Anita was among the first group of nurses ever required to take basic training. She’ll chuckle and tell you, "It was a riot, I think." Until that point in 1943, nurses had been exempt. "Somebody, I think it was a man, in Washington decided everybody should basic training. Up until that time the nurses didn’t have it. So they sent 35 of us to Denver." First, all of the training materials, including films, had been made for males. "If we’d been alone, we’d probably have been ladies, but with 35 of us, we weren’t." They showed these trained female nurses how a man takes a shower and cares for himself after, shall we say, intimate relations. The film ended by saying if anyone needed to see it again, to just ask the sergeant. Well, they did. Over and over and over again. They went through three sergeants that way.

"They’d take us out on the field for close order drill," she says. A diminutive Anita wore a size 9 and was issued the smallest man’s shirt. She was not allowed to roll up the sleeves according to army regulations, so when the unit passed in review and she saluted, four inches of sleeve draped over her face.

One of the women in her unit was a Denver native. Her dog, a German Police dog, found it’s way to the base. When the sergeant would "bark hut-2-3-4" at the women, while they were marching, the dog would attack him. Then they’d have to stop while the woman pulled her dog off. It all lasted six weeks.

Anita was stationed in Denver for much of her duty. Many of the women in her basic training group were attached to the 51^st General Hospital in India, but she was taken off orders and retained at Lowry and Buckley fields. A registered nurse then was assigned to 4 wards of 40 men each, so they had 160 patients to care for. They gave mostly hypodermics and IVs. That left most of the bedside care to the corpsmen. "I got so I knew accents," she says. One day, however, she heard a voice from either Pennsylvania or New Jersey say, "36-26-36." Another soldier told the first to knock it off. "That’s our nurse." The first voice then said, "34-24-34." Again he was to be quiet, or he’d get thrown out the window. The first speaker continued, and, ... he got thrown out the window.

Stories, "you gotta be kidding," she says. The hardest part was talking to the wounded boys and sometimes, talking with them as they died. It didn’t get any easier when she was detailed as a flight nurse. On that detail she went lots of places and never saw anything of them but where the plane landed. She hadn’t sought that assignment out because flight nurses could not wear glasses, which she did. But the big cargo planes flying the American dead and wounded out of England, probably Heathrow, were divided into upper and lower levels and the flight nurses needed to be short. Anita qualified. "You know the Army. They change the rules when it’s convenient."

She began flight detail in October 1944 and was among those who brought the casualties, dead, alive, and injured, out from the Battle of the Bulge, an experience she’d rather not talk about. How did she cope? "You never thought about it," she says, "you just did it. You were in the service of your country. That’s not popular these days."

"The Germans were in place in France. They knew we’d come in. We took a lot of hits." Her cargo hospital planes, however, were not fired on.

She does remember the day her chief nurse said the general’s office had called and was sending the general’s car out for her at 10 a.m. the next day. She didn’t know why, but at 10 that morning she was saluting and reporting for duty. The general escorted her to a ward to meet a soldier who had taken some shrapnel in his leg. It was Bob Young, a childhood friend from Idaho. They had played soldier and nurse as children in Pocatello, and they enjoyed quite a visit.

What was it like when the war finally ended? "What a dumb question," she replies. "Now think about it? How would you answer that?" When the war ended, everyone celebrated, went downtown and kissed everybody. They were demobilized.

Anita and her husband went to the University of Utah where he studied law and she went back for some nursing classes. The GI bill paid them twice that way, an extra $90 a month. Classes were taught off-campus. Each day she went to class, she’d help an older women carrying heavy shopping bags on and off the bus. When she finally finished her bachelor’s degree, she was offered a position on the faculty at the university. The woman carrying those shopping bags, probably full of books, was the Dean of Nursing. "As soon as I graduated, I was appointed to the faculty," she says with a chuckle.

Life next took her to Palo Alto, California, where the 2200 bed Veteran’s Hospital she worked for was affiliated with Stanford University. The classes came to the hospital, and Anita added a master’s degree to her resume. The GI bill was a real benefit to the WWII vets, says Anita. There were more people college educated than there would have been. The veterans of Korea and Vietnam haven’t been treated as well; in her words, "they have valid complaints." Still, she recommends military service for both men and women, since they can get their college education while they are serving now. Also, at age 79, she clears her throat pointedly, a person’s biggest expenses are medical. Military veterans have that provided for them.