Our mother Sue Lee Ballard during WWII

Thoughts from my sister Susan :

I just read an article about the new WW II memorial in Washington D.C. I couldn't help but think of my mother, who was a nurse in the European Theater from 1942 until a bit after the official end of the war when the U.S. Army rolled into Germany and the Balkans. She was 21 years old when she went overseas; her entire class from nursing school in Hot Springs, Arkansas signed up for the Army Nurse Corps right after graduation.

Sue Lee Ballard was a smart farm girl who won a full scholarship to nursing school, her ticket away from a place where you had to hide in the outhouse to read a book because there was always so much work to do. She and her identical twin, Sibyl, were born a few years after the eldest child, their brother, Rogers (not a spelling error; it was a family surname used as a first name).

As the oldest girls, they were given the task of raising each former baby of the family after the newest baby was born, since four more children came after the twins. They had endless chores at home, which may have accounted for why both of the twins loved school so much. They shone at school, their main competition being each other.

So Sue Ballard was used to being a responsible person and a hard worker. She did well in the Army Nurse Corps and quickly rose to administrative positions. She saw a lot of young men who were injured and she saw people die. During the war she was notified of Rogers death at Anzio and she had an Australian fiance named "Chuck", who was also killed. She knew (and I think may have had an affair with) Creighton Abrams, who was later a general in Vietnam. I remember her seeing his picture on a 1960's magazine and staring at it for some time, saying this was the Creighton Abrams she knew in Europe.

When I see pictures of her from the war years, she looks much older than the hippies of my generation did in their early twenties. The dark red lipstick and the formal hairdos of the 1940s may have been the cause. Or, perhaps it was because life and maturity are sped up during times of immediate crisis. When you or anyone around you may truly die at any time, it is different from a generation that has enough space from catastrophe for intellectual debate and protest. Many people died in Vietnam, but I know that I was removed from seeing it in person, and, in fact, I knew not one close friend or even good acquaintance that actually went to Vietnam. The nearest thing was a few boys I vaguely knew from high school, or the older brother of a friend who went in the mid-60s as a Marine lieutenant after he graduated from college.

So, I had a very different young adulthood than my mother. I always sensed that the woman and mother she became had a lot to do with being an army nurse. I can still recall her animated conversation whenever she encountered another WW II veteran, usually a repairman or an insurance salesman, etc. My own father (who died when I was 18 mos. old) had been too old for the war, and so had my stepfather been, though he painted many of the portraits used in Navy posters produced during the war.

I was the only kid I knew who had a mom as the veteran in their household. One amusing aspect of this was that my mom could literally swear like a trooper when she got really, really mad, though she was a highly respectable person, otherwise. I always silently thought how amazed people would be if they could hear her, and a little smile would curl the corners of my teenaged mouth. Since I was the source of her frustration, that little smile must have driven her buggy.

My mother died of cancer at age forty-six in July of 1967. I was seventeen years old and my half-sister's were both very young (almost two and just 5). She never received any of the belated honors for women veterans, though I know she was glad that she served her country. She revered both FDR and Dwight Eisenhower because of her wartime experience and she retained a special feeling for North Africa, Sicily, Italy, & France, places she never saw again after she returned to the U.S. She was a strong and queen-like woman, always elected as president of organizations, and the most skilled, generous, and warm of hostesses. She was the Director of Nursing at Gravely Sanatorium (a tuberculosis hospital) in Chapel Hill, NC for many years before we moved to Connecticut, closer to the New York City studio of my stepfather. My new little sisters were raised there until her death and she was a great mom to them and became a heart-felt gardener (I always wondered if her farm roots reasserted themselves after so many years).