For the Boys

A month after her 24th birthday, Lt. Mary Elizabeth Balster collapses among the rubble of a shelled supply room. On the night of November 30, 1944, holed up in the Heinrich Himmler Barracks in Morhange, France, Lt. Balster's evac receives a typical patient load, but this time one of the admissions is a 19-year-old tanker she'd nursed back to health five months before in Normandy. The charge nurse on Surgical gently informs the lieutenant that the private is critical. Rising determined to save him, Balster limps toward the shelled supply room determined to search for any blood plasma bottles still intact. Recaptured from her mother's reminiscences and letters home, N. C. R. Davis takes listeners through every heat-of-battle harrowing moment as Balster lived it, achieving a rare glimpse of one nurse's point of view during the latter part of the European conflict. The book mixes Lt. Balster's observations, memories, and dreams to tell the story of a richly rebellious woman trying to navigate her life while nursing wounded and dying frontline soldiers. Her strong-willed, beguiling personality fosters the grit necessary for her success as a combat nurse, but these same characteristics cause two men to fall in love with her. And the personal cost of war comes to a heartrending conclusion, as she must choose one man over the other.