To her family, Linnie Bolles was always a hero. Now, the rest of the country knows as well.

Bolles received the Silver Star for valor for her service as an Army nurse in World War I. It was awarded posthumously July 21 - 89 years after she earned it.

Mrs. Bolles died in 1989 in La Junta.

Her story started in Salem, Ill. After high school, she was wondering what she would do.

"She said she didn't want to teach school. There wasn't much anything else girls could do," said her daughter, Mary Jane Reed, of Gerrardstown, W.Va. "She saw a picture of a nurse and decided she wanted to be a nurse."

She studied at Wesley Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

After graduating, she and her roommate, Irene Robar, joined the Army Nurse Corps in World War I and were sent to work in a hospital in Paris. Back then, she was Linnie Leckrone and was among 10,000 American nurses serving without rank.

"Then they were picked to go to the front," Reed said. "They treated the wounded right off the battlefield."

According to Army Times, Mrs. Bolles was tending the wounded at Chateau-Thierry when the field hospital came under artillery fire in July 1918.

For heroism under fire, Mrs. Bolles and Robar were awarded the Citation Star, the forerunner of the Silver Star that was authorized in 1932, according to the American Forces Press Service.

"Leckrone probably didn't even consider the history she was making on July 29, 1918, as enemy artillery pounded the location of her field hospital, and she and the small staff of the gas-and-shock team did their best to care for the barrage of incoming wounded," according to the press service.

"She knew she had a citation from Gen. Pershing," Reed said. "She didn't know about the Silver Star."

An Army investigation turned up the information on Mrs. Bolles, who in turn was recommended to receive the Silver Star.

Mrs. Bolles didn't talk much about her time in war. Reed was able to pry loose a few images, like the one of a wounded soldier.

"He was just a boy," Mrs. Bolles told Reed. "No more than 16 years old. He called me Mom. And he was so sick, he died before morning."

Reed asked her mom once if she had a boyfriend during the war.

"Heavens no," Mrs. Bolles said. "We were so busy I didn't have time to flirt."

She talked a bit with her grandson, Jeff Reed, of Denver, telling him: "I was just doing what had to be done."

Her other daughter, Jan McNess, of La Junta, said that she mentioned one other story: She and her crew cared for 50 wounded British soldiers, 30 of whom were shipped out to a hospital the next day.

Her role, McNess said, was to patch up the wounded enough to be transported to more modern facilities.

"She said when they were closest to the war, they worked in tents," McNess said.

In the early '20s, Mrs. Bolles moved to Colorado's lower Arkansas Valley to become a nurse for Otero County. She lived at a boarding house in Manzanola. And Ralph Bolles, a field man for a cannery, stopped in each day to eat. They married. In 1941, they moved to La Junta. They are both buried in the Bolles family plot in Rocky Ford.

massarog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5271