The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [46]
CHAPTER 10
Siboney
The rains started in Cuba, falling lightly at first, then in heavy, gray panels, drumming against the blades of palmettos and muddying the camp. In the afternoon, the temperature might reach 120 degrees, but during the night, it dropped into the 60s, and rain fell steadily, soaking the soldiers in their dog tents. Camped outside the village of Siboney on a narrow mesa between steep hillside and jagged, coral-rock shoreline, the Thirty-third Michigan and Seventh Massachusetts awaited the Battle of Santiago.
Dr. Victor Clarence Vaughan, dean of the medical school in Michigan, chose to sleep in a hammock. It was a good way to prevent the crabs that scratched their way across the sparse mesa from crawling over him in his sleep. With his poncho and blanket hanging in the boughs of the tree to protect against the rain, he could reach the blanket when the temperature fell and wrap up inside the wet wool while waiting for morning and the swarms of mosquitoes that came with it. When the mosquitoes were too much, Vaughan would strip down and head toward the water pipe that pumped fresh water from the mountains outside of Siboney into Santiago. The troops would drive holes into the pipeline to drink water, or even better, get a morning shower, before plugging them closed again. After his pipeline shower, Vaughan would make his way to the mess hall for coffee—freshly made by the cook, who pounded the grains in a tin pan with a bayonet.
The army needed a place to unload supplies, but the treacherous road from the American-held Guantanamo Bay to Santiago was riddled with tangled jungle and tropical fever, so transports— including a large number of medical supplies—were sent to the coastal hamlet of Siboney under the command of General W. Rufus Shafter. Vaughan and the other Michigan volunteers had arrived there on board the Yale on June 27, 1898.
Vaughan had already seen things in Cuba he never expected to see—some were innocent observations like the fact that the locals feared the soldiers’ toothbrushes. The soldiers kept them in the bands of their caps, and the locals, having never seen a toothbrush before, thought it might be some sort of weapon. Other observations were more disturbing. The Cuban insurgents, so romanticized in the U.S. as revolutionaries, were nothing more than a collection of withering men, women and children. “It was the first time I had seen a starving people, and I could hardly believe what I saw,” wrote Vaughan. “My mental picture of starving people had consisted of individuals uniformly emaciated from head to foot, but the first impression made upon me by these people was that they had eaten too heavily. The limbs and the chest were greatly emaciated, while the abdomen was markedly protruding.”
Vaughan and the troops were at their new camp less than a week before the Battle of Santiago. A few miles away, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders rode toward Kettle Hill in the San Juan Heights. In the next six days, 12 surgeons—Vaughan among them—would treat 1,600 wounded men from the battle. They operated throughout the day and by lanterns swinging from posts in the night, listening to the sound of Spanish bugles in the distance and smelling smoke rising from the sea. Since most of the bullets and shrapnel passed directly through the body, the surgery was fairly simple. Vaughan chose a barber as his surgical assistant to help him clean wounds with Lysol soap and apply iodoform gauze at the flesh points of entry and exit.
When all of the men had been treated and the wounds dressed, Vaughan went back to his hammock exhausted, convinced he could sleep anywhere under any conditions. Exotic birds called from the treetops, and the smell of rotting mango and approaching rain was in the air. Cloudbursts would fall by the afternoon. As he reached his hammock,