by Chris Barton
2. If anyone questions you, don’t defend—attack; put the burden of proof on him.
3. Flattery and deference will get you everywhere.
This particular moment offers a pristine example of that last point. See, before volunteering for duty, you had no time to cram for your new role as Navy doctor, no opportunity to stuff your head with information gleaned from medical textbooks. You’re equipped only with the details dropped last winter by the real—and completely unsuspecting—Dr. Cyr in his casual conversations with you. That, and your own good sense.
Here at the base, your duties include handling sick call each morning. Several thousand miles from the front, you expect the action to be relatively light, but you could still use a little help. So you mentioned to your superior officer that you’ve been asked to take on a side project—putting together a do-it-yourself medical guide for the doctorless fellows at an isolated lumber camp out in British Columbia. Would he like to help?
Would he? And how. Like it does every time, buttering up an expert by asking for his opinion worked like a charm. Your superior ran with the project, practically took the whole thing out of your hands, and did it himself.
And now he presents you with a booklet guaranteed to get someone with zero medical training up to speed on treating the everyday injuries and ailments they might encounter around a bunch of loggers—or sailors.
Between that booklet and your access to an ample supply of antibiotics, you’re all set.
JULY 1951
PACIFIC OCEAN
Well, here’s a situation that the lumber camp guide doesn’t cover, and for which penicillin is no help at all.
You’re the medical officer on the HMCS Cayuga, a destroyer making her way from Hawaii to Guam en route to her second tour of duty in Korea. You’re days away from your destination, and someone needs a rotten tooth pulled.
And it’s not just anyone. It’s the captain himself.
You arrive at his cabin late in this summer day to have a look, and it’s obvious that the old man is suffering. It’s also obvious that he expects Doc Cyr to be able to do something about it.
While you get your bearings, you ask him a few questions. Turns out, Captain Plomer was scheduled to get the tooth yanked before the Cayuga went to sea, but he was too busy, it wasn’t bothering him much, etc., etc. That’s good to know—it means he bears responsibility for the situation, which means he should be willing to cut you some slack as you figure out how best to handle it.
You have him open his mouth, and you peer inside. Teeth look a lot alike, and they sure are close together, but this one back here seems to be the one that’s troubling the old man—you think.
You tell Captain Plomer, quite correctly, that you did not learn a thing about dentistry in medical school. You can pull the bad tooth, but not until morning. At the moment, you can give him some pills for the pain, but you need some time to prepare if you’re going to do this right.
It’s a long night back in your cabin. In all the medical books on board—and you’ve looked, and looked, and looked—there’s next to nothing about pulling teeth. What little you find, you read over and over. And you wonder what will happen to you if, out here in the middle of the Pacific, you botch this procedure on the man who runs the Cayuga. If ever there was a time when you needed a drink . . .
Morning comes, ready or not, and the captain wants you down in his day cabin now. He wants to get this over with, and as much as you do too, you haven’t managed to work up much enthusiasm for it. Still, you grab your bag, go over in your head what needs to happen, and head down to your makeshift dentist’s office.
And when you get there . . . everything goes like a dream. With an audience watching through the ammunition chute overhead, you stick a needle full of Novocain into the old man’s gums. What’s the right amount? You don’t know, but you’re inclined to err on the side of freezing half his face. Once he’s good and numb, you take what appears to be the right tool, grab hold of what appears to be the right tooth, give it a pull, and become a hero.
The tooth is out, the captain is happy, and you feel like there’s nothing Doc Cyr can’t handle.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1951
KOREA BAY
And as it turns out, the Cayuga’s medical officer doesn’t see a whole lot more action than a doctor back at Stadacona does. There are bruises, cuts, and steam burns, but those can be handled just as easily by your assistant, Petty Officer Hotchin.
Your main jobs on the ship are keeping an eye out for morale problems and, not entirely unrelated, dispensing the rum rations. As the so-called “morale officer,” you make the rounds in your dress whites, .45 automatic pistol (an unusual piece of equipment for a surgeon) strapped to your side, chatting up seamen on the lower decks and fellow officers up above.
Between your smiles and jokes, you don’t mind talking about yourself one bit, and you easily deal with potentially dicey questions about your background. Such as: How is it that a fellow with the French Canadian name of Cyr, who originally hails from the French Canadian province of Quebec, has such a thick Massachusetts accent?
Why, that’s simple, you tell them: You were educated in Boston. Lucky for you, nobody expects Doc Cyr to speak French, other than a couple of Quebecois boys in the kitchen, and who’ll pay them any mind? You’re both an officer and a doctor, and while you yourself aren’t impressed by men’s titles and degrees, you know that others are easily awed by those things.
As for the Cayuga’s role during these September days, the ship is supporting South Korean guerrillas during their raids on the western coast. The Cayuga rides the waves at a safe distance while shelling targets on the mainland. When you do see the sorts of injuries a lumber-camp manual might not cover, they’re typically among the Koreans after one of their raids.
Today, the Cayuga is returning to the area where the most recent raids were staged a few days ago. When you get there, the Koreans waste no time sending a junk over to greet you—and with good reason.
There are six or seven wounded men on board, three of them in bad, bad shape. There’s a chest wound, another shot in the groin, and a third just as bad off—and God knows how many hours or days they’ve been in this condition. You’re called down to have a look and determine how best to handle them.
You don’t need to be an expert to know that these men are going to die if they don’t get operated on soon.
Whatever you had in mind that day you showed up with Joseph Cyr’s credentials at the recruiting office in Saint John, it wasn’t this. No matter. You’ve got a job to do.
And there’s not room to do it in the sick bay. Even if there were, wielding a scalpel amid these waves, with those frail bodies lying on those narrow tables . . . ? Not a chance. You’re going to do it right here on this steel deck, on blankets in the shade of the torpedo tubes.
Everyone scrambles to get you what you need. Your gear is here. Hotchin is here. There’s no time to delay. First up is the chest wound. The only way to know exactly what damage the guy suffered is to open him up. There’s no time to consult the literature back in your cabin. You just have to do it.
And so you scalpel your way down to the ribs, then cut through one of those. The next incision will collapse the lung, allowing a better look at the wound. Could Hotchin handle the collapse? Sure. But this one is yours.
While Hotchin attends to the others, you carry on. By the time he comes back, you’ve covered the wound with Gelfoam to stop the bleeding. You tell Hotchin, “I removed the bullet.”
Anyone who knows you knows you’d be only too happy to show off that bullet. But you don’t. You’ve got two other patients to tend to, Dr. Cyr.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
FERDINAND WALDO DEMARA JR. agreed to let the Royal Canadian Navy distribute the story of Dr. Cyr’s surgical heroics to the newspapers back in Canada. The real Dr. Joseph Cyr saw the coverage, and the Navy quickly discharged Demara, who went on to pose as a psychology teacher at a college in Washi
ngton State and a Texas prison warden, among other roles. As a California minister under his real name, he was welcomed at a Cayuga reunion in 1979. Demara died in 1982.
MAN IN UNIFORM?
PRIVATE WAKEMAN
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1864
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Your marching orders finally came through, Private—right along with this cold snap. After sixteen months of watching this war against the Confederates from the safety of Washington and Northern Virginia, you’re at last heading south to see the elephant, as they say.
Your commanders ordered you to be ready to move at a moment’s notice, and for the soldiers of the 153rd New York Infantry, that moment is now. Out here in this freezing weather, you’re lined up four abreast, a regiment full of volunteers. Each of you chose to enlist. None of you had to sign up for whatever now awaits you.
Especially not you, Rosetta.
You’re a volunteer among volunteers. You, who could get out of this march, out of this Army, and out of this war at just half a moment’s notice, simply by confessing that you’re not really a man. You could be sure to miss the next Gettysburg, the next Chickamauga. But you like this life first-rate. It suits your independent nature.
The money’s good too. When you left the family farm in Chenango County a year and a half ago, you also left behind all feminine limitation on how much you could earn. As a man, you snagged yourself a wage of five dollars for just a few days’ work—hauling a barge of Pennsylvania coal up the Chenango Canal and then east on the Erie, clear over to Montgomery County. That’s where you ran into the Union Army recruiters.
Five foot tall and nary a whisker? No matter. They offered you $152—nearly a whole year’s pay—right up front for joining for three years, and thirteen dollars more every month after that. Well, that was a fine test of what kind of man you were. For what kind of man would pass up the opportunity to finish off this war and keep the Union together? Besides, what kind of living could you have earned once you got known as a man willing to shirk his honor and duty?
So you added two years to your actual age of nineteen, and that was that—you were signed up. You stuck around Montgomery County for a couple of months until they’d filled in the ranks of the 153rd. And in October of 1862, you all mustered in and moved out, down to the captured rebel town of Alexandria, Virginia.
Some Union Army recruits have seen battle—and met their maker—less than two weeks after kissing their mothers good-bye. All these months of guarding and drilling in Alexandria and Washington have given you a chance to send many a letter home to your parents and eight younger sisters and brothers. Your family knows where you are, and what you’ve been doing. They’ve written faithfully in reply, addressing their letters to “R. L. Wakeman.”
But no one in the Army is reading your mail, telling you what you can say or can’t say about the 153rd or anything else. So while nobody in the barracks has known you as anything other than Private Lyons Wakeman, you’ve signed your letters home with “Rosetta Wakeman,” “Sarah Rosetta,” “Miss Rosetta,” “Affectionate Sister,” “Affectionate Daughter” . . .
In those letters, you haven’t pretended to be anything you’re not. You haven’t pretended to be a man. You haven’t pretended to be a soldier—you are a soldier. And you haven’t pretended to be someone who can live at home with them again after the war ends, if you live to see it.
There’s been no need for your letters home to rehash all those old tensions. You know what they were about, and they know it too. All that matters is that you know you had to leave. You don’t ever intend to go back to stay, no more than you could have stuck around in the first place. A farm of your own on the Wisconsin prairie sounds good. That can be your prize for getting neither found out nor killed.
You might just get there with the help of these Army wages—they’re yours, and you get to decide what to do with them. You’ve sent some home and told your folks how to divvy it up, what to spend it on. It’s one thing for you to extend your hand to give all you can spare, quite another for your family to stick out theirs, expecting to take. “Don’t you ever ask me to lend you some money again in this world,” you snapped last October. “If you do I won’t send it to you.”
There’s a nervous excitement rippling through the regiment as you wait for the command to get going, and it’s not just shivers from the twelve-degree air. Today is not like last April—back then, you were all ready to march, loaded up with three days’ rations, but nothing happened. You were all still fairly green, anyhow. Today, though—today is serious.
You feel like you’re in good hands with the colonel up there—Colonel Edwin P. Davis. Colonel Davis saw action in the Battle of the Seven Days, right before you joined up. And even if he’s not exactly been in a rush to get the rest of you a taste of battle, you can’t help but look up to him—so much that you wish you’d thought of “Edwin” before you started going by “Lyons.”
Army food and Army drills have made you fat as a hog and tough as a bear. You’ve got the company and battalion drills down pat—regular speed or doublequick, it doesn’t matter. In Alexandria, it was guard one day and drill the next—loading and firing blank cartridges over the shoulders of the men in front of you, as the soldiers in the row behind did the same. When the draft heated up last summer and it looked like there might be riots, the 153rd got moved to Washington, D.C.
Here on Capitol Hill, the 153rd has guarded Carroll Prison, the B&O railroad depot, and City Hall, plus the camp itself. You’ve seen Negroes get drafted just like white—that’s a big change, even just since you joined up.
Some of the others get all het up over the reasons for fighting this war, but you haven’t had much to say about it. All the same, you’ve been hoping to see some real action—at least, that’s what you’ve told your parents, and isn’t that the manly thing to say?
The longer the war lasts, the longer you get to enjoy living this way. Too often, though, there’s been nothing to do—not what some expect from life in a wartime army, but it’s true. And when there’s nothing to do, the more time folks have to stick their noses into somebody else’s affairs—and the greater the risk that someone will stumble onto your secret and try to send you home.
It would be at their peril, you believe. “I can take care of my Self and I know my business,” you wrote your folks. “I will Dress as I am a mind to . . . and if they don’t let me Alone they will be sorry for it.”
That brings to mind something you haven’t written to your family about, something that’s none of their concern nor anybody else’s: how you’ve managed to keep secret that you’re a woman. In such close quarters as those enjoyed by members of the Union Army, it can be a bit challenging to find the privacy you need day to day and month to month, but not so much as folks might think. The doctor’s examination you got when you joined up was hardly worthy of the name, and not even your bout with the measles a year ago brought you much attention.
It’s something of an odd position you’re in. In a way, Rosetta, you can be yourself in the Army, even if that self wears britches and goes by the name of Private Wakeman. You fit in: You can bluster and grumble as well as the rest of them—about those Copperhead Democrats trying to quit the war before you’ve won it, and about officer pay, and how good you are with an Enfield rifle, and of course about the long odds those rebels would face should they choose to tangle with you. You use up your share of tobacco too.
But the soldiers who see you every day, you can’t let them truly know you, not even a little. And the people who know you—your family—they can’t see you, other than in the black-and-white likeness you sent home, with you in your Army coat and cap, standing as stiff as the rifle in your right arm and looking straight ahead. “Do you think I look better than I did when I was to home?” you asked in the letter you sent along with it. Just how did you expect them to answer?
Here’s a question for you, though: Who are you going to be when this war is over, and if you’re
around to see that day, God willing? You’re earning a man’s wage now, and you expect to earn a man’s wage when you get out—for your family’s debts, and for yourself. It’s hard to see yourself ever getting to have that independent life if you don’t stick it out now, if you don’t put up with the risk that there might be a rebel’s bullet or cannonball out there with your name on it.
If there is one, you won’t be seeing it soon. Assuming you don’t freeze to death while waiting, you’ll set out any moment now, but you’re not about to march right into battle. For now, you’re just heading a few miles down the road. All you’ve heard is that you’re getting on the boat in Alexandria, getting off in New Orleans, and heading toward Texas.
A little bit ago, you took pen in hand to tell your family as much. When that was done, what else was there to say? “I bid you all good-by,” you wrote. “Don’t never expect to see you again.”
And below that, you signed, “Edwin R. Wakeman.”
Forward, march.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
SARAH ROSETTA WAKEMAN marched with the 153rd from Franklin, Louisiana, and battled Confederate troops at Pleasant Hill and Monett’s Bluff during the Red River Campaign of spring 1864. “I was under fire about four hours and laid on the field of battle all night,” she wrote after her first engagement. Like many in her unit, Wakeman soon developed acute diarrhea. As it did to tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides, the ailment killed her: She died in a New Orleans hospital on June 19. Of the hundreds of women who posed as men in order to fight in the Civil War, Wakeman is the only one whose letters home are known to have survived.
HITLER YOUTH?
SOLOMON PEREL
LATE JUNE 1941
NEAR MINSK, BELARUS
Your name is Solomon Perel. You’re a short, skinny, sixteen-year-old Jew, and you’ve just been captured by the Nazis. It’s all you can do not to piss yourself.