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At 8:1 5 pm on Jul y 19, the 102nd depar ted Saint-Germaine-deVarreville in trucks moving southeast across the Cotentin—“blasted towns” everywhere. At 11:1 5 pm they set up in another pastur e two miles north of Barneville. As promised, all of the unit ’s equipment awaited them—including Alabama, with booze unbroken—personnel tents even erected. With still-fresh memories of Goffs, Ren returned to sleeping on a bedroll and cot in a p yramidal tent shared with buddies L aws, King, Peterson, and Rutenberg. The next day he aw oke to find that Goodiel had added to his list of chaplain’s duties the locating of laundry services for the physicians; the 102nd’s washing machine serviced hospital sheets and occasionally “men’s laundry.” Bemused yet excited about any excuse to explore, off he went in Alabama with the dirty clothes of at least eight physicians—first stop seven miles inland to the north at Surtainville. He located a woman who had directed an elementary school at nearby Valognes until it was blown up a month earlier. She spoke “a little English” and was eager for the take- in work. Here he also had the fi rst of many encounters with Europe’s “other” wartime rural economy. “Small boy . . . tries to sell me a 4 oz bottle of cognac for 200 f rancs.”As he drove back to Barneville, however, his bemusement about the laundry assignment gave way to more pondering about “the men”unnecessarily struggling over the Utah dunes two days before.Finding the CO this time willing to go along with anything, back at the tents “I speak to 75 officers and nurses about their treatment of the men . . . flunkies . . . [making them] c arry their duffle bags, etc. I offended some.” The next morning these concerns again mo ved to the bac k burner. Overnight Goodiel received new orders. Up at 4:30 a m and with some of the officers’ laundry left at Surtainville, the 102nd trucked back across the Cotentin twenty-two miles east to become fully operational out of a pasture at Picauville, across the road from a P47 airbase, between PontCHAPTER 5 Barneville-le- Car teret and Picauville Jul y 194 4 42 ch a pt er 5 l’Abbé and Sainte-Mère-Église,where the 101st Air borne had torturously helped begin D-day operations back on the night of June 5.Even if German planes could target the hospital,it was still relatively safe while being close enough—between ten and tw enty miles away—to recovery from the Saint-Lô battle and westerly fighting at Periers and Lessay. Little action occurred that first day in Picauville; Ren and Roland even got orders to take Alabama the twenty miles back to Surtainville to pick up and drop off more laundry. On July 21,however, the wounded started arriving. For the week following that date, the hospital stayed 50 percent full, averaging two hundred patients a day.The load was made more demanding by rapid arrivals of seven or more wounded at a time , all needing instant surger y. The 102ndmoved to a combat schedule of twelve hours on and twelve hours off. Indeed, just four days into France, the surgeons had to expand into the command’s pyramidal tent,which moved offices,including Ren’s,into pup tents. As Ren told the diar y on the night of July 25,“the 102nd is [now] in the war.” And the next night he continued to Mary: Ambulance after ambulance came . . . the flood . . . surgeons working day and night (there are two shifts) . . . and the boys . . . exhausted when they come in f rom lack of sleep and pain . . . don’t have much to say and ar e very patient and brave . . . It was so bloody. One man with shrapnel [was] William Gregory from Selma, lives out on the Summerfield Road. Ren’s chaplain duties during this week went on “practically all day”in the wards.“Some boys want a prayer . . .one wanted to take Communion [so] I took some wine in a paper cup and a piece of bread in my hand and gave it to him.” But Ren had secular issues, too. Consistent with the Geneva Convention, the US Army ’s ambulances picked up wounded German POWs as they brought in GIs, and some twenty of these received treatment under the tents at Picauville. “A few of the [GIs] in...

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