For Whom the Lotus Blossoms
Around 1916, Victoria (VD) Daily was born in Five Points Manhattan, Lower East Side, New York. Her folks left Belfast for the ‘promised land.’ After treating a stabbing victim as a youngster, Miss Daily concluded she wanted to be a nurse despite poverty. Her father worked additional hours in the shipyard to pay for her three years of nursing school before the war and her service in the US Army during WWII.
Miss Daily recounts her life in the steaming jungles of Manila, Philippines, just ahead of the invading Japanese Imperial Army, Rangoon, where she had to fight Japanese air strikes and king cobras, and the Battle of Coral Sea and Guadalcanal, where she served on a hospital ship and was injured by a rogue Japanese pilot.
Miss Daily helped the operating room doctors, worried about the cruel Japanese and jungle animals or insects performing surgery under horrendous conditions, often without anesthesia or electricity. Her notebooks depict the horrors humans can inflict on each other, especially the Japanese's atrocities on people, as well as the love and beauty she came to enjoy amid some of the world's most uninhabitable jungles.
She found her life partner at a Northern California Japanese American relocation camp after her service and injuries. Miss Daily also became a master of Kung-fu, which led her to fall in love with a Japanese Judo teacher in the jail camp. Her life partner had finished half of law school before being arrested for her Japanese background.
She excelled in difficult conditions and rose to rank quickly, and the army sent her to medical school to acquire a gynecological doctorate. Miss Daily became a doctor and helped other ladies. Her husband worked near Capitol Hill as an attorney until retirement.
I share these writings to commemorate the woman I never met and because they taught me so much. We hope someone finds the same inspiration and motivation in her notebooks as I did to finish my degree.
The LGBTQ+ community has made progress, but the family still felt uncomfortable exposing their names. After the war, names and certain locations altered, and any similarity to anyone is coincidental.
