered that she had prearranged everything to the last detail and instructed that she wanted a full military funeral. She was quite a gal and I was lucky to know her!
