The Graybeards - KWVA - Korean War Veterans Association

what he was thinking. Even if the defect in
the artery could be bridged with a vein
graft, the lower leg would be flail without
nerve supply to the muscles. And, of
course, the skin was gone so nothing was
available to cover any blood vessel replacement.
True, plastic surgery — a big musculocutaneous
flap — could probably cover
the wound, but that would take hours.
Hours that might be critical for two or three
other men lying out there in the holding
ward. And he would still need a nerve graft
in a few months to innervate the lower leg
— and it might not be successful. Talk
about the horns of a dilemma!
Bill made his decision. He placed his
hand on the shoulder of the anxious
Marine. “It’s got to come off, mac. No way
to save it. Sony.” His voice was compassionate
and his eyes held fast to the
Marine’s.
The Marine nodded his head almost
imperceptibly, sucked in his breath involuntarily,
and said quietly, “Figured that
myself, doctor. And the battalion surgeon
up front said the same thing. It even feels
dead. Hardly any pain at all.”
It was a short procedure and Bill had me
do it so he could close his eyes for a minute.
I think he was as close to sleep as you can
get and still stand up. I tied off the retracted
and clotted femoral artery and vein.
Sharply incised the sciatic nerve. Incised
the few remaining muscle bellies. Sawed
through the bone. Debrided away some of
the muscle and skin that had been devitalized
by the tearing action of the shrapnel.
Packed the end of the stump with Vaseline
gauze and a handful of fluffed gauze. And
wrapped the stump with Ace bandages.
It may have been a short operation, but
it was a mutilating one, distasteful to us
both. Patching up holes in the gut was one
thing. Chopping off a leg was another. One
was constructive, the other destructive.
Both had the primary aim of saving life.
Both patients would have died without surgery.
But the psychological effect on us surgeons
was different, to say nothing about
the physical and psychological effect on the
patients.
The second day ended and the third
night began. Fatigue was a grasping
specter, a hollow-eyed and bloodsmeared
devil standing by every man. I could feel its
heavy hands pressing my eyelids down,
dragging at my shoulders until they ached
with dull pain, knotting my stomach so I
couldn’t even eat, squeezing my temples
with steel-banded fingers, buckling my
knees when I relaxed for a fraction of a second.
While the doctors worked, the corpsmen
stood asleep on their feet, rousing more and
more painfully each time. While the corpsmen
switched patients, the doctors leaned
against the tent posts or sat on a cot and
closed their eyes for precious moments.
Two of the corpsmen began to hallucinate,
reliving experiences they themselves had
had on line, and had to be carried unconscious
to their tents.
The third night was the worst. The constant
flow of men from the lines was lessening,
but the aching fatigue in each man
resulted in slowing down of reflexes. Minor
techniques such as starting an IV became
major undertakings. The surgeons’ eyes
blurred over, making them stop to close
them till the blurring cleared. Even Sam
Dougherty, the mechanical anesthetist, was
starting to have difficulty getting his
patients asleep and then awake. It was a
nightmare.
Unnoticed by all, the nightmare was
about to end. Sixty-two hours after the
casualties began arriving, seventy-four
hours since anyone had slept, on the morning
of Monday, August 18th, a Sikorski helicopter
settled onto the copter pad near my
CP. Another circled slowly, waiting for the
other to clear its cargo. We heard the
copters, of course, but we’d been hearing
them for days.
The sun rose fiery red on the horizon as
the first copter settled in. Two corpsmen
trotted in a drunk-like stupor to bring in
more seriously wounded men. To their surprise,
then, out climbed a half dozen men in
shiny new green fatigues, clean new combat
boots, cameras slung around their
necks, eyes glancing warily around them as
if a Chinaman with a burp gun might be
hiding in the bushes.
These men were American Navy doctors
and corpsmen sent over from Japan to
relieve the men of Easy Med.
So it was all over for us for awhile. For
Bill Ogle, “Pierre” Lascheid, Sam
Dougherty, Gordon McKinley, Ben Flowe,
Lee Yung-kak, and all the other doctors.
For Don Flau, Korbis, J. P. Holliday, and all
the other corpsmen. We were able to sleep
again, knowing that the wounded men were
being taken care of.
We would be up again in a few hours if
the casualties kept coming and the new
men needed help. But now our waking
nightmare ended with sleep. Sleep to erase
the memories of the mutilation we had just
tried to correct, sleep to forget the carnage
that man had perpetrated against man in the
name of a godless communism.
A sleep which was not anesthesia, and a
sleep which, unlike Jesse Carter’s, was not
death. We nearly slept the clock around.
When we finally awoke early on Tuesday
morning, the 19th of August, everything
was quiet except for the usual sounds of a
military base. An occasional truck rumbled
by. The off-duty corpsmen played volley
ball on the hillside copter strip. The thin
purr of an L-19 hummed in the near distance.
Every five minutes the guns of the
11th Marines thundered in volleys of four.
The devil in my nightmare still played his
hateful tune in my head. Never had I seen
such carnage even on the worst nights at
Cook County Hospital.
I spent a couple of hours going over the
statistics with George de Preaux. We’d
triaged 1,004 wounded men from Friday
night to Monday afternoon. (The VFW
Magazine of June/July 1993 listed 313
WlAs for the Battle of Bunker Hill. But
that’s way off. I was there. I myself counted
them at Easy Med, and we didn’t get
everyone who should be counted and
weren’t. There were MIAs and POWs and
some who didn’t report minor wounds.
There were some who went out through
Dog or Charley Med.)
We did 142 major operations under general
anesthesia — better than two an hour.
We evacuated 153 walking wounded to
Able Med for minor debridement. We
shipped 288 severely wounded men to the
Consolation — forty-eight Sikorskis with
six stretchers in each.
We operated on 397 WIAs in the Minor
Surgery tent under local anesthesia. A high
percentage of those “minors” were multiple
shrapnel wounds. Five, ten, twenty, even
thirty wounds in a single body, but none of
them breaking bone or penetrating the belly
or thorax. Many would have been called
“majors” in a Stateside hospital. Three men
came in DOA.
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