(From Part 1 Chapter 22, "A Doctor's Letter Home" from Iwo Jima)
"Side by side lie three men, all with shattered elbows. Through one elbow there is a hole from front to back made by a shrapnel fragment the size of an olive. Wonder of wonders, although the elbow feels like a loose bag of rough stones and the x-ray shows that the three bones making up the joint are in a hundred pieces, the man has perfect control of his hand, indicating that the vital nerves were not dam-aged. And the circulation is good.
The second fellow has a wound on the outside of his elbow the size of the sole of your foot, with bones, muscles, cartilage, and arteries all protruding through the hole. I catch a spurting artery with a clamp and tie it off. Although the lateral epicondyle of his humerus has been completely torn off, his radial nerve is still functioning. I wonder about this.
The third has a hunk of metal the size of a pat of butter where his elbow joint used to be. The hand is torn in a dozen places, his kneecap is shattered, and the center of the wound is the size of a teacup. At the upper end of his left thigh is a deep wound an inch in diameter, in the depths of which the x-ray shows a piece of shrapnel shaped like an arrowhead and two inches long. His left testicle has been wounded. He volunteers sleepily, 'I got the son of a bitch right between the eyes.' I wonder how he did it with all these wounds.
Here is a San Francisco lad. Lord, he must be seven feet tall. White as a sheet. A little hole in the front of his left thigh and a three-inch hole of exit in the rear show the course of the machine-gun bullet that fractured his thigh bone. A nice clean wound like this is easy to fix. A little blood and plasma, a few ties, and some plaster of Paris and I'll fix him slick as a whistle. That wound in the rear makes for swell dependent drainage. Tells me his mother is a nurse, he lives on Monterey Heights, and will I have to take off his leg. 'Hell, no. This is one of the easiest things I fix. Nothing I'd rather fix up than a nice compound fracture of the femur"... "I look over the wounds of a lad shot in the buttock by a sniper; the bullet came out through a wound in his front belly wall right beside his belly button, tearing his intestines enroute. Here's a case for Dr. Kelly and Dr. Gilfillan. How I hate the thought of these belly cases! Each one takes four hours or more to operate on, and 50 per cent die. Each one takes hours of attention after operation.
In the time that one belly wound is being operated on, I can save half a dozen lives and limbs with other wounds. And I am a lousy belly surgeon. Fortunately, every time we get belly cases, there are other doctors aboard better qualified and always anxious to do them. On one occasion when there were two bellies awaiting operation and it looked as though, willy-nilly, I should have to do one of them, a man came in with his leg half torn off below the knee and in serious shock. Since this was an emergency, taking precedence even over belly wounds, I had to take him to operation immediately to control his shock and leave the belly to Dr. Gilfillan and Dr. Kelly."
(From Part II, "A Royal Flush at the Panama Canal")
"Some time during the afternoon of our trip on beautiful Gatun Lake, someone in a leadership role said, "Hey, this is a fresh water lake! Now would be a great time to flush out the Salt Water Fire Hose System and get rid of all the critters that are making their homes there!"
And so the order went out. Each hose was to have two to three people on the hose. The hoses were 3.5 inches in diameter with your basic "suicide nozzle" measuring only one-inch of hole at the end of the nozzle to create unbelievable pressure, enough to knock down a Budweiser horse. As I recall, Ted Page, David Hutchins and I were aft on the starboard side hose on the 02 deck.
The water was turned on. In the beginning the good ol' Bay State looked like a New York City fire boat when it saluted the Queen Elizabeth entering the harbor with a load of A-1 celebrities aboard. It was really neat, just like I had pictured it would be.
We were dazzled. Every single hose on the ship was aimed in the air, all aiming outboard. Then I think it was Ted who said to me, "Drisc, take a look!" I was mystified for about seven seconds. Then I looked where Ted was pointing, up to the Bridge wing where Captain Rounds was standing looking forward. I said, "To do what? Oh, you mean, do THIS!" I aimed the hose forward and a giant stream of water went onto the deck at the Number Two Hatch!
No sooner did that happen when somebody hit us from the port side of the Number Two deck. Then it was PANDEMONIUM IN PANAMA! Those hoses were all chipping paint and basically making the old BAY STATE the cleanest its ever been in we didn't know how long.
Hoses were aimed into sleeping compartments, shoved into port holes, pointed just anywhere there was an opening. Mattresses were piled like seaweed in the corners of our berthing compartment. Water was flowing hither, thither, and yon. It was so much fun we couldn't believe it.
Then we found out that some of the scuppers and drains were leaking like crazy and the water in the bilges was getting deep-even they were getting clean like Spic and Span. We had leaks to fix. Then, as if by magic and the word of God (a.k.a. Captain Rounds), we had to stop all of our fun and stop hurting each other with our 100-pound-per-square-inch squirt guns that were capable of washing the fillings right out of our mouths."
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