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  CHERRY AMES, FLIGHT NURSE

  CHERRY AMES NURSE STORIES

  CHERRY AMES FLIGHT NURSE

  By

  HELEN WELLS

  Copyright © 1945 by Grosset & Dunlap, Inc.

  Copyright © renewed 2007 by Harriet Schulman Forman

  Springer Publishing Company, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Springer Publishing Company, LLC.

  Springer Publishing Company, LLC

  11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor

  New York, NY 10036-8002

  Acquisitions Editior: Sally J. Barhydt

  Production Editor: Matthew Byrd

  Cover design by Takeout Graphics, Inc.

  Composition: Techbooks

  07 08 09 10/5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wells, Helen, 1910-

  Cherry Ames, flight nurse / by Helen Wells.

  p. cm. — (Cherry Ames nurse stories)

  Summary: With the war still ongoing, Cherry Ames works as a flight nurse, flying into battle zones to pick up wounded soldiers and take them to base hospitals for treatment.

  ISBN 0-8261-0397-9

  [1. Nurses—Fiction. 2. United States. Army Nurse Corps—Fiction.3. Flight—Fiction. 4. World War, 1939-1945—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W4644Ce 2006

  [Fic]—dc22

  2006022322

  Printed in the United States of America by Bang Printing

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  I

  PRACTICE FLIGHT

  II

  SOMEWHERE IN BRITAIN

  III

  MYSTERY OF MARK GRAINGER

  IV

  “AUNT” CHERRY

  V

  FIRST MISSION

  VI

  A MEDAL FOR JOHNNY

  VII

  CHRISTMAS PARTY

  VIII

  UNDER FIRE

  IX

  THE MYSTERY EXPLAINED

  X

  MISSION HOME

  Foreword

  Helen Wells, the author of the Cherry Ames stories, said, “I’ve always thought of nursing, and perhaps you have, too, as just about the most exciting, important, and rewarding, profession there is. Can you think of any other skill that is always needed by everybody, everywhere?”

  I was and still am a fan of Cherry Ames. Her courageous dedication to her patients; her exciting escapades; her thirst for knowledge; her intelligent application of her nursing skills; and the respect she achieved as a registered nurse (RN) all made it clear to me I was going to follow in her footsteps and become a nurse—nothing else would do. Thousands of other young people were motivated by Cherry Ames to become RNs as well. Cherry Ames motivated young people on into the 1970s, when the series ended. Readers who remember reading these books in the past will enjoy rereading them now—whether or not they chose nursing as a career—and perhaps sharing them with others.

  My career has been a rich and satisfying one, during which I have delivered babies, saved lives, and cared for people in hospitals and in their homes. I have worked at the bedside and served as an administrator. I have published journals, written articles, taught students, consulted, and given expert testimony. Never once did I regret my decision to enter nursing.

  During the time that I was publishing a nursing journal, I became acquainted with Robert Wells, brother of Helen Wells. In the course of conversation I learned that Ms. Wells had passed on and left the Cherry Ames copyright to Mr. Wells. Because there is a shortage of nurses here in the US today, I thought, “Why not bring Cherry back to motivate a whole new generation of young people? Why not ask Mr. Wells for the copyright to Cherry Ames?” Mr. Wells agreed, and the republished series is dedicated both to Helen Wells, the original author, and to her brother, Robert Wells, who transferred the rights to me. I am proud to ensure the continuation of Cherry Ames into the twenty-first century.

  The final dedication is to you, both new and old readers of Cherry Ames: It is my dream that you enjoy Cherry’s nursing skills as well as her escapades. I hope that young readers will feel motivated to choose nursing as their life’s work. Remember, as Helen Wells herself said: there’s no other skill that’s “always needed by everybody, everywhere.”

  Harriet Schulman Forman, RN, EdD

  Series Editor

  CHAPTER I

  Practice Flight

  LIEUTENANT CHERRY AMES, OF THE ARMY NURSE Corps, training at Randolph Field, Texas, to become a flight nurse, decided to take time out, this hot September morning, for a Coke.

  In the PX—the post exchange—Cherry ran into her old friend Ann Evans. Ann, looking pale, was buying chewing gum.

  “Why, Annie, you don’t chew gum!” Cherry protested.

  “No, but my pilot does,” Ann replied grimly. “We made a pact. Anyone who gets airsick on training flights has to buy the crew chief six packs of gum. Not only am I flipsy-flopsy in the stomach—I’m going broke!”

  Cherry grinned. “You’ll outgrow it as I did. Come on over here to the soda fountain and have a cup of tea.”

  The two girls were perched on stools at the fountain when redheaded Gwen Jones burst in. She waved a special-delivery letter.

  “For you, Cherry! I’ve looked all over for you! Open it quick—it’s from Dr. Joe.”

  Cherry ripped open the letter and scanned the small, neat handwriting—a scientist’s hand.

  “Hurray! Dr. Joe is coming to our graduation. But something seems to be up. He wants me to—” she read on “—to look for someone and do something when we get overseas—provided we are sent to England. He says he can’t explain it in a letter.” She turned the page over, and examined it again. “That’s odd.”

  “A mystery,” Gwen suggested hopefully.

  “Rumor sayeth all new flight nurses are slated for England,” Ann contributed.

  Ann and Gwen, old, dear friends who had been student nurses with Cherry, read the letter, too. Cherry sipped her Coke thoughtfully. Major Joseph Fortune had been Cherry’s friend and neighbor from the moment she and her twin brother were born. His motherless daughter, Midge, was practically Cherry’s little sister. Cherry was really touched that Dr. Joe was traveling from his Army research laboratory in Washington, D.C., to see her graduated. She knew her family could not come to Texas all the way from Illinois. She was bursting to know what Dr. Joe was referring to in his letter. It was not like him to be mysterious.

  “Is Lex, or should I say Captain Upham, coming, too?” Ann asked.

  “Your old beau, now Dr. Joe’s assistant,” Gwen chanted. “My, my, what a change of role!”

  Cherry said absently, “Do you know it’s almost a year—a year this coming Christmas—since I’ve seen Lex? It’s pretty hard to keep up a friendship by mail.”

  “Never mind Lex,” Ann said. “What’s this mystery?”

  Cherry shrugged. “We won’t know until Dr. Joe gets here.”

  “How can you wait?” Gwen demanded. “I’m already itching with curiosity and it isn’t even my who-killed-Cock-Robin.”

  “I just hope we get to England,” Cherry said. “Oh, graduation day, hurry up and get here!”

  Between the day the letter arrived and graduation, Cherry had plenty to learn. Here at Randolph Field, Texas, about a ten-minute ride from San Antonio, she attended the Army Air Forces School of Air Evacuation. At this Troop Carrier Command base, teams of AAF doctors, nurses, enlisted medical technicians, and pilots, trained together. They were people of fire and courage.
They had to be. Six weeks of intensive work, and then they would be ready to fly, in their winged ambulances, to every American battle front on the globe. They would fly to places where wounded men needed help fast—places where only planes could get through. They would pick up the wounded and fly them back to base hospitals. “Flying angels,” soldiers called these gallant nurses of the air.

  “This is the strangest, most wonderful school I ever saw!” Cherry thought, as she walked across the vast, windy airfield, to meet her pilot, Captain Wade Cooper. Cherry looked up to the sky. It was full of Army planes—her new home was the sky, now.

  Parked planes were so thickly clustered that Cherry walked under their wings as often as under blue sky. The air vibrated with the hoarse thunder of plane engines. Dozens of gray planes swooped and roared over her head. Propellers flashed in the sun. Everywhere, aloft and on the earth, were sunburned young men in khaki uniforms, or hard-working young men in green fatigues. Cherry’s dark eyes shone. She put one hand on her blouse. She, too, like the young men, would wear silver wings there.

  She would also wear the flight nurse’s jaunty uniform of slacks, shirt, and side-perched trench cap, in Air Force blue. But now, she ran into the nurses’ barracks, and into her room, to slip on her working coveralls.

  Cherry’s room was small, with fresh-smelling wood walls and a big open window, which gave her the good feeling of living almost outdoors.

  “The rooms I’ve lived in!” she marveled as she changed her clothes.

  First and dearest was her own room at home. Home was Hilton, a neighborly Middle West small town, where Cherry and her twin brother, Charlie, had gone to school together—where they had two of the nicest, liveliest parents anywhere. Yet Cherry had left home, when Dr. Joe had awakened her to the great work of helping people through nursing. Right after high school, Cherry moved into a chintz-and-maple room at Spencer Hospital Nursing School. There, despite a number of scrapes and her stormy romance with Lex, she had proudly earned her R.N.—Registered Nurse. After that, Cherry had lived in Army pup tents, or handsome Army post buildings; in a white marble Castilian castle in Panama, and in rude shacks in the embattled Pacific jungle. For the last six months, awaiting reassignment to volunteer air duty, she had been working in a station hospital in the United States. And now, for a few brief weeks, she occupied this airy little room. Then on to—who knew where? To England, with luck!

  “To wherever our wounded soldiers need me,” Cherry thought soberly. “To wherever I can keep a man from dying.”

  Wherever people needed a girl with love in her heart and healing in her hands, that was where Cherry belonged. She wanted to serve, she had trained to serve. Sympathy or vague good intentions—these were not enough for her. Only a nurse, Cherry knew, could bring so much help and comfort and hope to others, who sorely needed her. Only a nurse could experience such broad human adventure, such profound inner reward. She thought for a moment of the other girls who had trained with her at Spencer—Vivian, Bertha, Mai Lee and Josie. “Yes, they’re the finest, highest type girls, all of them,” Cherry thought. “And they’re all Army nurses!” They were now at another camp in the United States, waiting to go overseas again as ground nurses. Cherry crossed her fingers about where her MAE—Medical Air Evacuation—Squadron of twenty-five nurses (divided into four “flights” and a Chief Nurse) might be sent. There were two squadrons, fifty nurses, training together here at Randolph.

  Cherry buttoned the final button on her coveralls. She was all ready now for work.

  She raced out to the field to find her pilot. He was standing at the plane, talking with the ground crewmen. Cherry liked Captain Wade Cooper. This tall, laughing, sunburned young flier was fun.

  “Here comes my nurse!” he hailed her. He left the mechanics, and drew Cherry under the wing. “We’re early today. Stick around and talk to me, Lieutenant Ames.”

  “What’ll we talk about?” Cherry teased. She leaned against the huge plane wheel.

  “We-ell. What should I say to a nurse?” He grinned candidly. “You know, this is the first time I ever was teamed up with a nurse. We pilots think flight nurses are pretty special.”

  “Thank you, Captain. I’m proud to be in the Air Forces. And I’m glad to have drawn you for my superior officer.”

  “Well, I’m glad too. Now can we drop the formalities?”

  They laughed, and Cherry caught a gleam of deviltry in his bright brown eyes.

  “When the Chief Nurse introduced us, she said you have quite a famous record. What are you famous for, Captain Cooper?” Cherry asked.

  Wade Cooper made a face.

  “I’m famous for doing things in a plane that no one in his right mind should do.”

  “Come on now, tell me.

  “Look, Cherry, I’ll send you a memo in the morning. Read all about it—Cooper’s cutups—only five cents a copy—the twentieth part of a dollah!”

  But Cherry teased and coaxed. Captain Cooper had to give in with a grin. When he grinned, Cherry noted, he looked like a happy six-year-old.

  It turned out that Wade Cooper, when he was in the bomber command, one day took up a bomber—which normally carries a crew of six or seven—all by himself. Without permission, at reckless risk to his life and to the costly plane, he made a one-man attack on a Japanese base. His instruments and lights were shot out by antiaircraft fire, he was caught in a tropic storm, but he brought the giant plane home, anyhow, singlehanded. This was an heroic accomplishment, but against orders. He had already been warned, time and again, about taking crazy chances—for fun.

  “I guess I was something of a smart aleck. Jeepers, what a time I had for myself! When you fly one of those high-powered bombers, why, you’re just sitting there with a thousand horses in your lap and a feather in your tail!”

  “Why did they put you, of all people, in an ambulance plane? That’s one place where you’ll have to fly safe and sane.”

  “That was the general idea. They transferred me to the aerial ambulances to teach me a lesson—to make me fly safely.” He groaned.

  “You’re not very enthusiastic about being here.”

  “Might as well hitch a race horse to a grocery wagon.”

  “Maybe I can make you see that flying the patients is mighty exciting work too.”

  “Well, having you aboard my plane, Lieutenant Cherry, is going to make up for a lot!”

  Now Cherry asked a favor which she had had on her mind for some days—ever since she heard a certain pleasant piece of news. She explained to her pilot that a very fine medical technician she knew was training at Randolph Field. His name was Bunce Smith. He was not yet assigned to a team, and Cherry wondered if Captain Cooper would ask for the young technician.

  “Sure thing. I’ll go right over and request to have him placed in my crew. You wait here.”

  In ten minutes, the flier returned with Bunce. Bunce was still a tall, lanky, gangling youngster, and he was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Miss Cherry! Jehosophat, I’m glad to see you!”

  “Bunce, this is wonderful!”

  He shook her hand so long and hard he nearly pumped off her arm. Cherry looked delightedly at her former corpsman. Bunce had grown up some, though not much. His clothes no longer hung perilously on him; his uniform fit neatly and there were now sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. However, his hands and feet were still outsize and still in his way, and his light brown hair still had a cowlick that would not lie down. His blue eyes beamed at Cherry.

  “Look, I’m still wearing that Indian ring you gave me.”

  “Wearing sergeant’s stripes, too, I see. Want to be on my team?”

  “Do I? Wow! When do we start?”

  Captain Cooper grinned at both of them. “Seems you know each other from way back when.”

  Bunce offered solemnly, “Miss Cherry reformed me once, sir. It was a pleasure.”

  The flier shoved his hands in his pockets. “Ma’am, I see where you’re going to reform me, if I’m no
t careful.”

  They all laughed. Cherry asked her corpsman:

  “What’s been happening to you, anyway? And what’s this ribbon on your shirt? Are you a hero, Bunce?”

  “Shucks, no, Miss Cherry. When I was a litter-bearer in the field, I just went out and got some beat-up fellows and they gave me this fruit salad.”

  “You mean you rescued the wounded under fire.”

  “Well—sort of—yes. Three or four times.”

  Cherry turned to Captain Cooper, who had whistled softly. “Did you hear that modest account, Captain?”

  “Wait till I tell my crew about this pill roller.”

  Two young AAF men joined them. They all exchanged cordial hellos, and Cherry introduced her medical technician. The copilot, Wade’s assistant, was Lieutenant William Mason, a sunburned young man with the sharp eyes of a flier. Lieutenant Richard Greenberg, radioman and navigator, was a quiet, gray-eyed boy who looked efficient. His job was to transmit messages and to keep the plane on the right course.

  Wade, Bill, Dick, Bunce made up Cherry’s flight team. That ended the informality. Once at work, they were Captain, Lieutenant, and Sergeant.

  The plane thrilled Cherry. The muddy-colored giant had four motors and a wingspread of nearly a block on each side. This Douglas C-47, called the Skytrain and “work horse of the air,” was a transport cargo plane. In peace, it had carried passengers or freight; in war, the Army had converted it to carry jeeps and tanks and troops—or patients. When Cherry’s team flew to battle areas to pick up the wounded, they would never fly an empty plane but would haul troops or vital cargo. With such military cargo, they would have no right to the protection of a Red Cross painted on their aircraft. Instead, the white star of American combat forces was painted on its broad dark side.

  “We’ll be a fair target for the enemy,” Cherry realized.

  Up in the plane’s side, in the middle, were huge, double bay doors. Pushed up to them was a portable ramp. There was also a tractor-elevator which lifted two stretchers at a time up to the doors.