Marguerite Noutary talks about her childhood 
and her career in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps


Vivian Peterson:	Marguerite Noutary (capital M-A-R-G-U-E-R-I-T-E, capital N-O-U-T-A-R-Y). She lives at 213 Claire (capital C-L-A-I-R-E) Avenue in Fullerton, California (capital F-U-L-L-E-R-T-O-N), California, zip code 92635.

Marguerite Noutary:	…have heard, I was born in Fullerton and raised there. My folks came directly from southern France and they landed in Anaheim. From there, they had to walk to Fullerton. [audience reaction] And the reason they came to Fullerton, my mother had a brother there already living in Fullerton. And my mother, many times, told me, oh, if she could’ve returned to France that very day! [audience laughter] That this area here was just a desert, and she mentioned that many times, a desert. And my father died in 1953, and he told me, “You know what? This place could come, could return again to a desert. [audience laughter] And, if he only knew how many drought years we, we’ve had. It’s not funny, really. The reason, um, my father came to, um, the United States, there were a lot of people at that time from businesses and, uh, ranches and the big land owners would go to France and tell them all the opportunities and for them to come here. I thought that was very interesting, way back then. So, that’s when they decided to come to Fullerton, 1905. They were very happy and contented and never went back. [audience laughter]

	As you know, I graduated from the school of nursing in, uh, Orange, which is now UCI. I had toured many of the, uh, hospitals in Los Angeles and all, but they seemed oh, so crowded to me and so far away! [laughter] So, that’s why I decided to come to Orange County. I had been to Fullerton College, of course, and, uh, Fullerton High School. At that time, even, they required you to have at least 2 years of college before we could go into the school of nursing. I was there for 3 years, and, uh, the third year, there would be, uh, Red Cross nurses would come and encourage us to join the Army Nurse Corps. I don’t know if they had an inkling what was going to happen or just [‘cause 2:54].

But anyway, there were about 6 of us that volunteered but we could not go into the service until we had taken our state board. So, we graduated in October of ’40, and I think it was about a month before we could take our state board. Then, the recruiter would come again and ask us, you know, if we were ready and all this and that, but we weren’t ready. We didn’t have our, uh, um, we had our diploma, but we weren’t registered yet in the state of California. So, by July 1st, I received my orders and, you know what? They had my name all spelled wrong! 

Audience:		[laughter] [Inaudible].

Marguerite Noutary:	Oh, I would go to different places [in forts 3:38] and show’m my orders 
and what should I do? “Oh, go on, go on – they’ll take care of that when you get to Camp Roberts.”

So I went to Camp Roberts and the chief nurse looked at my orders and she chewed me out that I had come on orders that were not right and so on and so forth. And I could not go on duty until my name was all corrected and spelled right, so I just sat and sat for about a month before everything was corrected. And so that was the start of my career. [audience laughter]

Um, Camp Roberts, at that time, in 1941, the hospital was not completed, and the roads were mostly just dirt, and the camp was really crowded. So we started going on duty, well, the nurses, as soon as they arrived, would go right on duty. But I had to wait about a month. And then, as the time went on, uh, Camp Roberts was really a place where the soldiers would come and be stationed until they were sent into, uh, the South Pacific, mainly. That was the staging area. And we worked, uh, our hours were usually, uh, 3 shifts if, if the chief nurse had enough nurses but if she didn’t have enough nurses, we just worked 12 hours, 20 hours, whatever she said, we worked. And, um, as soon as war was declared, December 7th, all the – we had no days off then, she just canceled everything. No days off. No vacations. No one could get out of the service at the end of a year because, at that time, they said ser-, you went into the service for 1 year only but that was canceled. The only way you could get out was if you were pregnant. [audience laughter] So, that was managed, also. [audience laughter]

Also, at that time, it was interesting to know as soon as war was declared on December 7th, I’ll never forget, um, there were a group of corpsmen and doctors. They left that evening. We weren’t told what was going on or nothing. But, you know where they went? If you remember, along Morro Bay, Santa Barbara, because apparently there had been a ship seen there. [inaudible audience response] That was very interesting. It wasn’t until about 1942 that nurses started to get orders, um, either to go to South Pacific or to England and, um, my orders never seemed to come, never seemed to come, so the chief nurse told me once, “I don’t know what it is but your, you never seem to get orders!” [audience laughter] I don’t know why, I don’t know. [audience laughter] 

Audience:		[Inaudible].

Marguerite Noutary:	Because my name was spelled wrong, yes. [audience laughter]

Then, finally, uh, I did receive orders and it only stated to prepare for 2 years. It didn’t’ say which theater, the South Pacific, CBI, or Europe – prepare for 2 years. So, I prepared for 2 years, not knowing where we’d go.

From Camp Roberts, we went to Camp Beale. Um, that’s east of San Francisco, where the staging area was for, uh, most of the enlisted people and officers to go to the South Pacific so I felt sure I was going to the South Pacific. But from there, um, a group of nurses were shipped down to Los Angeles, uh, and then we got aboard ship on, at Los Angeles Harbor. Then, we docked at Perth, Australia. From Perth, Australia, well, I thought well, here I’m going to be in Australia. But no, we were there just for about a day, so they could re-, uh, refuel the ship and get supplies, I was told. I might mention, onboard ship, there were 18 nurses to a cabin – 3 decks, 1 washbasin [audience laughter]. So, we got up, uh, I was on the top, of course, so we’d get up first; I was on the third layer and then the second and then the first. Made it a little more convenient.

When we first crossed the equator, you know what they did to the women? They turned off all the water, ducked our heads in flour [sounds of wonderment from audience], and we stayed that way all day. [audience laughter] So, when we crossed it again, to go up to Calcutta, they didn’t’ do that, though. Thank goodness! Once was enough. [audience laughter] If I remember correctly, there were 3,000 nurses and enlisted men onboard that ship. And the enlisted men, I was told, slept, um, 8-hour shifts because there wasn’t enough bunks.

We landed at Calcutta and the nurses were taken to the hospital there. The hospital in Burm-, in, uh, Calcutta, as a whole, was very nice. It was a beautiful quarters. It had been, um, I believe, a, like a large hall or, and then they had added buildings to it, but it was, as a whole, very nice and, uh, very clean and all. We were told when we’d go into Calcutta, all we had to do to the taxi driver is, when you were ready to come back, to tell him that you wanted to go to the American hospital. That’s all you had to say, American hospital, and he knew where to take you. Because they didn’t speak English at that time, anyway. Most of’m, well, they could understand or else they just didn’t want to, I don’t know.

The patients there, they were taken very well, taken care of very well and then those that could go back to duty would go back but those that had to be sent back to the USA usually were flown, either directly from Calcutta or they were flown to Karachi, and from Karachi, they would return by ship to New York.

Then, from Calcutta, I received orders to go to, uh, M’ichina Burma. M’ichina Burma is real close to the Burma Road and if any of you have seen pictures of the Burma Road, believe you me, you haven’t seen dust until you’ve seen the Burma Road...
Audience:		[Inaudible  11:09].

Marguerite Noutary:	...or mud, too, yes. But, M’ichina, we were in tents at that time and the 
mo-, right in the middle of a monsoon season. There again, the nurses were 2 to a tent and, uh, I have never seen anything mildew so fast like in Burma. Our billfolds, all mildewed. Everything in our suitcases or, uh, foot lockers. Our hair was never dry; it was moist all the time. And we all had a little Burmese girl to each camp. You know how much they paid her? The army paid her. 

Audience:		[Inaudible  11:53].

Marguerite Noutary:	Well, 15 cents, American money, in a day. And I don’t know 1 or, was it 5 
pounds? 5 pounds of rice a month, or something like that. But they were excellent. The army had set up a, a washing room with washing machines and all but, you know, they would never want to us the washing machines. They would go down to the [Ariwani 12:18] River and they’d wash everything by hand, right on the rocks. The nurses, uh, we wore either the fatigues on duty or, if you remember the seersucker dresses...

Audience:		[Inaudible  12:33].

Marguerite Noutary:	...and the seersucker, um, the pants and the blouse. And we always had to 
have after, was it 5:00, I believe, uh, our sleeves rolled down because of malaria. Our, uh, showers weren’t very close at all to our tent. You had to walk quite a ways and by the time, it seems like when I would get there, the water was turned off. [audience laughter] The water always turned off. Whenever you’d receive, uh, word there was a party somewhere, you know, well, what did we do? Go to our tent and change our fatigues. [audience laughter] We never wore our street dress at all. That seems so strange to me when I look back now, God, not even a dress! [coughing]

Um, our duty there was hard. I thought being on duty in M’ichina was the hardest. By that, I mean we would receive word, “Well, you’re gonna get, uh, 50 basket cases,” or “You’re gonna receive 100 basket cases today.” So, um, in the emergency room, we would, uh, use the triage method and whichever the nurse, usually the doctors would choose certain nurses to work in triage and triage then, it was up to the nurse to, uh, see which patient, uh, looked the least injured and, uh, those that you thought would recover. But those that were dead on arrival, you just had to wait and, uh, the chaplain took care of them, took care of the bodies.

There were, uh, just plain – the hospital was just plain tents, real long, narrow tents and you, we would have patients on both sides of the tents. The first thing you knew, one side of the tent, the rain would start coming through. Then, you’d have to move all those patients over to the other side. By the time you had’m all moved over to the other side, here comes the rain over here, so back you’d go to the other side. [laughter] And the latrines for the patients were quite a ways from the tent and that was very hard on the patients. I remember that very clearly. And the, uh, food, the food to be served to the patients in Burma, I thought, was very, very hard. And, as a whole, I thought the food wasn’t too, too good but the be-, we did the best we could.

I was there, uh, uh, 4 months in Burma, then I received orders to go to Kunming, China. And, uh, oh, by then really, I’d just as soon, I would have liked to have stayed in M’ichina, myself, but you know how it is. You don’t get what you want. So away I went to Kunming, China, another nurse and I, we had orders. And you know that’s the only time I ever wore my dog tags, when we flew over the hump. I had to wear my dog tags. I always kept them in a pocket or something but this time, I thought I better wear them. [audience laughter]

Um, over the hump, that’s quite an experience. You look down and you see those mountains and you see that little Burma Road down there, you wonder how in the world they ever got through. To this day, I just can’t imagine with all that equipment that they drove through that Burma Road into Kunming. And, of course, all this time, you know, people ask me, “Well, what were you doing in China and Burma?” I said, “Well we had a war!” “You mean they were fighting there?” I said, “Yes, they were.” The Japanese were there and it’s amazing how many Japanese we had as prisoners in M’ichina. In fact, I went over the hump once with a plane full of just Japanese prisoners, from M’ichina to Kunming. But, um, as a whole, the prisoners, though, they were meek at the mouth. They couldn’t say anything. They do, the Japanese would do anything you’d want them or ask them to do but, um, they were fighting, believe me.

Of course, in Burma, too, there was a lot of malaria. We had tents and tents full of malaria patients only. And if you’ve never seen anyone go into tremors, I have never seen anything like it, in, only in, uh, malaria patients, how bad they can go into these tremors. And, um, usually, it would always happen on the ward that I’d be assigned to and they’d all go into it, it seemed like the same time at night. [audience laughter] It was something.

Then from, uh, Kunming, as you know, war ended, what was it, August the 5th or 7th? [audience response] 7th. Okay, and then, uh, October 5th, that was it, the nationalists and the communists started fighting and they were only a few miles from the hospital. Then we received orders right away to evacuate the hospital immediately to Calcutta, because you could hear them fighting. But before we did that, we did receive, uh, the General Doolittle’s flyers that were captured in Japan and they were flown to M’ichina Burma and, uh, they were very, very ill. By that, I mean some were mentally ill and others were physically ill. And as soon as we could, we would, uh, fly them back to the United States. But there was a large group of them that we received. They were very, very good patients. Very, very thin. Then, when the hospital was moved back to Calcutta, I remained there for quite a while, until almost November, because we had a skeleton crew of army personnel there only. But as soon as we got orders, we were moved back to, uh, Calcutta. Then from Calcutta, we had to wait for orders again, so they were sending the, uh, the patients from Calcutta back to the United States very rapidly. I don’t know what happened there all of a sudden, but everybody was leaving.

In the meantime, though, I want to mention that, in Kunming, if you remember [inaudible 20:01] that we had as [inaudible 20:04], well, right outside of Kunming, there were acres and acres of equipment, Jeeps, tanks, everything, and all these fur-lined jackets that the, uh, pilots wore and all that, and some of the nurses thought, “Oh, we’ll go over and see if they’ll sell us some of those jackets,” and all this and that. Boy, we went over there, and they told us in nothing flat that this was [inaudible 20:30] and everything remains right here, that nobody could touch’m. So, you can imagine how much we [laughed 20:37]. [audience laughter]

The hum-, the humidity over there is unbearable. It’s just unbearable, the humidity. And, uh, several of the nurses, especially in, uh, Burma, the chief nurse did send a few of the nurses back to the United States because, uh, it was hard to take. Everything we ate was canned, in Burma and in China, canned food. And I ended up eating [inaudible 21:10]. No, it was steamed, uh, stewed tomatoes. That’s all I could eat. And the chief nurse came to me one day and she said, “You’ve got to eat more or I’m gonna send you back to the States.” [audience laughter] So, I thought, well, I’ll try, I’ll try, but it just seemed so, um, it must be when you’re in a foreign country or something, I don’t know, that I just couldn’t swallow that stuff down, I just couldn’t take it. [audience laughter] But I finally did start eating a little more.

In Calcutta, they did not put us on duty. I think they felt sorry for us. They didn’t, uh, send us on duty. We could just take it easy and rest and see the sights. Oh, the sights! [audience laughter] They told us, “If you go to the burning [inaudible 22:01] – you know, where they burn the bodies and all – I have a picture in there – you weren’t supposed to go inside but I did. I went inside and you could see the legs and feet, you know, and then hear [inaudible 22:16] and burning and all, oh, it was unbearable. Also, they told us, “If you see a body in the street, if you go back in 1 or 2 days and you still see that body, if the vultures haven’t eaten it. So I went back, just for the heck of it, and I wore my gas mask [audience laughter] and here was, would be these bodies so that’s how the filth was. And some friends of mine went over to India a few years ago and I asked them if they really thought it had been cleaned up much and they said, “Oh no, I think it’s still the same way you saw it. There’s new hotels and all that but, as a whole, there, they haven’t improved that much, so I don’t know.” But it was pretty bad, very bad.

From, uh, Calcutta then, we received orders to go by plane to Karachi. To Karachi, we waited for a ship. The ship, we had to wait there, I think, about 30 days and we returned by, uh, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. And, believe you me, in December, that Atlantic was rough. [audience laughter] It was rough! Several of the nurses landed in the sick bay, I remember. We landed in New York. From New York, we were sent to, uh, Camp Kilmer in New Jersey. From Camp Kilmer, we received orders then to be flown to Camp Beale in California. And there, they kept us, again, for a month or two, I don’t know why, before they would process us through to be separated from the service. And the officer that spoke to a group of nurses, he told us, “Don’t throw away those active years of yours! You go back wherever you plan to go, and you join the reserves.” So, dumb me, [ audience laughter] I joined the reserves and I stayed in the reserves until age 60, which included, altogether, my active and reserve, 36 years and 8 months. [audience response] We would meet one weekend a month, usually at the UC-, what is now UCI, and then when UCI came in, they didn’t want the reserves, so we had to go to the naval hospital in Long Beach for our weekends, which was very nice, really. 

Then we had our 2 weeks of active duty, usually in the summer. And wherever you worked, I know the state of California, they had no problem at all there, you showed them your orders and, uh, you went directly then for your 2 weeks active duty. However, I didn’t mention this but December 1st of, uh, 1961, I received orders to, I was recalled on active duty. I thought, “Oh my gosh, what have I done now?” [audience laughter] And I was sent to, uh, Fort Polk, Louisiana. They recalled 500 nurses and we arrived at Fort Polk. And all these nurses, half of them, you know, madder than you know what! And, they were gonna write to this congressman and all this and that, and I just told’m, “Well, I’m sorry. I don’t know any congressmen, so I guess I’ll stay.” [audience laughter] So I stayed, which I’m grateful now. It added up the, uh, points toward your retirement. And, my job here in the state hospital at Norwalk was still there waiting for me when I returned.

I asked the chief nurse from Washington, when she came down to visit us at Fort Polk, “Why did you call back all these nurses from California when you have so many out here on the east coast?” She looked at me and she said, “I’ll call any nurse back when I want.” [audience laughter] So I kept quiet. But, it’s amazing how many of those nurses left right away. They did not go on duty, which I thought was terrible in this matter because the expense to get there, then the expense to process them to get out as soon as they got there. There were several from this area.

When I was chief nurse of the Orange County Medical Unit, uh, it was very interesting. Some of you might remember Colonel, uh, [Carl 27:13], Paul Carl from Orange? Dr. [Roland 27:17]? He was in the unit. All these doctors from Orange County, and it was a very, it still is – see, we do have a very active, um, um, medical unit here in Orange County. And we thought certainly we were gonna be called several times, as a whole, as a whole unit, to go back. And they would tell us, “Be sure to have your finances and your home and everything taken care of because, if we receive orders, we’ll have to leave in a hurry.”

When I received my orders to go to Camp, to Fort Polk, I thought the same thing. What am I going to do with this house? I received orders at 11:00 in the morning and by evening I had my house rented and everything taken care of. I called my hairdresser and she said, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. I’ll take care of it for you. I’ll see that it’s rented and everything,” and she sure did. And, by that evening, I had everything taken care of and I left in 8 days. And the other nurse went to Fort Polk and one went to Oregon as I recall. And we thought sure we were gonna leave from, uh, uh, Fort Polk, uh, they kept mentioning, uh, Europe ‘cause Europe was very bad apparently at that time in ’61 and ’62. And then I had orders to come back to California from Fort Polk and [ended up 28:49] with that other deal, the Bay of Pigs started in [audience response] Cuba. But, uh, they let us come home. They didn’t keep us.

So all in all though, really, as I look back, I’m very grateful that they sent me to these countries ‘cause I don’t think I want to go on my own. [audience laughter]

Vivian Peterson:	This was a Women's Overseas Service League oral history project taped at the Orange County Unit in, uh, Laguna Hills, California at the general meeting on March 3, 1990. The background noise is the rest of the people in the audience.


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