Veona Vaillette
Age: 88
Hometown: Grand Rapids, Minn.
Residence: Desert Hot Springs
Military branch: U.S. Army Nurse Corps
Years served: March 17, 1945-June 18, 1947
Rank: Registered nurse, second lieutenant
Family: Three children, three grandchildren, three great-grandchildren
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II Wednesday through Sunday through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
More
Veona Vaillette worked stateside and overseas as a member of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps during World War II.
Nurses were in high demand during the war. She was inducted into service on March 17, 1945, and was sent to Madigan General Hospital in Fort Lewis, Wash., for basic training.
She worked at the Hospital Train Unit Service Command Unit (SCU) 1960 at Presidio of San Francisco, a major Army installation.
The trains, staffed by doctors, nurses and other support personnel, would pick up sick and injured veterans returning from the war at the port and take them to Letterman General Hospital in the Presidio — or other general hospitals throughout the U.S.
“The fellas could get right on the train from there,” she said about the port. “Our trips would take us to any hospital in the country. My first trip was to Florida.”
The nurses would tend to injured patients during train rides.
“The ones that came back, we had medicine for them,” she said. “Morphine for the ones who had a lot of pain. (We administered) mostly pain medication.
“Most of them just laid there,” she said.
In mid-November 1945, Vaillette was sent to Asheville, N.C., to prepare to go overseas.
“They gave us (long) underwear and heavy boots that went up to our knees,” Vaillette said. “We were put on a train that went up to Boston. It had no heat and only one bathroom for the whole train — and the toilet was plugged most of the time.”
The women were in Boston just a short time before heading across the Atlantic Ocean.
“They lined us all up and we boarded the ship in the middle of the night,” she said.
The ship, the MS John Ericsson, was bound for Bremen, Germany.
“Through the holidays we were on the ship,” said Vaillette, looking at the ship's Christmas Eve menu she had kept as a souvenir from her voyage.
After landing in Bremen, the women of the Army Corps of Nurses were sent to Bremerhaven.
“Then they started shipping nurses to different Army camps,” Vaillette said.
In January 1946, she was assigned to the 193rd General Hospital in Verdun, France.
“I ended up in a woman's ward,” she said.
She thought for sure she'd be tending to injured men, but instead, she cared for a handful of sick women.
“I came all this way to be assigned to a woman's ward,” said Vaillette.
After being overseas for less than a month, she learned there was a family emergency and was needed at home.
The Army orders said little more than she was to take the first transportation leaving for the U.S. from France.
All during this time, Vaillette had no idea what had happened.
“I didn't dare think of anybody,” she said during her long wait to return, fearing that possibly her grandparents had taken ill.
As she was getting ready to board the ship leaving from France, the Red Cross delivered a letter to Vaillette.
Lila Gilbert was Vaillette's 13-year-old sister. She had been staying at her older sister's home in Grand Rapids when a furnace blew up Jan. 13, 1946.
“It said, ‘We buried Lila yesterday,'” Vaillette said.
