"At 92, Ruby Bradley has outlived the few who could tell you her story first-hand. Half a century ago she was a frontline U.S. Army nurse in Korea on the day 100,000 Chinese soldiers overran American troops and started closing in on her hospital tent.
“THEY WERE GOING to take me out first. I got behind something and stayed. I was the last one out,” she said.
She stayed after she had loaded the sick and the wounded onto the plane that was sent for her. (“Everything was happening, and happening fast,” she told one interviewer at the time). Communist snipers surrounded the plane Maj. Bradley jumped aboard just as her ambulance exploded from an enemy shell.
“You get out in a hurry when you have somebody behind you with a gun,” she recalled.
Back in Spencer, Ruby Bradley came home to a hero’s parade. Neighbors wondered why Bradley had volunteered to serve on the front lines, considering where she’d been before — a POW for 37 months in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, slowly starving so children could eat.
- Photo of Ruby waving was taken in
1945, at time of Japanese surrender
“I’d save part of my food for the children, later in the day, when they started crying and being hungry,” she said.
MEDALS AND MEMORIES
Nurse Bradley shrank to 86 pounds. She used her ill-fitting uniform to smuggle surgical supplies into the P.O.W. camp: “I was bulging here and bulging there, you know, with all sorts of equipment.”
Bradley’s courage saved many lives. She assisted 230 operations and delivered 13 babies.
“I knew I’d get through. I was just sure of it,” she remembered.
Nurse Bradley didn’t just get by: She became the most-decorated woman in American military history. She has a heavy shadow-box display case filled with medals: having earned 34 medals and citations for bravery, including two Bronze stars. She retired from the Army in 1963, but remained a nurse all her working life. She admits this was not the life Army recruiters promised in 1933.
“They said, ‘Now, don’t worry. You won’t be in any war!’ Here I was in two of ‘em,” she said.
But she fought and fought fiercely for six years — not just in one war, but two, determined to save lives while everyone around her was trying to take them."