Bill Toms, editor of the 17th Airborn email newsletter has written the following;
"I had served as a medic, but I was preliminarily trained as a rifleman. Consequently, I have two views of combat. Had I stayed a rifleman, my duties would have been to shoot the enemy soldier in the face, or bayonet him in his belly and would have felt glory and patriotism for killing another person who was bent on killing me.
However, as a 19-20 year old unsophisticated small town boy assigned to be a medic, my views become compassion and sorrow for those other young men who was killed or mutilated, whether he was friend or when they all had parents, wives, children and grandparents waiting at home.
My medical training was primarily watching black and white films of gunshot wounds, how to apply a bandage, tourniquet, splint, sulfanilamide powder and injecting a ‘into an orange. My other training was in erecting huge canvas tents, digging slit trenches for latrines, and marching while carrying heavy loads, and was the ‘dummy’ for other medics to practice pushing a needle into my veins. I had exceptionally large veins because I was so thin. Very seldom was I given experiences of carrying a person in a litter, or running with one under simulated combat conditions.
Suddenly, the sky turned red and the shooting started. It was all blood and guts, body parts,an arm or head that were detached from another soldier under such thundering explosions,screaming, screeching sounds and stifling smokes.
In most cases, I have shunted my experiences into the fantasy realm so that I can look back to those traumatic scenes to envision events that had now become unreal and imaginary.Otherwise, I would have become insane or at least withdrawn to suffer the effects of posttraumatic symptoms.
It is very difficult for me to talk about an entire planeload of paratroopers all burned to death when their C-46 were shot down and caught on fire to have crash-landed,or to tell about a poor rifleman who picked up a bazooka trying to stop a tank. He pulled the trigger and the entire bazooka blew up on his shoulder. He perished with half his torso torn away and had become an unidentifiable unknown soldier.
There were many other instances of bomber crews risking their lives to drop bombs on Germany. After the war was over, hundreds of unexploded b bombs to discover that those bombs were not fused to explode, only because somebody did not put in the fuse.
It hurts me to think that many of our military died unnecessarily due to our internal unwise decision of not putting self-sealing gas tanks in our C-46 cargo planes, or due to sabotage from among our labor force.
The net effect on me today is that I felt I had not done much in the war. I was in combat and yet I was not. I had only to rely on the fact that this skinny scrawny Chinese boy was promoted to a Staff Sergeant rank in a highly competitive environment as having been the only Chinese-person in that unit. I must have been a very good medic and a very dedicated one to have earned that distinction.
I was a Private all through the war, so it was more as an afterthought by my superior officers. I could have earned a medal of some kind, but I had not done an obviously heroic deed, so I did not deserve such an honor. I was happy with my Staff Sergeant rating because it was a promotion in higher pay and benefits.
At that rank, I was eligible to receive three bottles of whiskey a month after the war on payday, but it was not such a beneficial award since I did not drink at all. I traded my three bottles of scotch for three bottles of Coca Cola. I was very popular on payday for that, but I was also dreaded because everybody had to expose his genital to me on the mandated “short-arm inspection” before getting paid. It was the army regulation of the time that nobody got paid if he had a venereal disease. (Bill Tom, Medic)"
Tomorrow I plan to post the first part of my "in the Bulge days" story and will follow by the 25th with the invasion over the Rhine River. I hope you will find it of interest. It too is not a story of heroism but of an experience.
I did write the other day that conditions in none of the 20th century wars equal that faced by the GIs in the Bulge. I would retract that statement because the WWII soldiers (and Marines) in the South Pacific and the Vietnam vets faced different horrendous circumstances. Our soldiers caught by the Chinese in Northern Korea not only suffered sever weather conditions but were also surprised by an unexpected enemy attack. What I do know is that no American troops were equipped for the conditions in Belgium in December 44 and January 45.
