Arline Hall, shown at Marietta National Cemetery, holds mementos of her service as an Air Force flight nurse during the Korean War.

Arline Hall’s Korean War was not in Korea. The 77-year-old Marietta resident is humble about her years of service, but she can’t deny her part in the war effort. As an Air Force flight nurse stationed in Europe, she traveled to 14 countries treating servicemen and their families.

“We were helping, if nothing else, to open up opportunities for other flight nurses to go over there [Korea] by filling in in Europe,” she said.

Hall was one of thousands of veterans who were honored during Memorial Day ceremonies across Cobb County, with the two largest ceremonies in Smyrna and Marietta.

The Smyrna ceremony had a special focus on the Korean War.

Hall enlisted in May 1951, at age 22, after graduating from high school and attending nursing school. At the time, she said, she was living a “ho-hum” life, working as a nurse in Cleveland and living with her parents. “I wanted a little more excitement in life than that,” she recalled.

So she enlisted in the nurse corps of the newly formed U.S. Air Force, which had evolved from the Army Air Corps of World War II. After military training at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas, and Gunter Air Force Base in Alabama, Hall returned to Sheppard and applied to flight nurse school.

For the next month and a half, Hall took plunges off a 50-foot diving board — “I almost didn’t pass because I don’t think I can do that too well,” she said with a laugh — learned the art of survival in the arctic tundra and trained in an altitude chamber.

She was sent overseas to the 495th Air Base Hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany, and then to Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt.

From Rhein-Main, Hall said, she flew as part of the 1st Medical Air Evac Squadron on a C-47 cargo plane on missions throughout Europe and North Africa, treating soldiers and their families stationed overseas supporting the war in Korea.

Hall said she went to many towns that were still a mess of bombed-out buildings and cathedrals in the aftermath of World War II. She also met her husband.

Glenn Hall was the co-chief on her first Air Evac flight, but she didn’t make much of a first impression.

“When I first got to Frankfurt I overslept, and they were holding the plane for me, so you can imagine how I felt,” Hall said. She said that when she finally got on board, the co-chief invited her to sit up front, where it was steadier.

After an eight-month courtship, the two were married, in a union that has lasted 51 years and produced three children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Hall and her husband, now a retired Air Force master sergeant, agree that the Korean War is “the Forgotten War.”

“Our generation is dying out,” said Arline Hall, who has donated her flight jacket to the Marietta Museum of History for its display about women in the military. “There’s a wealth of information with our veterans that is being overlooked, I think — those that really had the hardships.”

— This article is a reprint from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.