“You’ll be fine, Liz,” Pru said confidently, and remembered what Lizzie had said about Audrey’s brother. It was a sad story, but there were so many like it, in England too. She felt sorry for Audrey too. Pru could only imagine how she would feel if one of her brothers died. She worried about them all the time, particularly Phillip, who was a daredevil. Her older brother, Max, was only a few years older than Phillip, but had always been more cautious, even when they were children. “You just have to treat each case individually. The corpsmen do triage as soon as the men come on, and they tell us who to take care of first. They do a lot of the initial work for us. Some of the soldiers just need to be made comfortable for the flight. And when needed, we give them morphine if they’re in too much pain, so they sleep. There’s only so much we can do up here. We can’t fix them. We’re kind of a medicalized taxi service, and now and then we have to deal with a real medical emergency. But most of it is fairly straightforward, and obvious when they come on. We know what we’ve got on the flight, and some of them are ambulatory. They’re not all at death’s door. Some are, and then you just do what you can, and pray they hang on till we get back to the base. Stay close to me or Ed, and you’ll find your feet very quickly.” Pru had confidence in her as a nurse, more than Lizzie had in herself.

She introduced Lizzie to both corpsmen, and then the pilots a few minutes later. Their second corpsman was Charlie Burns, a lively Scotsman and an excellent medic. Ed Murphy was the best corpsman Pru had ever worked with, and he knew far more than most corpsmen did. His medical knowledge was impressive.

“He should have been a doctor,” Pru said to Lizzie as they took their jump seats for takeoff and strapped in.

“I wanted to go to medical school,” Lizzie said conversationally as they taxied down the runway. “My father wouldn’t let me. He’s a cardiologist and my mother is a nurse, or was until she had children. My brother is an orthopedist now, and my younger brother left medical school to enlist after Pearl Harbor. My father thinks being a doctor is too much for a woman, and they should get married, stay home, and have kids. So I went to nursing school, which was what my parents wanted. But I wanted to be a doctor, not a nurse.”

“Maybe you can do that after the war,” Pru suggested.