by Don DeNevi
“Well, Lieutenant, here at Elliott, you’ll be assigned to the infirmary to continue your corpsman work. No surgeries, no heavy-duty medical work. Guys in medicine rarely come through and when they do, they do a little time, and are then quickly scooped up and sent to the front lines, usually in the Pacific. No, you’ll be put to good use here until your court martial.”
As Peter gazed at him, the civilian interrogator said, “Go get your coffee and something to eat. You start tomorrow. You’ll be awakened at 4:00am, breakfast, and report for duty under the watch of an MP. Since you’re facing the death penalty if found guilty, 24-hour surveillance is ordered. Even at work in the infirmary. We’ll escort you back to your cell where you’ll spend the rest of the day.”
After being escorted by the two mysterious civilians to the stockade’s kitchen for his first meal in more than 30 hours, Peter was unceremoniously turned over to three surly, gruff-looking MPs. Without so much as a word or glance, the sergeant pointed down a long corridor to a door that led down the steps back to his windowless basement cell.
Halfway down the dim-lighted stairwell, Peter heard his second bloodcurdling screams from somewhere in the basement.
“Only some poor fellow in abject, wretched terror of pain or terror was capable or releasing such a sound,” Peter thought to himself. Glancing at the three MPs, he saw that none of the three were moved in the least.
Reaching the basement corridor, Peter heard a louder, more intense shrieking that appeared to emanate from behind an iron-bound door where a grimacing armed sentry eyed the passing four-member party with disdain.
“Stoical bastard,” Peter thought to himself. “Not a civilized military man in the whole lot. Seeing him, I must be dreaming or in some Gestapo moving of the 1930’s.”
As the MP sergeant shoved the massive, weighty master stockade key into the cell lock, swinging the iron door, and firmly pushing Peter in, the Lieutenant once again was sickened by the terrible suffocating odor. Then, the door was swung closed and the lock clicked locked.
For several minutes, Peter sat on his metal bed in the coldness of his cell, staring into the darkness. Then, he rose and peered through the door’s peephole into the empty, smelly corridor. Of all his possible thoughts, he focused upon his new friend and train-partner from Camp Stoneman, and now Elliott Brig cell neighbor, Private Daniel Michael Marino, from Astoria, Washington. Peter hadn’t heard or seen neither hide nor hair of Sunny. Not a hint of a whisper from his cell neighbor. All the undercover Lieutenant could reflect upon was, “God only knows how many mouths opened in excruciating painful screams in this basement that no one ever heard.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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The Infirmary -- An Abyss?
That afternoon, Peter lay on his back, dozing off intermittently as his mind was flooded in a myriad of thoughts, half-dreams and reminiscences. For hours, faces and events floated past him, some hovering and lingering longer than hours. Despite feeling strangely emotionless and detached, he couldn’t sleep.
A deep silence had settled over the stockage, the air so still he could hear the heavy breathing of napping nearby neighboring prisoners. One thing was certain, he thought feverishly, “Serving as an undercover agent, living under the same conditions as the inmates, deceiving fellow incarcerated Marines who trust me, is the greatest challenge of my life. The die has been cast. All I can do now is learn what I can and ride out whatever’s coming. Meanwhile, I wait for someone to whisper ‘almond’ in my ear, that magic noun describing an edible, nutlike kernel. Meanwhile, I live a silent nightmare.”
The following morning, as the first rays of sunup ascended the eastern hills of Camp Elliott, Peter was an unbearable specimen of human tension. In additional to being hungry and yearning for a cup of steaming hot coffee, he was disheveled after a sleepless night of twisting and turning and dismayed he hadn’t had a haircut in over a month or a shave in three days. He felt as awful as he thought he looked. Endless thoughts of little or no consequence only made matters worse.
Precisely at 6:00am, Peter, hearing the lock of his cell door double-click, then swing open, jumped stiffly but quickly to his feet. Standing unannounced on the threshold was Captain Hofmeister, hands clenched behind his back, the hint of a grin hesitating around his lips. An armed Marine accompanying the captain stood behind him, partly in the corridor, watching, appearing mean and hard in a lipid sort of way.
“Come, you Ghoul, you Mad Ghoul!”, ordered Hofmeister, harshly. “You’ll eat, shower, shave, and dress, instead of a tramp, a U.S. Navy Corpsman.”
Peter studied the captain decidedly.
“That silly, stupid, son-of-a-bitch is dressed immaculately in his stiff, starched military uniform, weighed down by varying insignias, medals, emblems, and decorations. But, oh God, he is still as homespun and homely as when I first laid eyes on the freak.”
“What are you looking at?” demanded Hofmeister angrily. “Put your shoes on and COME!”
Peter, shoving his socked feet into his Camp Stoneman-issued shoes, thought to himself, “I’ll tell you what I’m looking at. An ugly reptile recently removed from a bottle of mothballs.”
Led leisurely back down the corridor to the stairwell leading to the main floor and General Infirmary, Hofmeister reminded Peter, “The kitchen is next door to camp where you will be henceforth quartered with the patients and convalescents you in a special single cell. There, you have canteen and cigarettes. The dentist has his offices there, although all we have here is a pair of pincers for extracting with a little anesthetic. Prisoner sits down and dentist, who comes here twice a week from Pendleton, asks, ‘Which tooth hurts’? ‘You sure that’s the one?’ And before the poor prisoner knows what’s happening, he suddenly howls in pain as a tooth goes missing!”
With that, Captain Hofmeister giggled. “By the way, you see black market activity going on, pay no attention. It’s none of your business. Money exercises attraction and, Mr. Bad Ghoul, you are to pretend you see nothing, or you will be in a big pain.”
“What do you specialize in, in case you want to purchase?”
“Food, always, for prisoner watches, fountain pens, tobacco, a few other things. Special food requests by the convicts make the MP sentries of the guard are non-commissioned officers. You talk about what they are doing, you will pay dearly, perhaps the removal of an eye or leg or arm.”
“I get it, Captain.”
“No one is scrupulous around here, not even the doctors and corpsmen, like yourself. However, faced with the iniquities of rogues and criminals, we react as one body. We don’t both with justice, legal military etiquette justice. We prefer to punish our black sheep ourselves.”
The Camp B dispensary, first-aid infirmary was next door to the stockade kitchen, less than 50 feet down the main corridor between their two entrances. As Peter completed his second cup of steaming hot coffee, after a reasonably good breakfast, Captain Hofmeister said as he stood up from the kitchen table, “Ready to assist with minor surgery in the sick bay?”
Surprised, Peter responded almost inaudibly, “Sure. It’s been a while, but I’ll help. Of course!”
“Good, Ghoul. I understand you’ll scrub down there to help with an incision and the drainage of an axillary abscess.”
As the two exited the kitchen entrance, and Peter was led down the short hallway, Hofmeister hurriedly described the infirmary’s chief physician, Dr. Simon Fisherly.
“He’s a big man, very precise, cautious, and unhumorous. A West pointer, he practices medicine by the book. We laugh, and he will nod as we do so, ‘If in doubt, go by the book! Every pain, every disease, every sickness is described and taught how to heal in the six-volume set of the Navy’s Internal Medicine. Just go find it in the index and follow the instructions.”
Entering the infirmary, a voice boomed out, “Yes, come in, Captain and Lieutenant.”
I was Dr. Fisherly. Standing next to him was a small in stature, frail, thin warrant officer, a clipboard in h
and. As the physician pulled his Zippo lighter from his pocket and fumbled with a cigarette, he studied Peter in a sweeping glance.
“So, you are part of the infamous ghoul team the whole Pacific is talking about. And, now you’re going to pull duty with me. Well, you may be famous out there, but in here, you’re little more than an orderly, and a toilet orderly at that. Newcomers are always assigned night duty first, 7:00PM to 7:00AM. You, plus Officer Campbell here. Tonight, you two get the isolation ward. Between now and then, smoke cigarettes and drink gimlets. For now, Campbell will tour you through our work areas, then show you your more basement cell, Mr. Multiple-Murderer.”
With that, Campbell threw Peter a pair of olive-drab “snuggies”. And, with bare-faced skepticism, he said in somewhat of a snarl, “Government -issued. Comes in two sizes, large and colossal. Giving you a ‘large’ because you look skinny to me. So, it’ll be like wearing a blanket. And, trust me, you murderer, the ‘snuggie’ will keep you warm in this freezing tomb.”
As Peter slowly began to reconcile the dangers of this undercover assignment, assimilate into his new hospital environment, and confirm, then coalesce a new friendship with a fellow Navy medical officer, he simply smiled at the rude remarks and ignored the epithets characterizing him a multiple-murderer.
In addition to immediately recognizing the sickbay infirmary would serve as a perfect base from which to conduct his probe, Peter, with his usual extraordinary intuitive sense of judging men, knew the chatting, incoherently, indeed, foolishly jabbering warrant officer would be a buddy for the duration of the assignment.
As the duo began the tour of the medical facility, Campbell, continuing to eye Peter skeptically, couldn’t stop talking, “Generally speaking, Lieutenant, as you might imagine, healthy young men who wind up here with much gut crud, mind rot, and otherwise crap. The one thing they are all riddled with here at Elliott, especially in the stockade’s Promised Land infirmary, are the nuisance symptoms of adolescences and the behaviors they spawn. The scrapes and minor cuts and wounds they come in with are not from bullets, shell fragments, and knives. They are wounds of penetration, perforation, and laceration. Almost all are fighting, as boys do, each other or being attacked by our people. We pour a little sulfanilamide powder into the cuts and tie on small Carlisle bandages. After kissing the bandaged wound, we send them back to their cells.”
Peter smiled. He knew almost from the first he would like this feisty man who appeared a few years older than himself.
“Hey, you’ve got a little pluck and spunk in you,” Peter interjected appreciatively, if not admiringly.
“Don’t mind admitting I do. Not enough to go around murdering people like you, I hear. But dad did say I had enough in me to fill a thousand turd holes.”
Peter again grinned slightly. The warrant officer, despite his grossness, was clean, decent, honest, cautions in manner in fact. He was thankful he had been assigned to work and bunk alongside of him.
“But, in seriousness, Lieutenant, what sticks in my throat day in and night out is seeing men crippled and disfigured and permanently impaired, every one of them in pain even before they face their first Kraut or Nip.”
Peter, suddenly alert, debated how far he would go with his questions if his first was answered.
“How is that?”
Campbell, realizing he may have spoken too long and too much. He hesitated, then said softly, “Maybe later…”
Peter knew friendship in a confined entity where there was so much suspicion, distrust, and dishonesty took both time and nurturing to develop. He felt, and appreciated, the impact Warrant Office Campbell made on him, especially since he had never encountered a military officer raking above a noncommissioned officer, but below a commissioned officer sounding so rowdy, brawling, fiercely spirited, and funny. Because Peter knew the man would give him far more than he could return; he wanted nay, needed, to have his affectionate presence near him.
“As you can see, Lieutenant-mad-killer, this crappy wanna-be emergency medical in a penitentiary hole-in-the-wall is part clinic, part bedridden ward, part operating room, part staff sleep quarters, part classroom, and part center for crafts, rehabilitation activities and prevocational skill training center. On some days, we may have as many as 50 inmates in here. Unlike other military infirmaries, outside-of-uniform volunteer personnel are not allowed. We have to do all the work ourselves. So, you and I do the whole show, with me supervising you. One guy ahead of you who disappeared last month, and I printed a sign and put it up at the rehabilitation open space wall. It read, “Cpt. Hofmeister says, ‘No bullshit rehabilitation time wasted here. We offer broken knuckles, smashed kneecaps, cracked and missing teeth, and assorted broken head wounds. No empathy, no sympathy, only hard knocks without. ‘Rehab’ is squarely for the effeminate, timid, and cowardly. Stand up and be a Marine or sit down and be a sissy.
Captain ‘Adolph Hitler’ Hofmeister’.”
Peter chuckled, “How long did it stay up?”
“Until the old bastard came through a few days later. He was furious. I don’t know what all happened, but my corpsman Rawley Shipley disappeared that night.”
With that casual statement, Peter knew there could be no doubt something akin to murder was going on in the infirmary itself. He tried to think as he was led on the tour. For one thing he noticed, there were more MPs than usual around the corridors. And, having cat-and-mouse conversations to elicit answers from Campbell seemed fruitless. There was more than usual saluting going on. Laughter and idle chatter were missing despite the increasing number of patients being admitted. Peter said nothing as Campbell busied himself with introductions and explanations. The unusual tenseness and officiousness persisted. The patients being escorted in from the stockade cells seemed to carry a wide range of illnesses, injuries, and treatment needs.
With the staff of corpsmen having grown to seven, and physicians to three, Peter heard one medical man say, “As usual, this time of day, they’re coming in by the trainload.”
“So what?” another responded. “We’ll passively treat them quickly and send them back to their cells. No room in our tiny wards. Who’s on duty as triage officer today?”
“Felix,” someone said.
“That’s good. You know how totally imperturbable he is. Like he says, ‘Can’t save them all.’”
As Peter leaned back against a wall to continue listening in, as well as watching the increasing activity, the warrant officer standing next ot eh Lieutenant, said casually, “This is even better than a tour. All these men with their varying types of needs for recovery need rehabilitation. You can see for yourself. But we think it’s phney-baloney stuff for getting out of work or taking required classes. You may know that not until recently, this year of 1944, in fact, the term ‘rehabilitation’ emerged due to a wonderful program of conditioning and retraining established by Dr. Howard Ruck in New York. Now, months later, ‘Rehab’ is the focus of treatment in all hospitals, whether military, prison, or general medical in states and cities.”
“What about advanced cases of respiratory and intestinal diseases, like the two obviously have sitting and waiting for one of the physicians to see them?”
“They’ll be on our afternoon bus to the Camp Pendleton Hospital and their staff will take care of them.”
“That’s good.”
“No, Lieutenant, what you see before you is little more than a clearing station, a first-aid center, to lance and patch everything from blisters to smashed faces, black eyes, and broken noses. We give aspirins for head colds, and merely watch over the ones who cry out in pain. If someone cries out ‘medic’ or ‘corpsman’, you run to him, usually for the bedridden it’s because they want water. You’ll hear men yell at you such things as ‘Wait until Ernie Pyle hears about the lousy jobs you corpsmen are doing’. That’s the ultimate threat!”
Peter chuckled.
“By the way,” continued Campbell, “you’ll receive your corpsman badge to wear on your frock front. So
, the most you’ll administer will be sulfa drugs. In the safe, we have a small amount of life-giving intravenous plasma, just enough, just enough to keep a patient alive until Pendleton is reached.”
“When do I start?”
“In a few minutes, actually. Your first assignment is to keep clean and keep in order the medical cupboards across the room, there--with continual use, they’re always untidy. All new staff have to do it. In emergencies, I may need to call upon you to apply tourniquets or inject pain-killing morphine or life-saving penicillin.”
“Well, Officer Campbell, I’m ready. Just give me a damp rag, cleaner, bucket of water and dry towels. Bring on as many cabinet shelves as you need cleaned.”
The warrant officer glanced at him with a slight smile.
“Haven’t had someone so overqualified as you serve as a mere orderly.”
“I see four coal-burning stoves in here. Anyone bother to clean them? I’ll do it. Anything at all to help the sick and injured.”
“Let me show you what’s in the cabinet. You can get started while I hail a corpsman to bring the towels and water,” Campbell said as he led Peter to the closest cabinet.
“Look,” he said, as he opened the lock with one of his belt’s keys. “Note the contents, all scrambled and in disarray. We have 2”x2” gauze, bandage compresses, acetaesone tablets, sulfurous acids, amydol tablets, atabririe tablets, bile powders, benzidine camphor, calcium chloride, atabrine, DDT, instruments for small wound bandaging, two mortars and pestles, a number of centrifuges, and a dozen or so bottles of anesthesia. Hooked to the wall adjacent the cabinet are a dozen or more stretchers, skeletal traction devices, laundry equipment, and floor to ceiling wall shelving containing several lamps, boxes dental equipment, food trays, bed candles, a medical library. Each of the infirmary’s rooms contains several locked refrigerators, the lead physician-director’s office holds the prison’s only safe.”