Judy Moreau, 87, recalls serving as a nurse in World War II

LEWISTON – Even before Judy Moreau shipped out in April 1943 – beginning two years of service in the South Pacific – she’d become a mature woman.

She had already endured three years of rigorous study in nursing school, a no-frills education that broke for only two weeks a year. Then she spent two more years treating patients in a busy Hartford hospital.

“In a hospital, you do a lot of thinking on your own,” Moreau said, her eyes glancing at the portrait of herself at 24, a pretty woman in an Army uniform.

As much as anyone could be, she was ready for war.

“It was a great adventure, when you look back on it,” she said. “We left New York and sailed down the Atlantic coast.”

Moreau and a shipload of nurses and other medical workers were never told where they were going. When the ship failed to turn east, they finally learned they were headed to the Pacific.

Moreau, now 87, recalls the time with little sentimentality. She enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942 because nurses were needed.

Though her service ended shortly after the war, Moreau, in a way, never left the Army.

She became active in the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Military Officers Association of America and several others groups.

She still is.

“They’re my extended family,” she said. “I relate with them very closely.”

In fact, she limits her volunteer work to Central Maine Medical Center, where she lends a hand in the preadmissions testing office.

“I don’t have time for more than one day a week,” she said. “I’m too busy.”

She has meetings several days a week and plans to spend today’s holiday with fellow veterans at the Portland Country Club, where she’ll have lunch and listen to a speech by a retired Navy admiral.

“I’m a flag-waver,” she said. “I am very, very patriotic.”

That feeling was deepened by her war service.

New Caledonia

Her journey to the South Pacific took about a month.

“It was a shipload of independent nurses,” Moreau said. “It’s a miracle somebody didn’t get killed. Everybody wanted to be the boss.”

There was plenty of work waiting for them when they reached their destination: New Caledonia, an island in the South Pacific Ocean.

There, after a month at sea, the nurses slept and worked in tents.

“We expected a hospital,” she said. When they arrived, servicemen where building a permanent hospital and barracks. “We were put right to work.”

Moreau was assigned to a psychiatric ward, working with some of the most severe cases, men who were suffering from “battle fatigue” and “combat fatigue.”

Today, they would be diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder. Back then, some were accused of shirking their duty.

“There were no goldbrickers,” she said of her patients, brought to the hospital from places such as Bataan and Guadalcanal. Eventually, the numbers of incoming patients slowed, as the war’s island-hopping neared Japan.

“For us, it wasn’t all dreary” Moreau said.

After a few months, the hospital was completed. People spent their off hours listening to the infamous Tokyo Rose on the radio.

Some young men even taught Moreau and her friends – none of whom went through boot camp – to salute.

“Men would salute us. We had to salute back,” Moreau said. “The three of us never saluted the same way.”

Little moments like that made the time pass.

“I never heard anybody whine,” she said.

In early 1945, Moreau was sent back to the states for advanced medical training. After the monthlong school, she visited her family in Hudson, N.Y., and was headed back to the Pacific when a pair of atomic bombs ended the war.

Moreau emerged as an even-more-mature 28-year-old.

“Your perspective in life has to change,” said Moreau, who married a year later and moved to Lewiston.

She now has a son, a daughter, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

“I’m proud to be 87,” she said.

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