Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [155]
As bad as the diseases in the mountain camps were, tropical ulcers were dreaded more. Slow, decaying killers, they started with a breach in the body’s outer defenses—a small cut from a saw blade, a nick from a flying fragment of rock—and in time were gnarled caverns of necrotizing flesh. “The thing eats faster than a cancer can even think of eating,” Charley Pryor said. Swelling out and turning up at the edges, the wound unfailingly drew a cloud of blowflies seeking a chance to lay eggs. The only remedy Pryor used was boiling water. It was too hot to touch, but it felt fine on the ulcer. He spent every free minute pouring it over a rag spread over his wound.
Some put maggots into the wounds to eat away the dead flesh. In Burma, the medical staff in Branch Five tore blue cloth from mosquito netting and used it as bandaging. But natural healing was nearly impossible under the circumstances. The best treatment involved outright removal of the gangrenous tendons and muscle—Dr. Henri Hekking favored curettage with a sharpened mess-kit spoon—followed if possible by local treatment with phenol or Lysol and a sprinkling of iodoform powder. His orderly, Slug Wright of the Lost Battalion, called this “the dry method.” It used no water, no soap, no ointment, no mud. You scraped and you sealed and counted on healthy flesh to scab over and heal by itself. Progress was evident after just three or four days. A man usually didn’t survive amputation. Dr. Hekking did not lose a man to a tropical ulcer.
One day when John Wisecup was working at the Hellfire Pass cutting site, the Japanese engineers detonated a load of TNT unannounced and caught him in a crossfire of limestone chips. He expected the wound to heal, but it festered and grew. There were good medical people around, but at Hintok they had nothing to work with, not even bandages. Wisecup covered his ulcer with mud and washed it with a hot salt-and-water solution. More ulcers opened up on his feet and legs, then beriberi swelled his belly to the point that the several-mile walk out to Hellfire Pass was too much to take. He was put on light duty: digging pits. The dying buried the dead, most of their graves unmarked. Fighting through roots and mud, Wisecup and Crayton Gordon put as many as seventeen men in a single flooded hole.
In the beginning, they valued life above all else. They dragged their sick and dying on the boxcars and on up from Kanchanaburi into the jungles around Hintok to work with them until they died. “Had we known…that they’d wind up in a damn slop-hole grave, [we would have] let them die on the trail,” Quaty Gordon said. “It would have been far better not to have carried the man, to let him stop on the side of the road, and let a Jap either put a bayonet through him or a bullet through his head, and that would have been the end of it. You carried him and let him go through all the agonies of hell in that jungle. But that was clinging to life; that’s what it amounted to.”
At Hintok they died without drama or ceremony. “We’d find them laying out there outside the tents,” Wisecup said. “At first we made individual graves, and then there were so many of them that we just couldn’t keep up with it.” One rainy morning he and another man were hauling a corpse on a stretcher through the rain. Wearing khaki pants torn across the rear, the Marine was sloughing through six inches of mud, bare feet bleeding with every step over the sharp bamboo shoots growing beneath the mire. As he walked, the swaying of the stretcher caused the dead man’s feet to keep bumping into his exposed buttocks. Lice were all over Wisecup. He bit off curse after curse. The jungle was working on him. “I never will forget this. I never will