After all, they've had 60 years to move on and leave Frances Plenert alone.

There are visions of bodies stacked like cord wood, the gas chambers, huge ovens and boxcars of dead on the grounds of Dachau, Germany. There are thoughts of mangled soldiers suffering in the cots of the tent hospitals on the beach at Anzio, Italy. And there is the memory of preparing the body of fellow Army nurse Ellen Ainsworth for burial after she was killed by a bomb.

''That ... I'll never forget that,'' Mrs. Plenert said, sitting at the dining room table of her Augusta home.

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Now 83, Mrs. Plenert still has a tattered scrapbook of the time between November 1941 and December 1945 - 49 months of leapfrogging across the globe as a surgical nurse in the 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group.

The group never strayed farther than five miles from the front lines of battle, acting as the first line of medical care for soldiers. They're a group often ignored in stories of war: the support staff working 16-hour shifts in tent operating rooms and hospitals, while sleeping in foxholes at night.

''I used to pray to God that I'd come home in one piece or not come home at all,'' she said. Mrs. Plenert was one of nine children - five, including four brothers, who went to World War II. Only her brother Steve did not return.

She joined the Army Nurses Corps in November 1941 - a month before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. By Dec. 7, she was working in a hospital at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

During the next year, Mrs. Plenert helped set up a hospital in Fort Chafee, Ark., before being transferred to the 2nd Auxiliary group and heading for Europe in March 1943.

''It was a very rapid change,'' she said.

Mrs. Plenert holds the dog tags she was issued during the war. JIM BLAYLOCK/STAFF

Her starched, white nurses' uniform had been replaced with fatigues. Typical nursing duties were pushed aside while she trained for combat service.

''We were being toughened up for the front lines,'' she said.

By early 1944, Mrs. Plenert was firmly entrenched in World War II. She was working in a makeshift hospital on the beach at Anzio - an area that saw 43,000 British and American and 40,000 German troops die in four months.

The hospital was a series of tents embossed with large cross symbols. They made perfect targets for German bombers and artillery, despite the Geneva Convention assertion that medical units were not to be targeted.

''The Germans had no mercy for the Red Cross,'' she said. ''We were bombed daily.''

If it was not bombs, it was gunfire strafed at the tents, which were only a wall of canvas to protect the nurses, doctors and patients inside.

''The bullets would come right through,'' she said. ''Plasma bottles would just fly through the air.''

The danger was apparent to the wounded soldiers.

''They used to tell us they wanted to go back to the front lines where they felt safer than being in the hospital,'' Mrs. Plenert said, adding that her service at Anzio earned her a Bronze Star.

From Anzio, her group followed troops through the freezing Rhineland - where they passed the frozen bodies of German soldiers left behind by their retreating comrades - and into Germany.

That's when she faced the horrors of Dachau, one of the first Nazi concentration camps, set up in 1933. Although not the site of mass murder programs like those in Auschwitz in Poland, Dachau still saw tens of thousands die through starvation, disease and torture.

Frances Plenert keeps a scrapbook of the years she spent as a nurse on the front lines during WWII. The top photo shows her getting a Bronze Star from Gen. Mark Clark for her service at Anzio Beach and the bottom photo shows her after she returned to the U.S. after the war. JIM BLAYLOCK/STAFF

''They hadn't had a chance to clear anything,'' she said. ''It was ghastly.''

A continent away, Mildred Stoddard was wrapping up three years of service as an Army nurse anesthetist in 1945.

She'd spent a lot of her time in a maze of of 6-foot-deep dirt hallways spread out through the tea fields that surrounded the 234th General Hospital and nurses' homes in Assan, near the border of India and Burma.

Every time an attack came near, the 1,000-bed hospital was evacuated into the trenches. The entire facility could be emptied in just five minutes, she said.

But for all the time she spent in the ''sick trenches,'' she doesn't remember much about them.

''You didn't pay much attention to the trenches,'' she said. ''You just wanted to know what was going on over your head.''

Now a Grovetown resident, Mrs. Stoddard was in her late 20s and already working in a Virginia-hospital as an anesthetist when she enlisted in the Army in October of 1942.

''The GIs used to call me 'The Sleepy-Time Gal,''' she said with a laugh.

For the most part, her memories of World War II have remained in the trenches of that tea plantation in Assan. Mrs. Stoddard has spoken very little of what happened there, only reminiscing during sporadic meetings with other members of the 234th.

''When we came home we didn't want to talk about it,'' she said.

Today Mrs. Plenert is a little more comfortable talking about what she saw. But it's still difficult sometimes, like when she tried to watch Saving Private Ryan.

''I started it and I just couldn't do it,'' she said, her voice softening. ''It got too emotional. You remember all the ones you helped.''

Reach Jason B. Smith at (706) 868-1222, Ext. 115, or jbsmith@augustachronicle.com.