MASSARO:WWII flight nurse one of a noble few

By Gary Massaro, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Courtesy Of Omi Jensen

Omi Jensen during World War II. As a Navy flight nurse, she helped evacuate soldiers wounded in the battle of Okinawa.

Omi Jensen

Omi Jensen liked to try new things, the one in her family who sought adventure. She found it plentiful during World War II.

Jensen served as a Navy flight nurse, evacuating wounded in the battle of Okinawa and American prisoners of war on their way back home.

Jensen, 87, was one of 112 Navy flight nurses in WWII. Tuesday marked the 100th anniversary of the Navy Nurse Corps.

Jensen was probably going to become a nurse all along. Her mother, grandmother, a sister and an aunt were nurses.

"Doesn't every little girl play nurse at least one time or another?" she asked.

Besides, there weren't a lot of choices for women who wanted professions back then. She grew up in Xenia, Ohio, then went to the University of Michigan.

"The war needed nurses, and I wanted to go," she said. "But I needed another year of school."

So she enlisted in the Navy, which waited until she graduated to call her to duty.

In the spring of 1943, diploma in hand, she reported. She was working in a dispensary on the West Coast when she applied for flight nurse.

"It was a good thing to be doing rather than hanging behind at the hospitals," she said. "I was free to make the decision."

She was stationed on Guam.

"They wanted to give us weapons," she said. "We refused."

On flights into Okinawa, her R5D hospital airplane ferried supplies. On the way back, it carried up to 30 wounded strapped in stretchers in rope slings inside the fuselage.

Her log noted that a lot of guys had limbs amputated. Jensen and a Navy corpsman kept the patients stabilized until they could get needed medical care.

Other nurses had a technique they used if one of the patients died. They'd continue to talk to the dead man as they passed along the narrow aisle so as not to alarm the other guys, she said.

"I didn't lose a patient. I'd tell them, 'Everything is fine. You're going home, buddy.' "

Most of the guys who were able told her about their hometowns. One wounded Marine had earned his second Purple Heart. He offered one to Omi.

"I told him to give it to his girlfriend," she said.

In the six-week battle, nurses evacuated 9,600 wounded.

Jensen was a casualty, too. She came down with dysentary and fever, and was sent to Hawaii.

"I was in the hospital on V-J Day," she said. "I watched them dancing around the flagpole."

After she got home, she married and raised a family.

She settled in Wheat Ridge in mid-'60s, working at the old Lutheran Hospital. But the war stories ended with the war itself.

"I never talked about it again," she said. "None of my friends know about it. It just never came up in conversation."

She said she's no different from others who served: "Our main desire was to get out of the service and get on with our lives."

massarog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5271