Now chief of her unit in the Army Nurse Corps, Cherry Ames has the support of her Spencer Hospital friends as she strives to meet the challenge of organizing an evacuation hospital on a Pacific island.
Cherry, the only public health nurse assigned to a rural county in southeastern Iowa, uncovers a phony folk medicine production operation using ginseng growing wild in swamp water tainted with harmful bacteria.
When she and her classmates in Spencer Hospital's nurses training program enthusiastically sign up for the Army Nurse Corps, Cherry Ames soon finds herself in Panama and struggling her way through army regulations.