Unsung Valor: A GI's Story of World War II

Patient and Replacement: France and England

Patient and Replacement Franc« ana tnglana January il—May lo, /94J Suddenly, I was floating. About 0235, medics lifted my litter, carried me out from under the open-sided aid-station tent, and slid the litter onto a rack in an ambulance, beside three other wounded GIs. When I asked the medic where we were going, he threw a blanket over me and said, "The evacuation hospital at Thionville." Before I could speak to the other wounded, my exhaustion and the warmth inside the ambulance lulled me back to sleep. At Thionville, doctors were conducting triage in the spacious foyer of the hotel de ville, or city hall, which had been converted into an evacuation hospital. A doctor, accompanied by a male corpsman and nurse, was inspecting the wounds of GIs lying on stretchers on the foyer floor. The doctor came over to me and asked, "How're you doing, soldier ?" When I told him I felt light-headed and wet all along my left side, he threw back the blanket, uncovering a long puddle of blood extending from my shoulder down my left side to my foot. The doctor ordered the corpsman to administer plasma where I lay. As the medic was preparing, the scene before my eyes slowly faded to black. I awoke in a cavernous ballroom, surrounded by other wounded being tended by doctors, nurses, and orderlies. We were lying head to foot on our canvas cots, about three feet apart, which left enough space between us for medics to tend our needs. ill My most urgent need was to empty my bladder. An orderly brought a urinal and left it with me, but try as I might I couldn't urinate. Another orderly, who discovered my predicament, brought a catheter and kidney-shaped basin. Explaining what he was going to do, he apologized as he slowly inserted the rubber tube in my urethra, trying to avoid hurting me. He asked if I had drunk water after taking the sulfa tablets; I explained how mine was frozen in the canteen and that I had to eat snow. He said snow didn't produce enough liquid to keep the drug from crystallizing in my bladder. That insufficiency and my failure to relieve myself for such a long time traumatized me. It took two more catherizations before I performed on my own. The procedure provided relief but left me extremely raw. About this time, they gave me an antitetanus shot. I couldn't recall the trip in the ambulance to Thionville, so I didn't know how long I had bled. The doctors decided that the clot, which froze around the nearly severed artery in my left wrist, defrosted in the heated ambulance, and I bled slowly on the trip to the hospital. They guessed that if it had taken longer to reach Thionville, I might have died from the loss of blood. Near daybreak, on January21, the surgeons operated, removing only the larger pieces of shrapnel from my legs and concentrating on repairing my wrist. They cut my new OD turtleneck sweater off, to operate on my arm, nearly breaking my heart, because my new sweater was the only personal belonging I had, besides dog tags. The surgeon said he would use a local anesthetic on my wrist, so I asked permission to watch the operation. Although he discouraged me, he reluctantly agreed. The surgical nurse immobilized my left arm by strapping it to a board about six inches wide. After deadening my wrist, the surgeon carefully lifted out three oddly shaped chunks of metal. The largest fragment, lying beneath the skin like an extra-wide watchband, was about two inches square and an eighth of an inch thick. The large flat "band" prevented the other two triangular-shaped pieces from cutting 2i2 Patient and Replacement all the waythrough my wrist. I watched the bloody work until I grew so faint I had to turn away. When I couldn't see what the surgeon was doing, he described incising the surface of my inner wrist to expose the severed artery, trimming its ragged ends, and "anastomosing" the vessel, by suturing the artery's ends together over a tube made of a recently-developed soluble substance. "It's a temporary stint/' the surgeon said, "allowing the blood to flow while the stitches heal. In time, it'll be absorbed in the bloodstream ." The operation shortened the artery...