by Jess McCuan   .   portraits by Rebecca D’Angelo

Military nurses find themselves at a curious intersection between life and death. 

As nurses, they are trained to heal and comfort. But like all soldiers, they’re trained to hunt and kill when necessary. Not all military nurses end up brandishing weapons in combat zones, of course. Canton resident Wendy Larkin narrowly missed being shipped to Laos near the end of the Vietnam War and instead spent several months treating colonels and generals at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Ashevillean Lynette Mitchel, who joined the Navy during World War II and always wanted to serve on a big ship, spent much of her time in an Asheville convalescent hospital where she met her husband Jack and made lifelong friends.

But some do get assigned to combat missions and end up straddling the line between fighter and caregiver. Terri Trimble, a Brevard nurse who just returned from her stint at a combat support hospital in northern Iraq in March, says she often felt tugged in opposite directions. Last year, a 16-year-old Iraqi girl was rushed to Trimble’s area at the hospital with gunshot wounds. Injured American soldiers there recognized the girl because they had raided her home looking for her brothers. “It was a hard thing,” Trimble says. “Her family members were the ‘bad guys.’ But I thought—you’re a nurse, it’s your job to take care of her.”

Larkin, now the critical care director at Hendersonville’s Park Ridge Hospital, says no matter how ugly or deep their wounds, she never flinched at treating a soldier. “He did his part, I’m going to do mine,” she recalls. “You have a purpose and you keep on going.” 

Lynette Mitchel, 86, Served in World War II

Many Ashevilleans know the Kenilworth Inn in its current incarnation, as a castle-like stone building full of upscale apartments. But in 1944, when Lynette Mitchel arrived there, the place was teeming with injured sailors. It wasn’t the first time the Kenilworth had been taken over by the military. The eight-story luxury hotel, built on a high knoll just southeast of downtown Asheville in the 1880s, was used as a U.S. Army hospital from 1918 to 1919 and as a mental health sanatorium from 1931 to 1943. When the Navy turned the hotel into a convalescent hospital again during World War II, they upgraded the building, adding spaces where recovering sailors could watch movies and bowl. 

Mitchel knew her assignment to the Kenilworth was a lucky one. She remembers standing in a dispersing office in upstate New York, telling the officer there that she’d been assigned to Asheville. “He said, ‘Do you have pull with someone in Washington?’” she recalls. “You are going to God’s country.” Indeed, for a woman who grew up in snowy Buffalo, had never been to the South, and who had just endured a harsh boot camp for Navy nurses in upstate New York, a convalescent hospital in a picturesque Southern town was a plum post. 

She spent her days at the Kenilworth overseeing physical therapy, wrapping up bandages and administering casts. Yes, the men were injured, but they were generally in good moods. “They were happy,” Mitchel recalls. “They knew they were not in active duty, and many of them would not be sent back to active duty… The war was behind them.” 

She found herself increasingly happy to see one sailor in particular, Jack Mitchel, a handsome fellow who had been badly injured in a fight during the North African Campaign, which the U.S. entered in the early 1940s. It was very much against Navy protocol for a nurse like Lynette, an officer, to date an enlisted man like Jack. But Lynette was smitten. She and Jack would sneak out of the hospital for day trips in the mountains—to Lake Lure, the Biltmore Estate and Lake James. “We’ve been married 63 years, so it did work out,” says Lynette. “I do pull rank on him when I have to.”

Wendy Larkin, 53, Served in Vietnam

Wendy Larkin left home at 13. A church pastor’s family in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, let her live with them for a time, as did her future husband’s family. In her late teens, she wasn’t sure of her career path, but she was certain it would involve helping others as she had been helped. She also knew her education would have to be cheap since she was footing the bill herself. She signed up for the U.S. Army in 1972 thinking it would be a way to both see the world and pay for college. She spent her 18^th birthday on a bus to Alexandria, Alabama, for basic training at Fort McClellan. 

Larkin admits she was a bit naïve at first. At Advanced Individual Training camp in Texas for triage nursing, both the men and the women left her baffled. “I had no idea women were wild,” she says, recalling that some in the program would stay up until 2 or 3am even though they had to report for duty at 5am. It was the ‘70s, so marijuana was en vogue, but Larkin was unfamiliar with the lingo. “People would say—‘Do you want to buy a lid?’ I would say, ‘I have no jar—why would I buy a lid?’” 

She took her mission seriously, even though, by 1973, the Vietnam War effort was quite unpopular. “Many of the boys I treated were so sad,” she says of the year she spent treating soldiers, some badly injured, at Walter Reed hospital. “Everybody felt down and sad. The boys would say all the time, ‘It doesn’t matter what we’re fighting for.’” After a year, Larkin’s boyfriend Jim sent a letter pleading with her superiors to let her leave the military. She was granted an honorable discharge in October 1974 and got married a month later. 

Nursing, and nurturing, have been enduring themes in Larkin’s life. In her 20s she had traveling nursing gigs, working with a homeless program at a church in Biloxi, Mississippi, and at a church shelter in Hawaii. Then in 1990, she got hired as a full-time nurse at Haywood County Hospital, then Mission Hospital in Asheville and Park Ridge in 2007, where she is critical care director. She believes the country does not provide enough services to the elderly, and she takes care to put elderly patients at ease. At various points, she and Jim have taken in and housed elderly people who sometimes pay for Larkin’s nursing care and sometimes don’t. Larkin always thinks of them as kin. “I never had any great grandmas or grandpas,” she says. “They were all grandmothers to me—even the grumpy ones.” 

Terri Trimble, 43, Served in the Iraq War

Terri Trimble has always been a risk-taker and a bit of a thrill-seeker, someone who describes working in an emergency room as “exciting.” She grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, got degrees in nursing and education, and after she left her job as an intensive care nurse at an ER in north Florida, she missed it.

She’d had jobs outside of nursing—in teaching and construction—but in the fall of 2005, she decided to up the ante. She wanted to serve her country, and she knew the military could use her nursing skills. Frankly, she felt pangs of guilt and irritation when she saw women joining the military who still had small children at home. Her son was 16, and she was looking for a new challenge, so she signed up for the U.S. Army Reserve. 

In 2006, she moved to Brevard and worked a short stint at Transylvania Hospital. She was eventually hired as an ER nurse at Hendersonville’s Pardee Hospital, a job she loves. Her hospital gig was interrupted by news that she and her reserve unit, the 345^th, were being sent to Iraq. 

In the army, she expected to work as a nurse but wasn’t quite prepared for all the soldiering. Already an RN, she joined as a second lieutenant and went to Fort Sam Houston near San Antonio, Texas, for officer basic training, learning how to fire a 9 mm pistol and an M16. Her training also involved sniffing out homemade roadside bombs—improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. “They assume you know all your medical skills, they end up teaching you all the combat stuff,” she says. 

After intense training in California in early 2008, she left for combat support hospital COB Speicher near the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit. It was on a giant base, around nine square miles, where nearly 30,000 people lived and hospital staff treated some 600 patients a year. Soldiers’ typical injuries and illnesses were a result of the grueling conditions: wearing heavy body armor, they often couldn’t clean small cuts, which got infected quickly; they got hit by shrapnel from IEDs; when the temperature outside was 140 degrees, they couldn’t gauge how much water to drink and became extremely dehydrated. Sometimes Trimble spent long days treating patients, other days she faced the drudgery of cleaning toilets.  

After several months, her enthusiasm for being in Iraq waned. The subtle hypocrisies in military protocol—not being allowed to fraternize with certain groups of soldiers on the base, for example—combined with her growing skepticism about the country’s ability to run a successful Iraq military mission meant that, by spring, she was more than ready to come home. “These kids were getting hurt—for what?” she says. “The country won’t be a democracy, and the tribes still don’t like each other.” 

Trimble is still in the reserves and could be called up again at any time, but in the meantime, she’s back in Brevard and working at Pardee’s ER. “It felt good,” she says, of her first day back in late April. “I’ve been in Iraq so long I was nervous… but it all came back.”

Now, to keep things interesting, she’s applying for PhD programs in naturopathy, a total shift from her traditional medical training. “I don’t like giving people pills for everything,” Trimble says. “There are better ways to manage illnesses.”