JOHNSON CITY, Tenn (WJHL) — In just a few months, Christine Hunter of Johnson City will turn 100 years old.
But time hasn’t faded her memories of military service in World War II or her patriotism that prompted her to care for severely wounded veterans during the war.
“We took care of them and did everything we could to help them,” Hunter said with commitment and clarity as if she’d dressed their wounds and spoon-fed them back to health as recently as last week.
Hunter enlisted in the United States Army Nurse Corps at the start of World War II, not long after her mother delivered the shocking news.
“She said Pearl Harbor had been bombed,” Hunter told news Channel 11. “So that was the beginning.”
Hunter was just 18 years old. She recalled weighing barely enough to meet the required minimum weight to join the service.
After nurse training and time caring for servicemen in her home state of Kentucky, the Army sent Hunter to a military hospital in Martinsburg, West Virginia where she was assigned to care for veterans just back from the battlefield with serious facial wounds inflicted in combat.
“They said, ‘We need her up here to take care of these people whose faces are gone. They need to be fed and taken care of,'” Hunter said, wincing at the memory of the disfiguring injuries she saw and treated. “And I did.”
“Being in the Army Nurses Corps and taking care of patients – that was my life,” she said. “That’s what I did, and I was going to do it right.”
Hunter said the seriously wounded veterans she met inspired her with their selfless devotion.
“They were so nice,” she said. “They never asked ‘why did this happen to me?’ They were there to do what they had to do to help us get through these terrible times that our country was in, and they did it.”
After a career in nursing and raising her family, Hunter said she would jump at the chance to serve on the new front lines–in hospitals as a nurse, which she considers the greatest privilege.
“When you’re a nurse, you have to love that patient,” she said. “I don’t care what kind of a person or if they’re good to you or not. You have to love that patient and take care of them.”
“We raised our hands and offered to help, and it was the greatest privilege of my life,” she said.
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