November brings together Native American Heritage Month and Veterans Day, and Native women have long stood at the meeting point of the two. In 1898, four Lakota Catholic Sisters from the Dakotas volunteered as nurses for the War Department during the Spanish-American War. They cared for soldiers in camps from Florida to Havana, and they are recognized as the first Native American women veterans. Twenty years later, Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture, a Mohawk nurse from the Six Nations Reserve, was one of more than 20,000 Army nurses who served during the First World War. In France, she treated soldiers wounded by mustard gas. When she came home, she kept nursing well into her seventies.

Their stories show that military nursing has never ended at discharge. The training carries forward into communities and careers, and into causes that last a lifetime. That same tradition runs through the story of our colleague Nonda Wilson, a former Army nurse whose commitment to women’s health has carried her from military medicine to health policy to the CAP Foundation’s See, Test & Treat program. This month, as we honor the women who opened that path and every member of our CAP family who has served, we share her story.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns of the First World War fell silent. More than a century later, November 11 still asks something of us. It asks us to remember that service is not a single act, but a habit, one that has a way of outlasting the uniform. For Nonda, it has outlasted it by decades.

Before she came to the CAP, Nonda spent six years in military medicine as an Army nurse. Nursing in uniform teaches a particular kind of attention: to the patient in front of you, and to the patient who might never have reached you at all. That second kind of attention stayed with her. After earning a master’s degree in healthcare policy, she joined the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, where she advocated for tort reform so that physicians could keep caring for patients without the threat of crippling malpractice litigation. For the past 18 years, she has brought that rare mix of bedside instinct and policy rigor to her work at the CAP.

Through every chapter, one cause has held steady. “As a former Army nurse combined with my tenure at ACOG, I remain an advocate of women’s health,” she says. So when Nonda learned what the CAP Foundation does through See, Test & Treat, it felt less like a discovery than a recognition. The program brings free cancer screening and health education, led by pathologists, to communities that are medically underserved, and it has provided preventive care to some 9,000 women. For a woman who has spent her career looking out for other women, these are numbers with faces behind them.

What moves her most is the people who make that care possible. “Supporting the Foundation is just my way to help advance health equity and to express my gratitude for the pathologists who volunteer their time to provide vital, free care to those who need it most,” she says. On a day when the country thanks those who served, there is something fitting in a veteran turning that thanks outward, toward the physicians who give up their weekends so a woman without insurance can walk out of a clinic with answers instead of fear.

Asked to name the thread that connects her to this community, Nonda doesn’t hesitate: paying it forward. She sees her support as a dual investment, one that meets urgent healthcare needs today while building something lasting through grants for the next generation of pathologists. It is the logic of someone who has worn a uniform. You take care of the person beside you, and you make sure the ones coming up behind you are ready.

Her advice to fellow CAP staff is as straightforward as she is: lead by example, talk about the mission, and help people see what their support actually accomplishes.

This Veterans Day, we honor Nonda and every member of our CAP family who has served. Their service didn’t end when they came home. It simply found new places to go.

 Now Playing: Connected: The Foundation Playlist
As part of this campaign, we’re building a CAP Foundation playlist featuring songs chosen by our staff, board, awardees and donors. As the campaign unfolds, so will the playlist, with new songs added along the way. Listen along and hear the soundtrack behind the threads that hold us together.