By Sig Christenson
Houston Chronicle
SAN ANTONIO — The birthday party Sunday at Fort Sam Houston’s golf club closed a big, big circle for Earlyne Sheets.
At 100, she was back where her life in many ways began, on the historic old post where she entered the Army right out of nursing school and soon went to England, where she cared for the first casualties from D-Day.
“I was 22 years old,” she said, a hint of wonder in her voice.
Well-wishers were in plentiful supply at an afternoon party for Sheets. Dozens of friends and relatives, some coming from as far as Florida and many from around the state, converged on the club’s dimly lit dining room.
There, as pictures of Sheets and her husband on their wedding day flashed on a screen, people lined up to greet her. She laughed and talked, and told one young bearded man about one of the images.
“There’s my daddy there. He was a big baseball player,” she later said as a photo of her father, in his Crosby baseball uniform, appeared on the screen.
“She’s sitting on top of the world today,” said her son, Mike Sheets.
Sheets’ actual birthday is Monday, just two days before the 74th anniversary of D-Day. As an Army nurse who helped care for thousands of Allied casualties, the invasion was the turning point of her life.
Based at the 130th Station Hospital in Chiselton, England, near Tidworth Barracks, Sheets met her husband there as he was on the mend after the North Africa campaign. He’d caught the flu and wasn’t far from a ward where she cared for 30 enlisted men.
“‘Hey, nurse, come talk to me, I’m lonesome,’” she recalled 1st Lt. George J. Sheets saying.
“‘Well, I’ll take care of that,’” she replied.
That was 1943 and a romance ensued, leading to a wedding the day before the Normandy invasion. Ten hours after they exchanged vows, they parted ways and Sheets, a 2nd Armored Division tank commander, was headed for Utah Beach. He would be her patient again.
Earlyne Reidland Sheets was one of 74,000 women in the Army and Navy Nurse Corps during World War II. She has Houston-area roots, graduating from Robert E. Lee High School in Baytown before attending Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos.
The next stop was Brackenridge Hospital School of Nursing in Austin and then, military service. The Army, quietly preparing as a world war raged overseas, had fewer than 1,000 people in its nursing corps but was snapping up professionals wherever it could find them.
She signed up at Fort Sam on Sept. 10, 1941.
A brother who would serve in the Marines in the Pacific, Wilburn “Sonny” Reidland, was reported killed on Iwo Jima along with his entire outfit, but the War Department was wrong. He had fallen ill with malaria when his fellow Marines shipped out to the battle.
“She talks about how she got out of nursing school with her good friend Liz … and how they were recruited through the Red Cross,” said her daughter, Jackie Sheets, 70, of San Antonio. “They were only going to stay in one year and then Pearl Harbor broke out and she was in for the duration.”
While Army nurses were excluded from active combat zones, they often worked in high-risk areas and shared many of the same dangers as the troops. Earlyne Sheets crossed the Atlantic to England on the Queen Elizabeth in 1943, the passenger liner zigzagging to avoid German submarines.
Talk to her about the risks of that journey, and she laughs.
“Oh, we had a wonderful trip on that wonderful ship,” she said. “We would go down in the big reception room at night and sing songs.”
There were air raids in Great Britain, and the haunting sound of sirens was part of the rhythm of life for American servicemen and women, whose numbers reached 1.6 million by June 6, 1944, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission.
Earlyne thought that she had seen the last of Sheets when he left her hospital until one night during the fall of 1943, when she caught a ride in a jeep with him back to her quarters.
There, they kissed goodnight.
With D-Day looming, the June 5 wedding at St. Mary’s Church in Chiselton was a rushed affair. Their best man at the 2 p.m. ceremony was his battalion commander, Lt. Col. Rudy Quillian, who lent them his quarters for a honeymoon that ended before midnight. They returned to their duty stations in the darkness, the night sky thick with the sounds of prop planes headed to France.
That September, bad news made its way to England. Shot in the abdomen, Quillian fell mortally wounded at Saint-Ló. Her husband was later shot in the hip, but was deemed likely to survive and got a boat ride back to a hospital near the 130th in Chiselton.
Earlyne Sheets split time between her duty station and his room as he recovered.
“She always said, ‘He was my patient twice,’” said Mike Sheets, 71, of Spring.
George Sheets would earn the Silver Star for gallantry outside of Vennikel, Germany.
A stream of troops wounded as they fought from Normandy ever deeper into France left stacks of dirty, bloody uniforms outside the hospital, which took 30,000 patients from June 1944 to January 1945. Sheets eyed them and decided to save the unit patches before the uniforms were burned.
Her mom crafted a quilt out of the patches but it eventually was lost, leaving Sheets despondent. Family members say her mood changed after she took an Honor Flight to Washington, D.C., two years ago. Crowds applauded her everywhere she went, from the airport to national memorials, one of which had a plaque dedicated to the battle of Saint-Ló.
One of those on hand for Sunday’s party, Butch Bertsch, 60, of La Grange knew Sheets was a dedicated nurse but had not heard the story about the unit patches she’d saved.
“What a dedicated American,” said Bertsch, whose wife, Carol, thinks of Sheets as a second mother.
“A true American hero,” he added.
“It was the best thing I ever did in my life,” Sheets said, “taking care of them.”
Copyright 2018 Houston Chronicle
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