Voices from the Korean War - Douglas Rice [145]
The Medical School is where I became good friends with Benjamin Franklin Dunkle, known as “Jiggs,” from Johnstown, Ohio. We had our evening meal in Sasebo, Japan, and breakfast in Pusan, Korea; our voyage to Korea was a short one.
We stayed in Pusan a few days processing through the “pipeline.” That was the first time I had heard that phrase and actually thought I was going to be working on some kind of pipeline. It turned out that all replacements to Korea were called “pipeline” or “cannon fodder.” This is where Jiggs and I split up. I was sent to Yong Dong Po, which was close to Seoul, to the division headquarters for the 1st Cavalry. Jiggs went to the 2nd Infantry Division to be a medic in a rifle company. He was killed in action during September 1951. [As a medic for the 23rd Infantry Regiment, he was killed in action on September 6, 1951; during the battle for Bloody Ridge.]
After spending a day at headquarters, I was sent to Company C, 8th Combat Engineers. I was just beginning to know people when I was transferred to B Company. Here I became known as “Doc” to forty guys—I went everywhere they went.
The reason I was transferred to B Company was a tank patrol had been ambushed with three engineers wounded, and one taken as a prisoner of war. The medic that was with them had a nervous breakdown and was sent somewhere else. I was never ambushed while on a patrol, but the fear of knowing it could happen was always with me. However, on one patrol we did encounter small arms fire and had some grenades thrown at us. So one of the tanks advanced to our location and shot its .50 caliber machine gun at the hill where the fire was coming from. We had no more trouble that day.
The Combat Engineers job was to lay mines, probe for and remove enemy mines, and build roads for the infantry. In the mornings I would go to the platoon sergeants tent to see who he wanted me to go with; it was usually the squad that was doing the most dangerous job. The most dreaded task was tank patrol.
Tankers had a right to be leery of hitting a land mine, because they would knock off a tread, disabling it. One time we had just caught up with the tanks, when a tanker was calling for a medic. I rushed up there finding a tank that had hit an anti-tank mine. The explosion had blown the escape hatch, which is located under the assistant driver’s feet, straight up breaking both of his legs in several places. I gave him a shot of morphine, took two ram rods—per leg—and put splints on his legs. I was looking for litter bearers to evacuate him, when the tank commander said they had to go back and check out the damage; they took the wounded tanker with them.
Roughly two weeks after I arrived at B Company, we went in one of our established anti-personnel minefields; we found a dead soldier from Signal Corps. Cautiously, we moved him out of the minefield so those who took care of the dead could do their jobs. A few days later, the letter I had written to Jiggs came back marked “Deceased.” I went out in a field, by myself, and cried.
It was October 1951, and the engineers were laying “Bouncing Betties” along a ridge in front of the infantry bunkers. We had stopped for chow, at noon, when a shell went off over the hill where we had just come from. Somebody was yelling “Medic,” so I took two engineers with me and we found another soldier from Signal Corps lying in the minefield—wounded. He told me to be careful because it was a minefield; I told him I knew and that some guys were coming to disarm them, so we could get him out.
I asked him if he had seen the strand of barbed wire with signs in four different languages that said, “Mine Field.”
He said, “Yes.”
My next question was, “Why are you in here, then?”
He told me he was checking the telephone lines, which were laid on top of the ground, from the MLR to the outpost and he thought he could make it through. Finally, we were able to get him out, but he was a long way from being out of danger. A piece of shrapnel was buried in his back. Not being trained, or qualified,