Florence Weinstein would receive her long-overdue World War II medals Wednesday, Aug. 21, just a week shy of her 100th birthday.

Those medals are not for the Brooklyn, New York, native’s hardest challenge during the war: to hold back the tears while she comforted shattered soldiers who had been brought home incapacitated.

“These boys were very young. They’d lower them off the planes in baskets when they were that bad, and that’s how the name ‘basket case’ came,” recalled Weinstein, whose father fought in World War I, where the term was first coined.

Her visits to the base hospital were not part of her duties in the Army—Weinstein’s official work was as a message relay for most of 1944 to 1948 at Camp Edwards, on the Cape Cod coast of Massachusetts. But after her workday shift, 20-year-old Florence would go to the base hospital to sit with the GIs, many of them missing limbs or vision or with heavy internal wounds.

“After I got through working, I would go, and I would sit with them and try to comfort them,” she recalled. She remembered the rank odor of the rooms, where open wounds were being treated. “It was very difficult, and it was very difficult for me not to cry.

“This was all very new to them. They had just come off the battlefield,” she recalled of the young men, still in shock about their conditions and their chances simply for recovery, let alone a future.

“I’d go home to my barracks, and I’d cry all night.”

It was compounded by the fact that her base held a prisoner-of-war camp, and she would occasionally pass it.

“I would walk by, and they would be playing ball out in the sunshine. Sometimes I would just stand there and look at them. Word had come out about how they were treating our people. That was very hard for me, too,” she said. “I would stand and look at them, frolicking in the sunshine.”

Weinstein had joined the Army in large part because she is Jewish: “The news was coming out about the concentration camps … I felt it very keenly. I made sure I did my part so we could win that war and beat the Germans.”

She was also motivated by the memory of her father, an Army veteran who had died when Weinstein was 9 years old.

“I worshipped my father,” she said. “So when the war broke out, I wanted to join the Army, too.”

She would have to wait several years, because back then the Army accepted no women until they were age 20. It also required “a pretty good sales talk” with her reluctant mother, she added, chuckling at the memory.

When the war was over, Weinstein was sent home. She would meet her husband, Max, another Army veteran, and reared her two sons, Paul and Steve, in Max’s home state of Ohio. The couple discovered Naples not long after his retirement as a doctor of osteopathy and bought a home in what was then a young Palm River community in north Naples.

Weinstein will celebrate her 100th birthday with her family in that home, where she still lives 40 years later. Palm River residents are familiar with her morning bicycle rides around the neighborhood. She has an exercise regimen and she’s faithful to it, a happy centenarian in Spandex leggings.

Her advice: “Be physically active. Use it or lose it. I eat a Mediterranean diet. Try to get eight hours sleep at night— and I say, ‘Try to,’” she said, acknowledging that a decent night’s sleep is only a dream for many Americans.

In thanks for service

Weinstein said it had never occurred to her she was eligible for wartime service medals until her colleagues in the Southwest Florida Women Veterans learned she’d never been awarded them.

It would be a wonderful 100th birthday gift, her friends decided. Helen Sundgren, the force behind getting the medals, knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get them from the U.S. government, with responses that took months to a year.

“We’d been through this with other veterans,” she said. “We don’t have time to wait for the Army.”

But military supply stores carried a few in stock, so with some quick ordering by Sundgren, Weinstein’s three medals arrived in time for a Wednesday presentation and luncheon in the Inspiri Center at Avow of Naples. Sundgren was delighted the group could make it happen.

“She’s a living national treasure,” Sundgren declared.

Weinstein got a quick glimpse of them last week, when Sundgren dropped by to show her the World War II victory award, the Women’s Army Corps medal and an American Campaign medal for her work as a relay.

“I never even thought about it,” Weinstein admitted of being honored for her service. She gazed at their brushed gold figures for a long moment.

“Wow. They’re beautiful!” For information about Southwest Florida Women Veterans, email johnnadettis@ gmail.com.