Ann Darby Reynolds ’61

Ann Darby Reynolds of Dover, N.H., is the subject of a four-page feature article in the March–April 2005 issue of Navy Medicine. In the article, Lt. Reynolds tells the story of the events that earned her a Purple Heart, a medal awarded only to those wounded or killed by enemy action.

Reynolds joined the Navy right after earning her nursing degree. In 1964, she was the youngest staff member at a military hospital in Saigon. Injured when a bomb hit the Brink Hotel where she was quartered, she ran to the hospital and began taking care of patients. “You just did what you had to do without thinking too much about it,” she writes.

The decorated veteran is also featured in the 2005 calendar “In Their Own Words: Profiles from the Women’s Memorial Oral History Collection.” She was one of four Navy nurses during the Viet Nam War to receive a Purple Heart, and one of only 200 women who have received the award.

When she learned that she and her fellow Navy nurses would be awarded the medal, she says, “they insisted we wear our blues. But I felt we should be in our nurse’s uniforms because that’s what we were there for. So they relented and that’s how we received our Purple Hearts-in nurse’s uniforms and caps.”

Lt. Reynolds retired from the Navy in 1988.