Son seeks to honor mother’s military service

By WILSON RING

Associated Press Writer

updated 1:28 a.m. ET May 26, 2007

ARLINGTON, Va. - It’s a busy spring morning in the curved pavilion of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial outside the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery: There’s a retirement ceremony under way, school groups tour the exhibits, and a woman in Air Force blues burps a newborn on her shoulder.

But for me, the outside noise disappears when a picture pops up on a computer screen in an alcove. It’s my mother.

Proud in her Army nurse’s uniform, 2nd Lt. Margaret Taylor of Quincy, Mass., 23 years old at the time, smiles for some long-forgotten photographer. The screen says she joined the Army in April 1945 and served with the 229th General Hospital in occupied Nagoya, Japan, after spending a month in the Philippines. Campaign and victory medals she won are listed.

Then the screen points out another consequence of war for the smiling nurse in the photo: Sometime during her 10 months in the Pacific she caught tuberculosis. And 19 years later, it killed her.

She left a 7-year-old son, born during a brief period of relatively good health, who for a long time didn’t comprehend the immensity of her sacrifice.

Searching for a way to remember
On and off over the years I’ve wondered what I could do to erect my own memorial to my mother. I don’t mean a statue or naming a building after her, just some way to tell the generations to come about her.

I’ve considered getting a marker from the Department of Veterans Affairs to place in front of her grave not far from Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vt., where we lived when she died. That way, someone who wanders the cemetery a century from now might pause and consider the former Army nurse who died on Jan. 8, 1965, at age 42.

But as clear as day I remember when I, as a 5- or 6-year-old boy fascinated by the miniature American flags that fluttered in a cemetery we passed, asked her if she wanted a flag on her grave.

No, she told me, she didn’t want that.

A shared grief
It was less than a year after my mother died when my father remarried. Clearly, he’d started grieving for my mother years before she died. He told me long afterward he and the woman he married, a widow, were drawn to each other by their shared grief.

I was lucky. My new mother (we never used the term stepmother) embraced me as her own, and in an instant I was given three sisters and a brother; my father and new mother later had two more children and then adopted another. It’s a family I came to love as though we’d spent our entire lives together.

My mother’s memory remained alive in my questions about her to my father and our visits to her grave. But my curiosity didn’t draw me to the details of what she did until years after my father had passed away.

That’s when I sent away to the National Archives for my mother’s military records and to the Department of Veterans Affairs for her claim file.

A copy of her commission and a list of her decorations came back, but a form letter told me her Army file had been destroyed in a fire. The VA sent me a two-inch pile of documents. It is mostly those records and conversations with her brother and sister — my uncle and aunt — that let me put her past together.

Later I got the unit history of the 229th General Hospital from the National Archives. And I found on the Internet the history of the ship that, I think, carried my mother to the Pacific.

My aunt provided a handful of old photographs and tattered, kitschy souvenirs that I bet came from the Philippines.

Heeding the call
In the spring of 1945 the Army was finishing an effort to recruit 10,000 new nurses (altogether, 57,000 would serve during the war). While the conflict in Europe was almost over, the invasion of Japan loomed, and military planners were expecting the war to last well into 1946 or even beyond.

Margaret Taylor joined up six months after her graduation from the Quincy City Hospital nursing school in October 1944. Her parents supported her decision to enlist, even though my grandmother feared for her health because of childhood rheumatic fever, says my aunt, Ann Lind of East Bridgewater, Mass.

The 229th General Hospital was sent to France in early 1945, but when fighting ended there, it was shipped direct to the Pacific, says Dr. Murray Dworetzky, a retired physician from New York City who didn’t know my mother but served with the hospital in France and Japan.

While I can find no orders tracking my mother’s voyage to the Pacific, family memories follow, to some degree, that of the “USS Gen. D.E. Aultman,” the Coast Guard transport that carried the 229th from France, through the Panama Canal, to New Guinea and then to the Philippines.

Less than a year before, the Philippines had been liberated after Japanese occupation. When American doctors arrived, they found many cases of malaria, dengue, pneumonia, leprosy and tuberculosis.

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