I need to tell you about my mother. Because I didn’t know most of it myself, not then, and I’ve had to put it together since.
Her name is Margaret Lindahl. Everybody calls her Peg. She was born on a farm outside Harmon, Minnesota in 1945, the youngest of five. She graduated from Harmon High in 1963. She went to nursing school at St. Mary’s in Rochester. She was a good student, she says. Quiet. She liked surgery.
In 1967, she joined the Army Nurse Corps.
She was twenty-two.
I know that because there’s a photograph in her bedroom closet. A young woman in a green uniform with her hair pinned up under a cap, standing in front of a brick building at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. She looks about fifteen. She’s not smiling. She looks like somebody trying very hard to look like she knows what she’s doing.
That’s all I knew. Growing up, that was the whole story. Mom was a nurse in the Army for a while, a long time ago. Then she came home and married my dad and worked at the Harmon hospital for thirty-two years and raised three kids.
She never talked about it.
Not once.
When we were kids, my brother asked her if she’d been in a war. She said, “I was in the Army, honey. Lots of people were.” And then she asked him if he’d finished his homework.
When I was in high school, I had to do a project for American History on someone who’d lived through the 1960s. I asked if I could interview her. She said she didn’t think she’d be very interesting and suggested I talk to Grandpa about the farm crisis instead.
Every Memorial Day, she sat in that green lawn chair in front of Ostby’s. She wore the red cardigan with the little pin. She clapped for the band and the fire trucks and the Boy Scouts. When the veterans’ float came by, she stood up.
She never waved. She never cheered. She just stood up, and put her hand over the pin on her cardigan, and stayed standing until the float had passed. Then she sat back down.
I thought that was just how her generation did things. Respectful. Quiet.
I didn’t know why she was standing.
I didn’t know what the pin meant.
I didn’t know that in 1968, when she was twenty-three years old, my mother had been an operating room nurse at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.
I didn’t know any of it.
Neither did the young man with the clipboard.
And neither, I found out later, did almost anybody else on Main Street that morning.
Except one.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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