"There was something that stirred up the adrenalin, I think, that really kept you going. You were needed there." (Transcript of 1986 interview, pages 26-27)

Regina H. Schiffman

Regina Schiffman, while serving with the 8063 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH), Korea [9/1951] War: Korean War, 1950-1955; Vietnam War, 1961-1975 Branch: Army Nurse Corps Service Location: Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC), Fort Sam Houston, Texas; Letterman General Hospital, San Francisco, California; Valley Forge General Hospital, Pennsylvania; 8063 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH), Korea; Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland; Walter Reed Medical Center, Washington, DC; Landstuhl and Frankfurt, Germany; Japan; Fort Benning, Georgia Rank: Lieutenant Colonel Place of Birth: Philadelphia, PA

After three years of neurosurgical nurse work at a New York hospital, 24-year-old Regina Schiffman decided to make a career in the U.S. Army. A year after she enlisted, the U.S. was at war in Korea, and in the summer of 1951 she found herself working in the operating room of a MASH unit. Conditions were primitive in both the O.R. (litters were balanced on saw horses, a pot-bellied stove was the sole source of heat in the frigid winter) and in her tent (she bathed most of the time out of her helmet). But Schiffman drew strength from the selflessness of her mission and the camaraderie of her fellow nurses and the physicians.