The heroism of Army and Navy nurses stationed in the Philippines who suddenly found themselves in the thick of World War II is the focus of this book. The nurses' relatively routine assignments became anything but as the Japanese invaded the Philippines and they found themselves dealing with wounded and dying soldiers, and even struggling for their own survival in prison camp.
Here鈥檚 an excerpt from Pure Grit:
鈥淭hough confronted by carnage from the first day of the war, the nurses never became hardened to shattered and bleeding bodies. That night they tightened tourniquets and treated shock with tears streaming down their faces. Most had learned to draw upon a 鈥榖lessed numbness鈥� that allowed them to do their job. But when faced with such mass suffering and death, something cracks inside the human soul. Juanita [Redmond] said, 鈥榊ou can鈥檛 ever be quite the same again.鈥�
鈥淛osie Nesbit believed that her charges kept going, in part, because there was no place to hide and no way to escape.鈥�
(Abrams Books for Young Readers, 160 pp.)
