She signed up for a refresher course at her old nursing school. It was scheduled to last for four weeks, and she was surprised how quickly the material came back to her. She hadn’t forgotten as much as she had thought, even if she hadn’t used it. She was halfway through the class on Thanksgiving weekend, still living at home in the silent house, when Lizzie called her. Audrey had decided to ignore the holiday. She had no one to spend it with and didn’t want to celebrate. Lizzie sounded excited when Audrey answered.

“A whole group of us just signed up as flight nurses yesterday. They’re sending us to Bowman Field in Kentucky. We’re being reassigned as flight nurses with the Army Air Forces, and sent for Medical Air Evacuation Transport training for six weeks. We’ll be learning field survival, ditching and crash procedures, parachutes, and some classroom hours related to flying. They need nurses and corpsmen to evacuate the wounded from the battlefields by air transport, in planes, and bring them back to hospitals. I knew a couple of girls who went to North Africa last year, as medical air evac flight nurses. I think they were the first to go. They didn’t get much training. We don’t know the details yet, but we’re hoping we get sent to England. Another group got assigned to hospital ships in the Pacific. I like our assignment better. Alex got assigned to the same squadron I did. We start classes on January second, so I guess I’ll be in Boston for Christmas. You can come up if you want. But I was thinking, if you enlist, you could volunteer for the Army Air Forces Flying Nurse Squadron and ask for Medical Air Evacuation Transport duty. Aud, I’d love to have you with us.” Audrey thought about it as she listened. It sounded perfect to her, and just what she needed. It was exciting, and a real chance to do some serious nursing and help the boys at the front. And if she’d be with Lizzie, it felt like an answer to her prayers.

“Okay, Lieutenant, I’m in. I’ll go to the recruiting station tomorrow.” She wrote down everything she needed to know to volunteer for the right squadron if they let her. “I hope I don’t flunk the physical or whatever they ask me, if they have an entrance exam.” Audrey was so excited, she was shaking. It was a huge leap into an unknown future, but as she hung up the phone with a trembling hand, she knew her parents and her brother would have been proud of her.