Voices from the Korean War - Douglas Rice [24]
As I arrived, I yelled for the medics to give them some morphine, because they were in pain. I offered to help unload them, but I couldn’t get out of the truck; this was the first time I had realized I too was wounded. All three of us were treated then transported to a M.A.S.H. unit. I was flown on a stretcher strapped to a side-pod of a helicopter, which meant I was exposed to the elements of the weather. The flight wasn’t bad, but it sure was dusty during takeoff and landing.
After being treated at the M.A.S.H. unit, I was taken by ambulance to Taegu, where I was loaded onto a train headed for Pusan. The car I rode in was equipped with web strapping, to hold the stretchers, which were stacked three high. The following day we arrived at Pusan and I was placed on an airplane, suspended by the same kind of straps that were on the train—I was still in the same stretcher. After spending a night at Itazuki, Japan, I was then flown to Osaka, where I was admitted to the Army General Hospital.
Upon arriving, the first thing I did was write home to assure my parents that my wound was not life threatening. It was a good thing I did, because a day after my letter arrived they received three telegrams from the government; they said I had been slightly wounded, severely wounded, and killed in action.
By the second day, my left leg—from the knee to the ankle—had swollen to double its size and had begun to turn a dark color. It was oozing a black, thick liquid that had a foul odor. As the doctor was making his rounds, he stopped at my bed and read my charts. He informed his assistant that he would have to amputate my leg below the knee. As he turned to see the next patient, I asked him if I had heard him correctly; he replied that I had. It being “my” leg, I asked if there was anything else he could try. Even though gangrene had already set in, he said he could try draining it, but I could possibly have problems with it for years. I told him to give it a shot. He said it was against his better judgment, but he agreed.
Two days later they operated on my leg, making a three inch incision on the left side of my calf; they drained a pint-and-a-half of infected liquid. Since the flesh was too rotten, they were unable to put sutures in, so they used a butterfly bandage. I was then confined to bed for two weeks to see if the incision would close by itself.
Later, they took an x-ray of my entire leg and found a couple of large pieces of shrapnel in my thigh. They took me back to the operating room and removed them, plus sutured up my earlier incision with stainless steel stitches—the butterfly bandage hadn’t done its job. The following day the stitches pulled through the skin, and once again the wound was wide open.
They tried this same procedure three or four more times, all with the same results. So, they tried a skin graft, which after two attempts was also unsuccessful. Word around the hospital was any patient needing to stay there for thirty days would be returned to the States. Having already been there two months, I became a challenge for the doctors.
A guy I knew from D Company was in the same ward, but he only stayed two days before being sent stateside. Before he left, he told me a guy from my squad was on the floor below us, so I hurried down to see him. There lying in a bed was my first gunner—Angel Gomez. When he saw me he smiled, and it was obvious a lot of his teeth had been broken off. His right arm had been amputated below the elbow. As we talked, I told him that because of his arm he would be going home. He said missing his arm didn’t bother him that much, but he wondered if he would ever walk again as he threw back his sheet to expose his amputated legs. He was firing his machine gun when it took a direct hit from a mortar shell.
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It was around the end of November when I received word from home that my brother Jim had been drafted into the Army. After completing his basic training at Camp