Colorado Springs, Colorado, October 1962. Margaret Callahan, 64 years old, Army nurse, Normandy, the Hurtgen Forest, the Bulge, 18 years of service across two wars, is sitting in a plastic chair in the Social Security Administration office on Pikes Peak Avenue, holding a letter that says her application for retirement benefits has been denied.
The clerk behind the counter has explained it twice. The Army records from 1944 are incomplete. Without the records, the service cannot be credited. Without the credit, there are no benefits. Margaret has been fighting this denial for 11 months. She has 1 month left before her savings run out. John Wayne is in the waiting room for a routine administrative matter, holding a numbered ticket, reading a magazine he is not reading. Here is the story.
Margaret Callahan was born in 1898 in Colorado Springs, the daughter of a man who ran a hardware store on Tejon Street, and a woman who had trained as a school teacher, and who had raised three children in the house on Weber Street that the family still owned when Margaret was grown. She had studied nursing at Colorado College and graduated in 1921, and had worked at the Saint Francis Hospital in Colorado Springs for 14 years, which was long enough to know the work thoroughly, and to understand that she had learned what the civilian hospitals could teach her, and that there was more to learn elsewhere. She joined the Army Nurse Corps in 1935. She was 37 years old, which was not young for a new recruit, and the Army took her because she had 14 years of surgical nursing behind her, and because the Army Nurse Corps in 1935 needed experienced nurses more than it
needed young ones. She was assigned to Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver, then to Letterman General in San Francisco, then to the Philippines in 1941 with the 12th Medical Battalion. She was evacuated from Manila in December of 1941, 2 weeks before the fall, on a transport with 40 other nurses and 300 wounded men.
She was in Australia by January of 1942 and in England by the summer of 1943, assigned to the 91st Evacuation Hospital, which crossed to Normandy in the first week of June, 1944, 3 days after the initial landings. The field hospital at Bayeux received its first casualties on June 9th, 1944. The volume was beyond what any planning document had anticipated, which was true of nearly every planning document produced for that operation.
Margaret worked the surgical ward for 31 consecutive hours during the first 72 hours of the hospital’s operation, which was 12 hours beyond what the shift regulations permitted and which the regulations did not address because nobody had written a regulation for the situation they were in. The Army Commendation Medal she received 3 weeks later in a ceremony that took 4 minutes cited her actions in terms that were accurate and insufficient simultaneously, which is the nature of citations.
She stayed in Europe. She worked the Hurtgen Forest in the fall of 1944, where the fighting in the dense German woodland produced casualty rates the Medical Corps had not seen since the First World War, and where the cold and the mud added categories of injury to the ones the bullets and shells were already producing.
She worked the Bulge in the winter at a forward station that was 11 miles behind, a line that moved backward for 3 weeks before it stopped, and then moved forward again. She wore the same pair of boots for 61 days in the Bulge because the resupply lines were severed, and there was nothing to replace them with.
She was in Germany when the war ended in May of 1945. She was 47 years old. She re-enlisted. She served in Japan from 1946 through 1948 at the Army Hospital in Osaka during the occupation. She served at Walter Reed in Washington from 1948 through 1950. She served in Korea from 1950 through 1952 with the 8055th MASH unit in the first year of the war, and then with the 43rd Surgical Hospital near Pusan.
She received her honorable discharge in June of 1953 after 18 years of service with the rank of major. She was 55 years old. She returned to Colorado Springs and took a position at St. Francis Hospital where she had worked before the Army, and worked the surgical floor there for 4 more years before her hip made the long shifts impossible.
She retired from St. Francis in 1957. She had the house on Weber Street which her parents had left her. And she had her savings, and she had the application she filed with the Social Security Administration in November of 1961 for retirement benefits reflecting her 18 years of military service. The SSA denied it in December of 1961.
The reason, the agency’s records cross-reference system showed only 14 years of credited Army service, not 18. The four years between 1935 and 1939, her years at Fitzsimons and Letterman and the Philippines posting, were not reflected in the records the Army had transmitted to the SSA. The Army records for that period were a known problem.
A fire in 1940 at a military records storage facility in St. Louis had destroyed or damaged a significant portion of pre-war personnel files. The SSA required original documentation and the original documentation did not exist. Margaret had hired an attorney in January of 1962. The attorney had filed appeals and submitted affidavits from two officers who had served with her in the Philippines and who attested to her service record in writing.
The SSA had reviewed the affidavits and declined to accept them as substitute documentation. The attorney had written to the Army Records Center in St. Louis directly. The Records Center had confirmed the gap and noted it could not reconstruct records that no longer existed. The attorney had billed Margaret $340 and had told her in April of 1962 that he had run out of avenues to pursue.
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She had come to the Pikes Peak Avenue office that October morning because the clerk she usually dealt with was on leave and she had heard there was a new supervisor who had recently transferred from the Denver regional office and who she hoped might see the case differently. The new supervisor had reviewed the file for 12 minutes and had told her with genuine sympathy and without any flexibility that the policy required original documentation and that without it there was nothing the office could do. Margaret took the denial letter the supervisor had prepared and folded it into quarters and put it in her purse. She sat in the plastic chair in the waiting room and looked at the floor for a moment. Then she straightened her back and clasped her hands in her lap the way she had always sat when she was waiting for something difficult to arrive. John Wayne had been in the waiting room since 8:45.
He was there on a matter connected to Batjac Productions, his production company, which had a Colorado corporate filing that required an administrative correction involving social security withholding records for two former employees. His business manager had assured him it was a 20-minute task.
It had now been 50 minutes. He had read the same paragraph of the magazine four times. He had watched Margaret come out of the supervisor’s office. He had watched her fold the letter. He had watched her sit down and straighten her back and clasp her hands. He had sat in waiting rooms for most of his professional life and he knew the difference between a person who was resting and a person who was holding themselves together by the posture alone. He leaned toward her.
He said, “Are you all right?” Margaret looked at him. She placed the face. She said, “Yes.” She said it the way a person says yes when they mean something more complicated than yes. He said, “I am sorry to intrude.” He said, “I could not help noticing.” She looked at the purse in her lap. She said, “It is a records matter.
” She said, “The army.” She said, “They have been telling me for 11 months that they cannot find 11 months.” Then she stopped and opened her purse and took out the folded letter and looked at it. “18 years,” she said. “They can find 14.” He said, “What years are missing?” She told him, “35 through 39.” “Fitzsimmons, Letterman, the Philippines.
” He said, “What happened to the records?” She said, “A fire in St. Louis in 1940.” He was quiet for a moment. He said, “Where were you in the war?” She said, “Normandy, the Hurtgen, the Bulge, Korea.” He did not say anything for a moment. He looked at the woman in front of him, 64 years old, straight-backed, hands clasped, the American Legion pin on the lapel of her plain coat, the folded letter in her hand.
He could have taken his numbered ticket to the window when it was called and handled his production company matter and walked out to his car. He could have said something respectful about her service and left her to the system that was failing her. He could have written a check to a veterans charity from his office in Encino and considered his account with the matter settled.
Instead, he said, “Who is the supervisor here?” Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. The supervisor’s name was a man named Briggs. Wayne went to the window and asked for Briggs, and Briggs came to the window.
Wayne told him what he needed, which was the name of the SSA regional director in Denver and the direct telephone number for the Army Adjutant General’s office in Washington. Briggs said he could provide the regional director’s information. He could not provide the Army’s number. Wayne said that was sufficient and wrote down the regional director’s name and number on the back of his numbered ticket. He went back to Margaret.
He said, “I am going to make some telephone calls.” He said, “I need your service dates, your discharge papers if you have them with you, and the name of the records officer in St. Louis that your attorney corresponded with.” Margaret looked at him. She said, “Mr. Wayne, I have had an attorney working this for 9 months.
” He said, “I know.” He said, “Attorneys write letters.” He said, “I am going to make telephone calls.” She opened her purse. She had a folded copy of her discharge papers in the inside pocket, which she had been carrying for 11 months because the case had required her to produce them repeatedly. She handed them to him.
He looked at them. He wrote down the relevant dates and her service numbers on the back of the numbered ticket beside the regional director’s name. He said, “Do you have somewhere to be this afternoon?” She said, “No.” He said, “Then wait here.” He said, “I will be back within the hour.” He went to his car.
He was back in 55 minutes. The telephone calls he had made were to the SSA regional director in Denver, who took his call within 4 minutes, to a man at the Department of Defense whom he had met at a USO function in 1958, and whose direct number he had in a small notebook he kept in his jacket, and to a retired Army general named Ridgeway, whom he had known since the Pacific, and who had the Adjutant General’s personal office number, and gave it to Wayne without being asked why it was needed.
The Adjutant General’s office agreed to initiate an emergency records reconstruction request based on the personnel files of the 12th Medical Battalion in the Philippines, which had been archived separately from individual service records, and which contained Margaret Callahan’s name in the unit roster for 1938 and 1939.
The reconstruction would take 3 to 4 weeks to formalize. The SSA regional director had agreed to place Margaret’s case in administrative hold pending the Army’s documentation, which meant the denial clock was paused. Wayne came back into the waiting room and sat down beside Margaret and told her what had been arranged.
She listened. She did not say anything while he spoke. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment. She said, “How did you do that?” He said, “I asked people who knew people.” She looked at her hands. She said, “I have been asking for 11 months.” He said, “I know.” He said, “I am sorry it took this long.
” He said, “It should not have required what it required.” She looked at the discharge papers in his hand. He gave them back to her. She put them in her purse. She said, “Mr. Wayne.” He waited. She said, “I was at a field hospital in Biak in June of 1944.” She said, “The first boys they brought in off the beach.” She stopped.
She said, “I did not do it for a medal or for a pension.” She said, “I did it because they needed someone to do it, and I was there, and I knew how.” He said, “I know that.” She said, “Then you understand why this has been so difficult to accept.” He said, “Yes.” He said, “I do.” The Army Records Center completed the reconstruction in 18 days.
The SSA approved Margaret Callahan’s retirement benefits application on November 14th, 1962, reflecting 18 years and 3 months of credited military service. The back payments covered 11 months of denied benefits. She received her first benefit payment in December of 1962. She lived in the house on Weber Street until 1979, when she was 81 years old and her hip required assisted living.
She moved to a Veterans Care Facility in Colorado Springs and lived there until her death in 1983 at 85. She had spent the 11 years between 1962 and 1973 volunteering twice a week at the Penrose Hospital Veterans Ward in Colorado Springs, where she helped other veterans navigate records disputes with the SSA and the VA, which she had learned to do with a precision that surprised the administrative staff.
She never spoke publicly about the morning at the Pikes Peak Avenue office. She told her sister in Denver the outline of it once and her sister told her daughter and her daughter told her own children. That is most of how it got out at all. Her niece donated two items to the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum on South Tejon Street in 1985.
The first is Margaret’s Army Commendation Medal in its original case with the citation from June 1944 on the reverse of the case lid. The second is her discharge certificate from June 1953. Major Margaret A. Callahan, Army Nurse Corps, 18 years and 3 months of service. Across the bottom of the discharge certificate in Margaret’s handwriting, in pencil so light it is almost invisible, are three words worth every day.
The placard reads, “Major Margaret Agnes Callahan, 1898 to 1983. Army Nurse Corps, 1935 to 1953. Normandy, Hurtgen Forest, Chosin.” She kept her discharge papers in her purse for 11 months. Then someone made a phone call. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already.
There are more stories coming, and unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.
