The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals - Brett McKay [46]
HERB SUERTH JR.
Bastogne was the coldest place I’ve ever been in my life. My wife and I have a cabin up in Wisconsin today where we often spend some time in winters, and even now, sitting in the warmth of that cabin, I’ll look out at the snow covered pine trees and shiver. It’s just a reaction.
A lot of the struggle in Bastogne was trying to keep your feet dry and warm. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day exercise. If you weren’t vigilant you had trench foot within hours. I was a bit lucky because I had been previously issued galoshes, rubber overshoes, with clips. They weren’t perfect. Your feet would sweat in them because they were enclosed, and get wet from the inside out. But they did keep the snow off and keep your feet from being soaked from the outside in. I never wore the burlap bags a lot of the guys put on their feet.
If you changed your socks three to four times a day, you could keep your feet pretty dry. You dried your socks with body heat by putting them in your helmet or wrapping them around your waist. I had six to eight pairs of socks. I kept them with me all the time and never put them back in my personal bag. You wouldn’t wash them—hell, no; you just dried them. It was hard to get water because you had to melt snow to get it, and fires were too dangerous. You couldn’t even keep water in your canteen at night because it froze. One of the things I learned back at the Blue Ridge [in training] was to always have a needle and thread with me to repair gloves. That proved handy at Bastogne because your gloves stuck to the rifle barrels and ripped because of the cold.
I was wounded when an artillery round landed next to me. Both my legs were broken. I spent three months in skeletal traction. They drill a hole through your knee, put a wire through all the bones, then put a U-shaped brace over that. At the end of that brace they hook up a wire. That goes up over the end of the bed and puts weights on it to keep your legs straight. Talk about painful. You’ve got to realize that by now all of us have tremendous leg muscles. We’ve been running, hiking, climbing, exercising—it takes a lot of weight to overcome your thigh muscles so the bones can set properly. If you ever want to interrogate an enemy soldier, just put him in skeletal traction. About the third day he’ll tell you anything you want.
They used maggots on my legs to eat away the dead flesh. I guessed it worked, because I kept my legs. At one point they had talked about amputating them. Altogether, I was in the hospital for eighteen months—three months in traction, then another six months in bed, then months of rehabilitation after that. It took a long time before I could set a foot on the floor. The first day I did, I stood up. The next day after that I walked across the damn hospital floor on a pair of rolling parallel bars. Ten days later I was out on a weekend pass. They fitted me for a set of braces that I wore for about three months after that. I worked at rehab eight hours a day until I finally healed.
BILL WINGETT
Just back from the hospital in Brussels, I pulled into Mourmelon one-and-a-half days before we piled on trucks for Bastogne. We drove for quite a while, we only got off the truck for piss call—I think we only did that twice. I didn’t have hardly any of my equipment. When our guys were coming south when we were coming north, I never hesitated saying, “Hey, I need that.” So I got to Bastogne with a couple of good coats and a rifle, borrowed from the guys who were retreating.
After some time I had to go to the infirmary for my feet because they were frozen. They were shelling the infirmary while I was there. But I was never shot. I was one of the few. Did I ever think I was going to die? I can only remember a couple of times thinking “this might be it.” But I do not remember any time that I felt like hunkering down in a foxhole