Really Think GI Life is Going to Agree with Me

Better I Should, Vintage Letters from 1943, Season 1, Episode 4

NCR Davis, author of "For the Boys -- The War Story of a Combat Nurse in Patton's Third Army," reads Lt. Mary E. Balster's letters home to her family. This episode contains letters from late April 1943 when she was in training at Ft. Leonard Wood, MO. This episode is dedicated to the memory of Major Thomas Broadstreet Isaac.

Really Think GI Life is Going to Agree with Me

These are recordings of excerpts from letters that Lt. Mary E. Balster wrote to her Minnesota family during April 1943. In these letters, there's a growing concern that Mary is going to have to choose between her boyfriend Clinton and a new interest at the post, Lt. Hal Zimmerman.

Signing Our Lives Away, Season 1, Episode 2

This is the second in a series of letters in which NCR Davis reads from Lt. Mary E. Balster's archives. These letters are dated April 1 and April 5, 1943. If you haven't heard the first letter in which Lt. Balster describes her first night in the army, you can listen to Season 1, Episode 1, entitled "My first nite in the Army and everything's under control." The date of that letter is March 31, 1943.

My first nite in the army, and everything's under control -- a letter from Lt. Mary E. Balster, March 31, 1943

This is the first in a series of letters written by Lt. Mary Elizabeth Balster. Some of these letters appear in the published book, "For the Boys -- The War Story of a Combat Nurse in Patton's Third Army," Casemate Publishers, US, UK, 2023. The author of "For the Boys," NCR Davis, has received several requests from readers to record all of Mary's letters, as the memoir contains only a small number of the more than 400 letters the lieutenant wrote to her Minnesota family during her service as a combat nurse in WWII.