Alicia Reinoso was 24 when she learned she would be part of the war. Authorities at the Central Aeronautical Hospital in Buenos Aires, where he was head of the nursing service, informed him in April 1982 that the mobile air hospital of the Argentine Air Force was “going south”. From this mobile care center, Reynoso and 13 other military nurses assisted Argentine soldiers wounded during a 74-day battle between Argentina and the United Kingdom for sovereignty over the Malvinas, southern Georgia, and the South Sandwich Islands, an area that Argentina has since claimed. Occupation in 1833.
Initially, the Armed Forces decided to install 11 module centers in the form of containers that form a mobile hospital on the islands. But the military authorities had to change their decision after discovering that the soil type could not withstand more than 14,000 kilograms. Instead, they decided to set it up at a military airfield, from where military flights to Malvinas would take place, in the town of Commodore Rivadavia, almost 1,000 kilometers from Puerto Argentina.
The director of the Aeronautical Hospital asked Alicia to select the five nurses she considered the strongest to join the team. They had to be able to deal with the brutality of the war. “I was looking for nurses who worked in resuscitation, the coronary department and the hospital ward. They were women who were accustomed to great stress situations. We were not going to treat a cold, we had to prepare.” Alicia tells todaytimes that she is from Entre Rios, Argentina.
From the day they arrived at the hospital, during the war, nurses got up very early to prepare boxes of medical supplies that were sent to their islands. But it was not until May 1, 1982, after the bombing began, that they first came in contact with the wounded soldiers. “We had a hangar that still exists today, where the wounded were arriving on military flights from the islands. If the injured person needed an emergency operation, I would go to the hospital a few meters away, prepare the operating room, and in a few. We started the operation in a few minutes. “
The hospital was located at the head of the runway, which was extremely dangerous. “When the Red Cross commission came to inspect the two countries in conflict, a Spanish woman in charge called us. She questioned the location of the mobile hospital. The first thing the enemy destroys is the runway,” Reynoso recalled. “Look, we were the perfect target.”
The routine was so tense that Alicia did not have time to panic. “Maybe, just when we collected the last little gas of the day, there was a place of fear. But we were not allowed to be perfect, to do makeup and to show that we were not afraid. But yes, we were afraid.
In the early 1980s, amid the bloodiest military dictatorship in Argentina, the army invited Argentine women to join the armed forces on television. Alicia, the youngest of eight children from a province far from the capital who had come to Buenos Aires in exchange for a friend, thought it would be a safe way to get a job.
His relationship with the security forces was no stranger to him: his father was a policeman. However, he barely knew her since she died when Alicia was six years old. From that moment on, he lived with his mother and siblings before leaving home. “My mother told me she was suffering in those years as a soldier’s mother on the islands,” Alicia recalls.
In 1980, Reinoso was part of the first group of women to join the army, where she served for more than 40 years. “Military nurses care in peace and work in war. We were ready for war,” he said.
“It was a time of utterly authoritarian rule. We had no way of thinking, we obeyed orders,” Alicia recalls. “Violence was so naturalized then that we got used to it. We were the only women in the sea of men dressed in green who pretended to be superheroes but were afraid of death inside. These men are the most dangerous.”
At dinner the nurses were instructed to serve the table. Alicia recalls with indignation the night when a colleague, Stella Morales, made a mistake in ordering a cutlery, imposed sanctions on her in the middle of the war, and sent her to her room for solitude. “That night the four of us went to follow him and the next day we did not go to work. We had a small revolt and there were five of us left in the room. We finally managed to get his sentence lifted.”
Reinoso is the first of 14 nurses to be recognized as a war veteran by a court order. The process, in which Alicia was represented, without the support of any group of ex-combatants, ended on May 7, 2021, but Alicia did not receive her Veteran Certificate until February of this year. At first we were introduced as soldiers, masculine and without military rank. “Then we complained and we were told it was a typo, but it was more than one wrong letter,” he said ironically.
After 2010, at the start of the lawsuit against the state, these women were recognized as part of the Malvin war. “At a time when no one saw us, justice saw us. It was a trial from a gender perspective, in the context of a war that always thinks of men,” he says.
But acknowledging justice is not just a formality. Thanks to this, war nurses can retire just like other war veterans. “We were told we were not veterans because we would not set foot on the islands, but we later found out that there were hundreds of veterans who did not set foot on the islands and retired. This is where I started. “The trial,” he said.
However, the documents are responsible for finding out that he is a veteran “by court order”. For Alicia, this explanation is an attempt to downplay them. “However, I’m proud to show that we were right. This is a triumph of women’s righteousness and respect,” she said. “On April 2, we show that we have won the rights that have been taken away from us for 40 years. The military does not accept women in war, so they tried to erase us from history.
Source: El Diario
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
