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Epilogue While the men of G Company relaxed in Czechoslovakia, quietly celebrating the end of the war against Germany, Lt. Lee Otts was more actively celebrating the occasion in Circencester, England, and preparing to leave for the States the next day. In contrast to many who went unwounded but who nevertheless bear the unseen scars of war, the sunny-dispositioned Otts was almost completely recovered from the alltoo -visible wounds he had suffered on Hoecker Hill on March 13. After being wounded Otts had been taken by ambulance from the 26th Division Clearing Station near Serrig, Germany, to the 12th Evacuation Hospital in Luxembourg City, where he was left largely unattended for some twelve to fourteen hours while more serious casualties were being looked after. Finally, sometime after midnight on March IS, an Army surgeon deadened his right shoulder with novocaine, cleaned out the bullet wound, and placed a drain in it. Since the collarbone had been shattered, Otts had to wear a cast from his waist to his chin, with only the left arm and right hand left free. Next a team of two surgeons went to work on his broken jaw, forcing wires around the teeth and through the gums, both top and bottom. Lee vividly recalls that this procedure, which was done without anesthetic , was extremely painful. Strong rubber bands were then hooked over the wire loops to render the jaws immobile. For the next month Otts did all his eating through a straw. There was nothing to be done about the silver-dollar-sized hole in his face where the mortar fragment had hit; it would be allowed to heal naturally before plastic surgery was attempted. The next day, March 16, Lt. Otts was evacuated by air to England. After a temporary stay of a week at one medical facility, where he received no treatment at all because the hospital did not handle broken jaws, he was transferred to the 192nd General Hospital outside the little town of Circencester. The first day there the bandages were removed from his face, and Otts became nauseated after seeing for the first time 256 • EPILOGUE the ragged hole along his left jaw that was so deep the bone was visible. "I hadn't shaved in about six weeks," he recalled in his memoirs, "and the matted, blood-caked beard, plus the hole in my face was too much to take." Those first days at the 192nd were not pleasant for Otts. Although he was ambulatory and was able to wander around the hospital, visiting other patients, the nights were bad. The combination of the uncomfortable cast and the pain of his wounds made sleep difficult. On top of that the drainage from the shoulder wound seeped inside the cast and enveloped him with a foul odor. And since he could not brush his teeth, his mouth tasted almost as bad as his shoulder smelled. The good news was that extensive dental X-rays showed no damage to his teeth. Early in April Otts talked his orthopedic surgeon into removing the cast, and by the middle of the month the wires and rubber bands were removed from his mouth. Although he had to continue carrying his arm in a sling and remain on a diet of soft food for a while, Otts' sense offun and adventure were soon in the ascendancy. And of course his keen eye for the ladies-at first the hospital nurses, but soon to be expanded to broader horizons-had not been diminished. By this time Lee was sufficiently recovered that, with a small patch concealing the wound on his jaw, he was able to go into Circencester every evening. A friend fixed him up with a blind date with a Red Cross worker named Mary Frances Byrd, from Wilmington, North Carolina. Otts was greatly attracted to the petite, dark-haired girl, and soon they were dating steadily. There was also Angelia, the sister of one of his friends in the ward. She was stationed in England in the WAACs and came to see her brother on weekends. ''As she was quite pretty, I was always on hand to give out with the fancy talk," Otts noted in his memoirs. He and Mary Frances Byrd were together almost every evening during that last three weeks Lee was in England. They would stop at a favorite pub called the "Black Horse," where Lee would have a beer while the abstemious Mary Frances toyed with a glass of...

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