That last word came out as a hysterical screech, causing a sudden momentary silence in the area. “Calm down, please,” I said. “Take me back to the OR. I need clean everything, and then we’ll get to work.”
At that moment, the senior nurse came back in, minus her orderly. The expression on her face told the tale: they’d found the third nurse, smothered under all that dirt. The hysterical nurse gave out an anguished cry, but the senior nurse wasn’t having it. She chided the young woman to get herself together, and then asked who I was.
“He’s a surgeon,” the young nurse said. “And at the moment, he’s the only surgeon.”
“Is that true?” the senior nurse said. “I don’t recognize you. What’s your name?”
“I’m Doctor Lincoln Andersen,” I said. “Lieutenant junior grade, USNR, currently medical officer with the MTB squadron on Bougainville.”
“So, what are you doing here, Lieutenant? And since when does a PT boat squadron rate a surgeon?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “But right now, why don’t you come to the OR with me and I’ll prove my bona fides.”
“Okay,” she said sternly. “I’m Lieutenant Commander Helen Carpenter, director of nursing. You better not be bullshitting me, Doctor, or I’ll shoot you myself.”
“Got it, sir,” I said. “Or, ma’am, I guess. Now, I believe time is of the essence.”
TWENTY-SIX
The next twenty-four hours were a nightmare, though I must say, the entire staff took a collective deep breath and rallied magnificently. I began with a triage round, accompanied by Lieutenant Commander Carpenter. The facility had three ready tables, so I assigned the three most urgent patients to those tables. Then I went into a side room, stripped down, and let two orderlies pour buckets of water over me while I scrubbed all the crud off. The pressurized water system was down due to bomb damage out along the airfield. I scrubbed with soap, deluged again, and then got into OR gowns.
I felt better. I could hear pretty well, the nosebleed was just a nosebleed, my lip hurt, but otherwise I was ready to go. My hands were steady. This had been scary, but Guadalcanal had been much scarier. I ordered the young burn specialist to my side as an assistant and, to his credit, he rose to the occasion. Lieutenant Commander Carpenter stayed with me for thirty minutes before moving on to be the OR mover and shaker, getting breathing equipment, instruments, anesthesia, and putting nurses in motion before I even needed to ask. She was marvelous—calm, authoritative without being unpleasant about it—and because of her, we were able to process casualties in a relatively smooth and organized fashion, given the chaos outside. It was clear the nurses adored her, and I was beginning to do the same. I rotated among the three tables for two hours, by which time Carpenter, apparently no longer in a mood to shoot me, made sure I had all the nursing assistance I needed.
Then three of the regular staff surgeons showed up, battered and bandaged, coughing and wheezing, but apparently concerned that there was only one cutter trying to handle the avalanche. One of them was much older than the other two, probably approaching sixty. He looked unusually pale and he was sweating, even in the air-conditioning, which mercifully had come back on. He sat down when he got there and asked for water. The other two, who were my age, gave me a friendly nod before going to scrub in. Once they manned their tables, the OR quieted down substantially. I felt a sense of relief. The nurses were used to working with them, so there were a lot fewer orders and hand-me’s once they showed up. Then the older doc, whose head was wrapped in bandages and whose eyeglasses had been taped onto his head, suddenly collapsed at the table from what looked like a heart attack to me. The nurses swarmed him but I just kept going, having done these marathons before. I knew if I stopped, I’d really, really want to sit down. I sucked oxygen periodically but no one batted an eye. Then they brought Garr in.
He was a bloody mess. It was a moment before I recognized him, and then the irony of the situation hit me like a hammer. Had he been conscious, I just might have bent over and asked him if he’d like some thiopentone. But then the nurse anesthetist nodded, and I reverted to being a surgeon. I had to amputate his left arm at the elbow, remove his left eyeball, and do the best I could with a slash wound that went from above and behind his left ear all the way down across his face to his right jawbone. Whatever had hit him had shattered all the teeth on the left side of his mouth. I didn’t have to remove them; they fell out in a bloody mush of white enamel and gum tissue when I suctioned and rinsed his mouth.
Next in was the Navy captain who’d interviewed me, whose name I still didn’t know, who’d been with Garr when the bombs hit. He had a collapsed lung from a through-and-through projectile wound. He was semiconscious when they brought him to the table. I don’t think he recognized me when they laid him down, gowned and masked as I was. He was obviously in great pain, and only relaxed when they started the ether. I backed away, shed my gloves and sweaty mask, got new ones and clean instruments, and went to work.
I don’t know how many operations I performed that day—and night—but it was many. The other two surgeons had their hands full as well. It had been Carpenter who finally called time on me and made me go lie down on a cot in a corner of the OR complex. I was asleep in thirty seconds. When I woke up, I found myself covered with a blanket. The OR was dimly lit and quiet except for the familiar noises of post-surgery cleanup. I was stiff and my feet were sore, but I was reasonably happy with what I’d done. I smelled hot coffee, and then Carpenter was there, with a mug in each hand. I sat up with a groan but gratefully accepted the coffee. She pulled a stool over and sat down next to me. I sat with my back against the sloping walls of the Quonset hut. The coffee was wonderful.
“So,” she said pleasantly, “you told me it was a long story. The nurses are calling you Superman. Give. And call me Helen, if you’d like.”
I did. I gave her a much shorter version of what I’d recited to the captain in Garr’s office, but then observed that I was getting tired of having to defend myself every time I collided with the medical bureaucracy.
“I know there’s a lot I have to learn,” I told her. “But when it comes to battle trauma surgery, I think I’m competent enough to save lives, at least for a while. As I see it, I keep them from dying during the first twenty-four hours after they are wounded. I understand that they’ll then need to go back to real hospitals and real specialist surgeons with at least a hundred years of experience.”
She grinned. “Got it,” she said. “And for what it’s worth, you’re a long way past being just an intermediate stop between a guy dying from his wounds and the work of a specialist who gets to take his time, study X-rays, pull skin grafts, do lab tests, and call in other experts. I watched you work. For a third-year resident, you’re quick, confident, decisive, and technically very impressive. I was a surgical nurse before I got old and they kicked me upstairs to be the Nursing Dragon. I know what I’m talking about. Your problem is political, not medical.”
“Do tell,” I said. “But, honestly? At this point, I’m ready to give it up and go back to my boat squadron and do pecker-checks and annual physicals for the duration.”
“Don’t you dare,” she said. “This war is spitting out revolutionary technical change. Weapons, airplanes, radar, and medicine. The old guard’s gonna react like it always does: ‘that wasn’t how we did it in my day, by Godfrey.’ You’re gonna be somebody in the next generation of surgeons. Did you keep logs of what you did?”
“Yes, I did. But listen, you’re making it sound like this war is nothing more than a grand-scale global residency, at least as far as we docs are concerned.”
“Bingo,” she said triumphantly. “From what I’ve read, all wars are.”
Her eyes were practically blazing. I almost asked her how old she was, because I really couldn’t tell. I knew that all the nurses worked hard not to be sexy, attractive, or ever seen as “on the make.” An operating room or a ward full of bloody, battered, and whimpering soldiers and s
ailors was no place for war paint or even a hint of perfume, and I was confident that Helen was a dedicated enforcer of that rule. And yet, I found her intensely attractive. Maybe it was because she was on my side. Maybe it was because an attractive American female was sitting right here, talking to me. It made for a nice change after months of nonstop tragedy.
I think at that moment she realized we were dallying with intimacy. Not sexual, so much, but just the kind of intimacy that exists between friends, where you can let your hair down and tell someone how you really feel about things. Except I was a man and she was very much a woman. She straightened up in her chair and momentarily turned her eyes away. Oh, boy, I thought. Doctors and nurses. I knew better.
“How’s Garr doing?” I asked. She seemed relieved when I broke the “spell,” which probably only existed in my own tired brain. I felt a pang of regret.
“He’s hurting and he’s scared,” she said. “His nurse made the mistake of letting him see himself in a mirror.”
“Well, that was inevitable,” I said. “He’s going to have to go all the way back to Tripler hospital to fix that mess. He needs a plastic surgeon and maxillofacial surgery.”
“He needs more than that,” she said. “As in, a swift kick in the ass. God, Almighty, but that man was a pimple on the ass of progress.”
“I remember him well,” I said. “He was my boss on Guadalcanal, a hundred years ago. And that captain? I never got his name.”
“The captain,” she said. “His name is Robert Chisholm, and he’s actually a flag selectee. He’ll be the senior medical officer for the whole Southwest Pacific. He is—formidable.”
“And a good guy?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Where did you go to med school?”
“Duke,” I replied.
“Wow,” she said. “Duke Medical? That’s up there. I would have thought that a surgeon at Duke could have gotten any deferment he wanted.”
“Well,” I said. “Is there any more coffee? Then I’ll tell you a little bit about me.”
She obliged, and then I began. I’d been finishing up my third year as a surgical resident at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, when the war started. Both of my parents are medical doctors; my father is a vascular surgeon and my mother a radiologist. Life was just about perfect back then. My parents, both established experts in their respective fields, were paying my way through the grueling process of becoming a surgeon. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I had the luxury of being able to focus entirely on my studies without having to worry about student loans, outside night jobs, and sharing living facilities with other financially strapped residents.
I had “only” four years to go to become a “real” surgeon. I’d already spent four years at a premed college, four years at medical school, and three of the seven years as a rising resident. I was thirty-one years old, beginning to bald a bit, and just starting to wonder if all this endless, day in, day out training and school was going to be worth it. I would have been thirty-five years old when I finally got to take the big Boards. That was a sobering fact, not to mention those nagging questions, such as: when will I ever have time to find a wife, or have a family? I’d already seen the work hours junior surgeons were subjected to. I hadn’t dared to express any of these concerns to my parents, who were footing the hefty bills.
And then one day there’d been a great commotion in the residents’ lounge over news reports that the Empire of Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and virtually destroyed the US Pacific Fleet. After studiously avoiding the growing calamity that was Europe, the United States had been plunged into a global war. Hitler and all his machinations had stayed 2,500 miles away for the past two years, kept that way by a nation of parents and grandparents who vividly remembered the last time America was dragged into a European war. But now, as black-and-white newsreels depicted the horrors of the attack in Hawaii and the scope of Japanese treachery, political sentiment in America, ever fickle, had morphed rapidly into a call for national revenge.
I heard about other residents taking leave to get commissions into the Army and I wondered if this might be a good way to deal with my doubts about a medical career. I knew I couldn’t present myself as a surgeon, but apparently the Army was taking just about anybody who could show a diploma from an accredited university med school. I went down to the local Army office recruiter in Raleigh, where I joined the surprisingly long lines of men volunteering to make the Japs remember Pearl Harbor. When I finally got up to the desk of a harried sergeant and told him I was a third-year surgical resident at Duke, I was immediately whisked away to another building to meet an Army Medical Corps major.
“Sure you want to do this?” the major had asked me. “I mean, hell, you’ve got a residency at Duke, for Chrissakes. I can get you waivered for at least two years, if not longer. You’d be a lot more valuable to the Army as a Duke-trained surgeon, not to mention preserving your medical career.”
“I know I can’t be a surgeon in the Army, but surely I can be an MD in wartime. I really want to do my part.”
The major just stared at me. “Don’t think you won’t be doing surgery in the Army, especially when you get to the field. You’re gonna get more hands-on training than you’d ever get at school, even at Duke. Let’s do this: go take the physical. If you pass that, you’ll get a reserve commission as a first lieutenant, then get some training on how to salute, and then you’ll get assigned to a field hospital somewhere. Tell me, what did your faculty advisor say when you told him?”
“He said: good for you.”
“I’ll just bet he did,” the major said. “But did he sound sincere?”
In fact, my advisor had tried hard to talk me out of it, but I persisted. I took the Army physical and failed it. Flat feet, a small heart murmur, less than 20/20 vision, and elevated blood pressure. “Go back to school,” the major told me. “When things get bad, we’ll come find you, trust me. This is gonna be a long war.”
On the way out I heard one of the other recruiters telling a volunteer that he, too, failed the physical. “Try the Navy,” the sergeant was saying. “They’ll take anybody; they just lost three thousand guys at Pearl Harbor.” I tried the Navy, told them about my physical. The recruiter listened patiently and then asked if I’d ever been convicted of a felony. A week later my father pinned on my bright silver lieutenant (junior grade) insignia and I was off to Newport. By mid-1942 I found myself on an Army transport ship to Hawaii, along with a whole bunch of Marines. Scuttlebutt around the ship was that there was an invasion being planned; the target was some island called Guadalcanal.
Helen listened attentively. “Well, I think that Army major was right, but we are all very damned glad you were here yesterday. Oh—speaking of Captain Chisholm: he wants to talk to you.”
“Is he in any condition to talk?” I asked. “He had a punctured lung. It was a dirty bullet hole. Infection is likely.”
She shrugged. “He’s conscious and wants to talk to you. You up to it?”
“Me?” I said. “Why, I’m Superman. I leap tall buildings in a single bound. I—”
She grinned and looked ten years younger. “Spare me,” she said.
“So, where’s Lois Lane?” I asked. “Somebody’s gotta help me walk.” Then she surprised me.
“Right here,” she said, and took my hand. Amazed, I put my other hand over hers. “To be continued,” I said.
She smiled then. It was a chaste smile. Tentative, demure, hopeful but not too hopeful. I squeezed her hand. Then someone banged into the OR and announced there’d been a big sea fight and that ships were coming in.
She closed her eyes. “Fuck,” she growled through clenched teeth.
“Hold that thought,” I said. She giggled and then we both started laughing before we realized people were looking. Then the doors opened, people began swarming into the OR, and the lights went up. Still, for the first time in this war I felt good. Then I remembered that Captain, soon-to-be-Admiral, Chisholm
wanted to talk to me. Helen disappeared into the crowd that was filling the OR complex. I asked an orderly when the casualties would arrive. “Two hours,” he said. “But this time, word is, they kicked some Jap ass for a change.”
Wonderful, I thought. I got up, swayed for a moment, hit the head to de-coffee, and then went to find Captain Chisholm.
The captain was in the recovery ward, in one of the crosswise Quonset huts. He had an IV drip going and there was an oxygen apparatus on standby. His color was fairly good but he lay there like a boneless doll. His eyes were shut and his eyelids fluttered every ten seconds or so. I stood by the edge of his bed for a full minute and then massaged his right hand. He woke up and struggled to recognize me. Then he did.
“Doctor Andersen,” he said in a weak voice. “Thank you.”
“You’re going to be fine,” I said. “Next time, learn to duck. Sir.”
He exhaled a long, chemical-smelling breath. “So, I hear you’re Superman,” he said.
I laughed out loud. “Nurses,” I said. “They like to give docs nicknames. If I was Superman it wasn’t for very long. Three of the hospital surgeons climbed out of their sickbeds and came back to work, thanks be to God. Should I be calling you Admiral?”
“Not yet,” he said with a tired grin. “Listen; I told you to go back to your squadron, right?”
“Yes, sir, you did.”
“Do that,” he said. “Munda is temporary. We’re going to bypass Rabaul. Let all those thousands of Japs up there just wither on the vine. Next stop is the Gilberts. Tarawa. Makin. Then the Marianas. Saipan. Tinian. Guam. You stick with your PT boats. Keep your damned head down. As soon as Halsey decides where the next big hospital will be, I will be in touch.”
The Hooligans Page 23