Nurse Jenna walked down the hallway to the framed photograph by the nurses station, a black and white print of twelve young women in fatigues in front of a canvas hospital tent, and she put her finger under the third name in the caption. She read it twice. Then she turned around slowly with her mouth open and looked at me, holding my bag of peppermints in the middle of the hall. I am Bettie Lou Garrison, eighty one years old, and the third name in that row is mine. First Lieutenant Bettie Lou Garrison, Army Nurse Corps, Chu Lai, 1968. The photograph had hung on that wall for nine years.
The old man in the wheelchair had rolled out of room 312 into the middle of the hall and stopped. Earl Pickens was ninety one, thin as a rake, with a veteran cap on his white hair and hands that shook on the arms of the chair. He had looked at me for a long time. “Lieutenant,” he said at last, in a voice like dry leaves. “Lieutenant Garrison. You gave me peppermints in the tent. You held my hand for nineteen hours.” The charge nurse stopped in the doorway with her chart pressed to her chest.
In the spring of 1968 a nineteen year old private named Earl Pickens had been carried into our field hospital with wounds to the chest and leg, and the surgeon had given him one chance in ten. I had stayed beside his cot through the night, wiping his forehead, feeding him ice chips and peppermints from a tin I kept in my pocket. He lived. We lost track of each other, as people did. Two years ago I saw his name on a list of patients at the VA and began to come on Thursdays, with a bag of peppermints. I never told him who I was.
A framed photograph by a nurses station gave one old Army nurse the afternoon to bring a young nurse back to the history of her own floor in Tampa.
I gave my terms to Jenna as she came back along the hall with the photograph held in her arms. “Honey, I am not going to report you, and I am not going to be angry. You were working a hard floor on a short staff, and you saw a woman in a cardigan and made a decision. I would ask only that you hang this photograph where the patients can see it, and that you put a chair in the hallway for visitors, because old women sometimes get tired. And I would like to sit with Earl for the rest of the afternoon.”
The eyes of Jenna spilled over. “Lieutenant Garrison, I work nights,” she said, her voice trembling. “I walk past that picture every shift, and I have never once read the names. My grandmother was a nurse in Vietnam, and she never said a word about it.” She wiped her face on the shoulder of her scrubs. “I told you to wait in the lobby, and you served in a war. I am so sorry.” Earl rolled his wheelchair forward and laid a trembling hand on her wrist. “Honey,” he said, “nobody told her to stop either.”
But there was one more moment of fear in Jenna, a moment of wanting the day to be over. She reached out suddenly and snatched the Army Nurse Corps pin from my cardigan, and ran toward the nurses station, evidently meaning to call the administrator before she lost her nerve. She had gone six steps when Earl, with surprising strength, wheeled his chair sideways across the hall and blocked the way. The charge nurse stepped in from the left, and an orderly pushing a linen cart rolled it quietly across the opposite side.
Jenna stopped, hemmed in by a wheelchair, a woman in scrubs and a cart of clean sheets. Earl looked up at her with his cloudy eyes. “Young lady,” he said, “that pin is the reason I am here to tell you about it.” Jenna looked at the small gold and red cross in her palm. Slowly she walked back and pinned it on my cardigan, with the shaking fingers of a girl at a recital. The whole hallway stood still. An old man down the way began to clap, and another, until the third floor was ringing.
The consequences were warm. The hospital hung a new brass plate beneath the photograph with the names of all twelve nurses and the story of the field hospital. The administrator, a thoughtful man named Dr. Kwan, invited me to speak at the nurses graduation in the spring. A row of comfortable chairs now stands in the hallway of the third floor. And Earl, who had been failing slowly, has rallied in a way the doctors do not entirely explain. He eats his dinners now, with a peppermint beside the plate.
In the name of my husband Raymond, who passed in 2015, I started the Raymond Garrison Fund. It pays for volunteer visitors for veterans in hospitals and for scholarships for night shift nurses who want to finish their degrees, in Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties. In the first year we placed two hundred volunteers at the bedsides of veterans and sent seventeen nurses back to school. One was a night nurse from Brandon whose grandmother had served in the Army Nurse Corps, and who is now a nurse practitioner.
On a Thursday in the following March, I walked down the third floor hallway with my bag of peppermints and my plastic chair under my arm. The nurses at the station looked up and smiled. Jenna came around the desk and took the bag from me. “Lieutenant Garrison,” she said, “Earl has been asking for you since breakfast.” I walked into room 312. He was sitting in his chair by the window with the afternoon sun on his face. He held out his hand. I took it, and held it, as I had for nineteen hours.
