1LT, US Army, Soledad Huerta Campbell

Soledad Huerta (Campbell) enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps in 1943 and was sent to Camp Howze in Gainesville, Texas for training. ¹ Her brother Raul had been taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Philippines in 1942 when Bataan fell, and Huerta was determined to find him. ¹ After serving for a year in Australia, New Guinea, and the East Indies, she was on the first hospital ship to arrive in Manilla following the Japanese invasion. ² General McArthur personally gave her permission to be the first nurse to enter the Bilibid prisoner-of-war camp to search for Raul. ^{1, 3} She wrote to her parents, “I rushed from one gaunt figure to the next, always hoping to see Raul. Then I learned he had been shipped to Japan. I was never more heartsick.” ⁴ The prisoners told her that Raul had been taken to the Japanese mainland on a prison ship, and she later found out that the ship sank in October 1944. ^{4, 5, 6} Huerta was decorated with a Bronze Star for “courage and devotion to duty” while serving with an advanced medical section at Santo Tomás in the Philippines. ⁷

Huerta was born in born in Kansas City, Kansas, but grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and attended Albuquerque High School. ³ She trained as a nurse at the Washington Boulevard Hospital and Cook County Hospital, graduating from the Wesleyan Memorial Hospital in Chicago in 1942. ^{3, 8, 9, 10} She received her Public Health Nursing degree from the University of California in Los Angeles and worked as a nurse at Albuquerque public schools, Presbyterian Hospital, Veteran’s Hospital, and the Bernalillo County Indian Hospital. ^{3, 8} She married Darrell Campbell and had two sons. ^{3, 8}