Veteran nurse heard the call.

Byline: Bill Bishop The Register-Guard

No one asked her to volunteer to go ashore with the first Army nurses to hit the beach at Normandy four days after D-Day in World War II.

But if they had asked instead of ordered, Sallylou Bonzer says she still would have gone - even knowing that ahead lay 27 months of 12-hour shifts tending the most seriously wounded GIs closest to the battlefront. Forget the TV image of a MASH hospital, those were farther behind the lines than the field hospital where Bonzer worked.

"They had a lot more fun than we did," says Bonzer, now 86 and retired in Eugene after a 42-year nursing career.

Field hospitals seldom stayed a week in the same cow pasture. Often they moved from one battle right into the next, the nurses sleeping in foxholes.

"I remember the time I woke up with snow on me," she recalls.

Her nurse colleague, Frances Slanger, was killed when the Germans shelled their hospital, becoming the first American nurse to die in Europe after D-Day.

So Bonzer says she felt "very humble, very proud" when the French government, on the 60th anniversary of the invasion, offered the National Order of the Legion of Honor to her and other surviving nurses of the 45th Field Hospital Unit. The medal, founded by Napoleon Bonaparte, honors those who do exceptional service for the country.

But Bonzer also feels a little saddened, too, about all the nurses who didn't live the long, happy life she had after the war, other deserving veterans who didn't get their medals.

"There should be some way to honor them," she says. "All the veterans deserve an honor. I feel sorry for all those boys who didn't get any medals."

After all, she says, many nurses did the same hard work she did. Altogether, 350,000 women served in uniform during World War II. Her entire nursing class ended up serving during the war - all the others were assigned to the Pacific, she adds.

For all of the horrors she saw, Bonzer believes that the nurses were better trained and better prepared for their duties than the average GI. Store clerks, farmers, boys fresh from high school just weren't prepared for what would happen to them in battle, she says.

"It was entirely different for them," she says. "We were volunteers. I knew what I was getting into. When you're doing what you know how to do, it isn't as frightening."

But she'll never forget June 10, 1944, the day she and 17 other nurses waded ashore from a landing craft at Normandy.

"It was a mess. Complete chaos. There were wounded lying around everywhere," she says. "We worked so hard. We lost an awful lot of people we tried to save."

Bonzer hadn't planned on being a nurse as she grew up in Wisconsin. She thought photography or painting was more her thing. But as a child during the Great Depression, she learned the importance of being self-sufficient. Nursing school was a ticket to security, and she found she enjoyed it.

She was scrubbed up and working in surgery when news of Pearl Harbor arrived.

Bonzer says she's not entirely certain why she joined the Army. It was not so much a pure act of patriotism. Nor was it out of any military tradition in her family, she says.

For the 22-year-old nurse, it was a call to adventure, the same voice that enticed her to sign up for military glider training - which led to a crash landing that she walked away from. The same allure that, later in the war, took her hitchhiking to the Riviera with another nurse on their days off.

"I've never dwelt on the horrors of the war. I've never felt that is particularly healthy," Bonzer says. "If I think of it at all, I think of the fun things we did."

But Bonzer's volunteer work in Eugene over the years brought her face-to-face with other veterans - particularly Vietnam veterans - who have a much harder time dealing with their experiences and finding a way back home.

"I've always been lucky," Bonzer says.

After the war, she married Dr. John Bonzer, a doctor she met in the 45th Field Hospital Unit and re-met in New Jersey after the war.

"We didn't talk about the war. We had other things to talk about," she says.

They moved to Eugene in 1949 and have four children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Even today, with the nation in a different war, Bonzer says she still hears that same calling.

"I would go now if they could take an older lady," she says. "It's interesting to do different things."

VETERANS DAY BY THE NUMBERS

Veterans Day originated as "Armistice Day" on Nov. 11, 1918, to mark the end of World War I. It became Veterans Day in 1954.

24.9 million military veterans in the United States 

1.7 million women veterans

9.7 million: veterans age 65 and older

381,000: veterans who served in both the Vietnam and Desert Storm eras

- U.S. Census Bureau 

CAPTION(S):

Sallylou Bonzer of Eugene was recently awarded a special medal of honor by the French consulate for her service as a nurse in the Normandy invasion during World War II. Bonzer holds her French Legion of Honor award. V e t e r a n s D a y