Six months after Pearl Harbor, there were twelve thousand nurses on active duty in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Very few had any military experience, and the majority were largely ignorant of the army way of life. It took until 1943 for Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somerville, commanding general of the Army Service Forces, to authorize a structured, mandatory four-week training course for all newly commissioned army nurses. On July 15, 1944, the same day Elinor’s army acceptance letter was issued, the War Department established the first basic training center for black army nurses at Fort Huachuca, located in the fort’s segregated black hospital, referred to as Hospital One. Elinor’s basic training included lessons in field sanitation, military protocol, and defense against air and chemical strikes, as well as a monotonous crash course in the skills they had learned in nursing school: administering prescriptions, taking X-rays, surgery prep, bedside care, and filing charts.26

The living conditions at Fort Huachuca were Spartan. Elinor wasn’t expecting stately furnishings, but none of the nurses were prepared for the depressing appearance of the barracks. They were long wooden shotgun houses painted beige, sitting on a mixture of gravel and dirt, each divided into small bedrooms with one common lounge area where the nurses could talk and play bridge or bid whist. Living on a military base would take some getting used to for anyone, but for black nurses from the North, like Elinor, the experience of entering buildings for “colored” people was infuriating. Many of the other nurses at Fort Huachuca came from the South. These women were used to Jim Crow. Overt discrimination was all they had ever known. But how was Elinor supposed to go from sitting wherever she wanted in a restaurant to socializing in the officers’ club for Negroes?

Basic training lasted for several weeks, so there really was no other choice but for Elinor to accept her new environment. She had made the decision to join, and she needed to see it through. From the very beginning, though, a bitterness began to brew inside her that would grow with each passing day.

There were hardly any places outside of Fort Huachuca that would serve a black person. Uniform or not, businesses and restaurants would deny service to African Americans. The poor treatment of black nurses, however, wasn’t nearly as bad as what black soldiers faced.

Complaints from soldiers who wrote home from bases across the country about the terrible racist conditions they encountered initially fell on deaf ears. But the steady flow of heartbreaking letters that wives, girlfriends, siblings, and parents received month after month created such concern that it was only a matter of time before the NAACP and the Negro press got involved.27