The voices you hear in No Time For Fear speak proudly. Nothing prepared these nurses for the magnitude of a Pearl Harbor bombing or the sight of an overfilled ward of legless and armless young men fresh from battles in France or Iwo Jima. This oral history collection provides an important counterpoint to the strategy and planning of warfare so often chronicled by the male warrior. Women, moreover, take center stage. One smells, sees, and feels war through their senses.

"My parents took me to the train when I joined the army, and I remember Mom saying, You might accept sending your son to war, but not your daughter." As she remembers her mother's words, the graying grandmother becomes the twenty-one-year-old nurse, eager to meet the world in 1942.

Nurses served bravely under fire beginning with the first battle of World War II at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In the Philippines and Guam American military nurses were captured by the Japanese and continued to use their skills to aid other prisoners, despite having to endure devastating illnesses and extreme hardship.