The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals - Brett McKay [64]
“I was the first to step out freely along a hitherto untravelled route; I have not trod in the footsteps of others: he who relies on himself is the leader to guide the swarm.” —Horace
Our Job Was to Do Whatever We Could Do
FROM WE WHO ARE ALIVE AND REMAIN:
UNTOLD STORIES FROM THE BAND OF Brothers, 2009
By Marcus Brotherton
Historian Stephen Ambrose believed that a key to Allied success in World War II was the ability of American soldiers to think as individuals. While the Japanese and German soldiers were highly trained and zealously devoted, when their line of command broke down, the men were left not knowing how to proceed. The American soldiers, in contrast, were able to think creatively and take initiative in the absence of direct orders. This was exemplified on D-Day when Easy Company’s paratroopers were dropped far from their intended targets and scattered from each other. Instead of being paralyzed by indecision, the men banded together whomever they could find, and as individuals and little groups did whatever they could to further the mission as they tried to find their companies. Some, like Ed Pepping, never made it back to their men, but got to work in whatever situation they found themselves and in whatever capacity they could.
ED PEPPING
We were dropped much lower and faster than anticipated. On the way down I remember seeing burn holes in my parachute from the bullets going through. I came in backward and landed in the middle of a field. I didn’t have enough time to pull up on the risers and alleviate the shock of landing. The back of my helmet hit the back of my head. I didn’t know it at the time but I had cracked three vertebrate and received a concussion. All I knew was that I kept blacking out and coming to. That blacking in and out happened all the time I was there. I have a lot of blank spots in my memory of Normandy. I can remember only about half the time I was there. It comes in bits and pieces.
When I landed, I had nothing except a knife. As a medic I never carried a rifle anyway, but the speed of the jump and the opening shock had ripped all my medical equipment off me. That was very frustrating. It had taken weeks to pack the equipment, but the frustrating part was that I had nothing to work with. You can imagine, a lot of the wounds seen were catastrophic.
As medics, our job was to do whatever we could do. On the first day I was on the way to join the guys and was called into a building being used as an aid station. We had no evac at the time. A guy had a big sucking chest wound, a wound they had only told us about but never seen firsthand. The only thing I could do was close the wound up as best I could. I couldn’t stay there to see that he was evacuated. I don’t know if the man lived or not. That was the way it was. Time after time we saw guys lose legs and arms, chest wounds, guys all shot up and bloody. A man can bleed to death in a couple of minutes. If it hadn’t been for the wonderful doctors we had—the guys who had some serious medical experience—we would have lost so many more men.
You have to realize that a medic is no doctor. Our job was to reach a wounded man as quickly as possible out on the field, get him stabilized by bandaging and giving him morphine, then get him back to a doctor—if you could. But if you don’t have any bandages or morphine, what can you do? You scrounge around and find whatever you can. When you come across catastrophic wounds—what can a medic ever do about those? It’s not like I had a first-aid book with me or could call up a doctor on the phone.
That same day, the first day, I went to a church in Angoville au Plein that was being used as an aid station. One of our guys had found an abandoned German jeep somewhere and was bringing in as many casualties as he could. I helped him out for quite a while. The people in that church have never taken the blood