Lakeland PBS presents Dedicated to Care: Lieutenant Colonel Hortense McKay, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

I think that she learned to always look for the rewards in small places and look for the small rewards even if times aren't good or are bad look for something that you can grab on to.

Make sure, you know, that you make the best of any situation and that sometimes the rewards come in very subtle ways that you don't even realize.

And I think that, you know, having been in a situation, you know, where you literally had to say this person is not going to live, we're going to take this person, has to be, I don't know that they ever taught them that, you know, at that time or whatever.

And so to be thrown into a situation like that and after the hard days of work and, you know, there's not enough food, there's not enough food to feed people.

Somewhere you had to find a little glimmer of hope and I think that somehow Hortense was always able and managed to do that.

I'm honored that she chose the Crow Wing County Historical Society as a place to keep her things and to save her story and to share her story.

So I feel like it's our job to do exactly that.

My name is Hillary Swanson and I'm the executive director at the Crow Wing County Historical Society.

We have a wonderful collection of photographs that were taken on a road trip to San Diego, California, and it was Hortense McKay's mother Lydia, along with two sisters.

One was a nurse, one was a nurse in training, and then another family friend.

And they were traveling to go visit the sister-in-law.

Their brother was sick with tuberculosis and was in the sanitarium and she was about to give birth and she wanted the comfort of his sisters there when their baby was born.

Lydia McKay was older than the other women, so she kind of financed the trip.

Her husband purchased a car for them to drive out west.

I think that's significant to know that he clearly supported this fully.

She was gone for 2 months and left him with four children.

Hortense was 13 at the time, her sister was 15 and then they had two younger brothers.

It was a good old-fashioned road trip.

They were by themselves, any road repairs that needed to be done they took care of it, they were being very independent women.

And also the purpose of their trip was to be caretakers.

And I can't help but think that that didn't inspire Hortense to go on to what she did.

My name is Patricia McKay Broback and Hortense was my aunt.

She was the sister of my dad.

My dad was the youngest of the kids born to the George McKay family.

She loved living on the family farm down in Harmony.

And my grandfather was a Scotsman, he married a German woman, they spent time between the two different families.

And one of the biggest questions everyone's always wanted to know is what had them move from Harmony to Brainerd.

And because the great grandparents, my great grandparents down there built a church, there's a cemetery there, a lot of the family is buried down there.

And one of the conclusions to that was that when the family went to Grandma's side they all spoke German, and my grandfather couldn't understand German, so it's believed that he decided to take his wife Lydia and move away and come up here.

Whether that's true or not we don't know.

I know that both Mabel and Hortense loved being down on the farm.

They loved the freedom that they had there and it was a change when they came up here.

But as kids in that time or whatever, you did what your parents told you to do and off they came.

When she was about 10 years old the flu epidemic hit down in Harmony.

It was before they had moved up here and Mabel and Hortense were the last in the family to get the flu and so they decided to be nurses and take care of the rest of the family and made little paper hats and evidently I think she loved that.

And, you know, there's talk that she then, you know, went out to the animals were sick and she decided to take care of everybody that was there.

And in the course of that, again, Grandma McKay comes into play because she had been going to the neighbors during that flu epidemic and helping out and, you know, and showing again her daughters, her family, that you helped your neighbors, you took care of people.

And I think maybe from that young age, you know, Hortense learned to do that.

Mabel became a teacher and Hortense did go to Teachers College, but it wasn't what she wanted to do.

So she got into the nursing program and then became a public health nurse.

And I believe that really there was no opportunity for her to do anything there, but the Army was looking for nurses and there was a way to be promoted and to, you know, have your skills recognized.

I think that that appealed to her, so she went into it.

Number one it was a job in a time when jobs were very scarce and it was a place that a woman could go and be provided for through, you know, housing and food and whatever, and you had an opportunity for advancement.

So she graduated from nursing school and had a few different jobs but I think it's really significant to know that she applied to the Army Nurse Corps in 1936, 3 years prior to Germany invading Poland.

So she wasn't someone who joined after the US was involved in the war and there was a big call for nurses.

This is what she wanted to do from the beginning.

I think that's really powerful.

At the beginning of the war there were something like 1,700 Army nurses.

By the end of the war I think there were 54,000 so that shows she was very much in the minority when she made that decision.

I don't know that she had a choice of where she was sent when she entered the Army, but the Philippines was a prime place to want to go.

It was in the tropics, she shared a house with several other nurses.

They had somebody that came and did the laundry and they had a cook and I know that the cost of all of that was very minimal.

There was a very large social setting to being in the Philippines with the clubs there.

There were polo matches that one could go to.

You could buy silk and get a silk dress made from a dressmaker at a relatively inexpensive price.

And so I think to begin with it was like this is a great place to go, it's a lot of fun here, it was a very desirable place to be sent.

She traveled to Manila in February of 1941 and was stationed at Fort Stotsenburg.

So she brought her car with her to the Philippines when she went originally.

She refers to it as a war casualty cuz she never got her car back.

That also shows when she first went there she just was going over there on a general assignment, she wasn't going to war.

She was the only woman from Brainerd there, but within a short amount of time a lot of men from Brainerd joined her there.

And she talks about her first ride in a jeep, she was taken for a tank ride, she talks about dinners that they had.

But then kind of refers to that as the feast before the famine.

She talks about waking up and hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbor on the radio and they all knew they would be next.

It was a battle scene essentially.

There were people who were missing limbs, people dying.

It was very much an emergency situation.

She makes note of them not being able to do any charts of any kind.

They were sticking notes on people just to say what doses of morphine they had had just so they wouldn't be overdosed.

But that was really her first taste of war.

She stayed at that hospital from that time until Christmas Eve in 1941 they were evacuated.

They had turkey in the oven and they said you need to leave now and she went from there to Manila and from there to Corregidor and there she stayed for quite some time nursing in the Malinta Tunnel.

So basically an underground fortress.

It was difficult there, being in the dark constantly, hearing the bombing going on outside.

After they were sent to Bataan, she was stationed at Hospital #2, which was completely an outdoor hospital, so she talks about factors like the sun.

They didn't have any cover.

Their treated water was in a couple of bags so you had to essentially wait in line to get a drink.

The only water they had for bathing was a stream.

They were rationing food by the teaspoon.

These aren't normal nurse circumstances.

Then once they were attacked treating people, amputees, people I can't even speak to it, it's just so awful it's... Any nurse has a tough job, but being in a combat situation I just can't even imagine what they went through.

It's crazy to know that she actually escaped narrowly two times.

When she was in Bataan they told her and a few other nurses we're putting you on a boat, you're going to Corregidor and her comment is these were my orders and I will have to live with this for the rest of my life because she didn't want to leave and she felt she needed to stay.

I think she says that they figured she'd be better off continuing to nurse than to be a prisoner.

And it was on April 8th that these women left on a boat and on April 9th Bataan surrendered.

So fast forward to Corregidor, she's there, again 13 women.

They put them on a boat, got them to a submarine and it was 36 hours before Corregidor fell.

By the time she got on the submarine she was completely delirious.

She was so sick from starvation and she had some other type of disease.

I think she went from 115 lbs down to 80 something.

You know she really didn't talk a lot about things.

I don't know if you're aware that it was very important for my dad, for all of us to go to the Philippines.

He wanted us to understand things.

So during the trip my mom went with my dad once, both my brothers went with my dad once, I went with my dad, and then I went back with my cousin.

And during that time we found out more things about where she was.

We were able to see where Hospital # 2 was and the stream that they have the picture of where the nurses would bathe and things.

And she talked in bits and pieces.

One of the things that hit me the hardest was when they were asked to abandon Hospital # 2 and make their way to Mariveles to go to Corregidor because the Japanese were coming.

You know she talked a little bit about that and getting there, and one of the things that haunted her, that she disliked the most was leaving the Philippine nurses who she'd gotten to be very close to, and I think for them to leave, it was hard.

Then getting over to Corregidor she never really talked about being afraid.

But she talked about being afraid the night they took them out to the Spearfish to get onto the submarine, and I kept thinking you have these enemy people coming behind you and you're told to get somewhere and I don't know how close it was.

I know that there was you could hear gunfire.

I would have been terrified.

And when you go on that road and see where they had to go it was a further journey from Hospital # 2 to Mariveles than maybe I would have thought in my mind.

And then, you know, to find out that really what the hardest part for her was to get on the Spearfish and to get on a submarine, and maybe it was because of the close quarters, I'm not sure how that all went, but it always haunted her as to why she was picked and other nurses weren't, were left to be, you know, there and then were interned in Santo Tomas and it just bothered her and she felt guilty.

My dad said there were two Filipino nurses that Hortense got very close to and she worried about them and my dad said that he only saw her cry twice in her life and it was when she found out that each of them had died at two separate times.

So she loved the Filipino nurses and always felt that they didn't get the recognition that they should have gotten also.

And again I think part of that was the love she had for them and then the horror she felt when they were left behind.

I think what really makes her a hero is she went to Australia then and then when she was called back to go to Leyte, she went.

I think she was the only out of many who said I'll go back.

I don't think I could have.

I think it's interesting to see that when she was confronted with these horrible situations rather than be afraid she learned that she could do this and how important her role was because she was able to do that how needed she was.

I think that's what kept her going.

She considers this to be the place that she grew up and this is the place where she made her home, after the fact, too.

Well, here at the museum we're extremely proud that we were chosen as a place that she personally donated all of her items.

She must have been proud, too, because she kept all of her paperwork, all of her correspondence, and personal items.

It turned out to be important that we have those things because that's the way they applied for her Congressional Gold Medal was with that paperwork.

We had to be able to prove all of those things and thankfully it was preserved here.

I couldn't be happier that they decided to pursue a Congressional Gold Medal for her.

I think that was important that she be honored that way.

It is my privilege to welcome you all to today's Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony in honor of Lieutenant Colonel Hortense McKay on the month of Women's History Month.

In the name of a true American hero, an Angel of Bataan and Corregidor, Lieutenant Colonel McKay.

Now the Congressional Gold Medal was created in 1776, the first recipient being General George Washington.

There have been a total of 173 recipients of the Congressional Gold Medal to date.

And my thought was they kept saying well send us all this stuff and I thought well she's never going to get this, you know, and I didn't quite understand the whole procedure.

And then as time went on and I had more communication with the people that were doing it I kind of went, oh, this is a big deal here.

But she wouldn't have liked it.

She wouldn't have felt she deserved it.

You know she has, there's a new medical training center at Camp Ripley that was named after her.

That she would have loved because it was a training center where it would help better combat medicine, you know, or whatever, something that was progressive.

She would have felt that there were other people that deserved the gold medal other than her.

And to be honest with you, when I went to the ceremony I was shocked at how many people were there.

It was absolutely amazing to see how many people from the community and beyond showed up.

We have our new Performing Arts Center over at the high school and it's so big that a lot of times it looks like there's just a handful of people in there, but it really filled it up, it was amazing.

I have been to several hundred ceremonies and I'm really blown away by this one.

This is amazing.

After she escaped from Bataan and subsequently from Corregidor, as those places fell to the Japanese, she continued to serve in the Pacific Theater for the entire duration of World War II.

After her time in the war, Colonel McKay remained in the US Army Nurse Corps for another 15 years, working in both leadership and teaching roles across the US and Europe.

She then lived in Brainerd until she passed away in 1988.

This woman lived a remarkable life.

Her courage and steadfastness through trials is heroic and humbling and I cannot think of a better way to honor her life than receiving this award.

And it made you miss the family, that her brothers, her sister, that would have appreciated it and been so thrilled for her.

So it's kind of a bittersweet thing, you know, with it but it was a, you know, unbelievable.

And it was nice that we have a place here to to put it, to keep it here because this is where it should be.

This is where she would want it to be, but she would have totally felt that she didn't deserve it.

I really enjoyed hearing all the different women in the military talk about Hortense paving the way for what they do now, that was really powerful.

She knew her purpose, nursing is a calling.

She was adamant about recording lessons learned from her experiences for future generations, and clearly we are the benefactors of those lessons today.

After the ceremony was over so many of the women that had come from the military kept coming up and saying they wouldn't be where they were today without Hortense and that was really an honor to hear how her contributions back then really played into what's developed going forward, you know, with the military.

And that really was her thing was to try and make things better, so.

On behalf of Army Medicine and the Army Nurse Corps we say thank you.

I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to speak about Lieutenant Colonel McKay's tremendous contributions to our Army Nurse Corps, the nation, and humanity.

It is women like Lieutenant Colonel McKay whose shoulders I stand on.

She has afforded me opportunities that I have been granted because of her tenacity.

Her military service is part of a chain of events that has afforded me the opportunity and many of the women who come after me to serve as they wish, and it has given me the opportunity to stand in front of you wearing two stars.

The nurse's motto is save one life you are a hero, save a hundred lives and you are a nurse.

Lieutenant Colonel McKay's courage and actions are an embodiment of that motto.

She will forever be remembered as the Angel of Bataan.

I feel a kinship to her as there are parallels to her life and mine.

Like her, I also serve with and provide medical care to our one of the 194th Armor Regiment here in Brainerd and I deployed with them in 2021, 80 years after she did, only this time to the Middle East.

Colonel McKay served her country bravely, loyally and unwaveringly, surviving harrowing experiences and defying great odds and because of her life of service and her example, my fellow women and I now have a seat at the table amongst our male peers.

Our voices are heard and we are treated as equal valued members of the team.

Members of 1 of the 194th Armor Regiment carry the legacy of Bataan and and we as a unit will never forget the bravery of our men, as well as Colonel Hortense McKay.

Lieutenant Colonel Hortense McKay proved that women can do the hard things and now the pages of history will forever remember this and we will remember her as the Jungle Angel of Bataan.

This program is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.