Toni Lawrie always wanted to help people. So she became a registered nurse, then joined the Peace Corps, where she served in Malaysia from 1963 to 1966. Though the experience taught her about life in an Asian village, nothing could have prepared her for her next journey -- as a member of the Air Force Nurse Corps in Vietnam.

Her first night in Cam Ranh Bay, her unit was attacked. She spent the next four years in the trenches, making life- and-death decisions with critically wounded soldiers and holding their hands when they died. After the war, she started a women's clinic in her hometown of Indianapolis, then moved to St. Petersburg. Her effort led to another clinic -- this time for women veterans. The Well Women's Clinic, which opened in 1988 at Bay Pines VA Medical Center, became a model for Veterans Affairs Department clinics nationwide.

Lawrie, regarded as a national influence in expanding health services for women veterans, died Dec. 15 due to complications of breast cancer. She was 69.

"I don't think there's any question and everyone would agree that Toni was really a pioneer in the area of women's health," said Joan Furey, a former director of the Center for Women Veterans in Washington, D.C., who once worked alongside Lawrie as a nurse at Bay Pines. "Back in the early 1980s when we were at Bay Pines, we really didn't have any kind of gender-specific health services for women veterans."

At least indirectly and sometimes directly, women have served in combat or combat-related roles since the Revolutionary War. They have been killed and wounded and have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder.