On June 18, 1944, Lt. Mary Barbour, an Army nurse with the 95th Evacuation Hospital, was working in a field hospital in Italy when the unit came under artillery fire. Medical personnel were directed to take cover. Barbour continued moving between patients who could not move.

She was awarded the Silver Star — one of the first Army nurses to receive it. The award citation noted that she had "maintained an exceptionally high standard of nursing care" during a period when the hospital was "subjected to enemy artillery fire."

Barbour's story is largely unknown because the standard histories of World War II nursing focus on aggregate numbers and official policies rather than individual acts of courage. But the individual records exist: nurses decorated for valor under fire, nurses who stayed with patients when facilities were bombed, nurses who worked in field conditions that would have qualified as combat service for any male soldier.

The Army Nurse Corps decorated 1,619 nurses for meritorious service or acts of valor during World War II. Their names appear in archives, in discharge papers, in unit histories. They rarely appear in the accounts of the war that most people read.

The gap between what happened and what is remembered is a curatorial choice.