My Dad In The War (Part Fifteen)

  I sent all my brothers and sisters a binder with copies of pictures of our Dad in the war, along with stories of his adventures. I'm sure the gratitude will be pouring my way any day now like a tsunami of appreciation.
This is a sample page:

 
All items on the attached sheets were given to me by our father over four decades ago. Dad gave them to me with the agreement that I would not show them to anyone or talk about them with anyone until after he was dead. He did not want to answer any questions about the rifles or about his experiences in the war.

     If you want to know the details about how Dad acquired the rifles, they are in the stories told in the binder I sent you titled: My Dad In The War.

     I had planned never to show them, but Jim talked me into adding them to Dad's binders. Dad's history is our history, after all.

     The attached sheets include:

 

     1) Dad's dress greens that he wore when he returned home after the war.  When Dad made it back home, he was still recovering from the malaria he caught in the Philippines, so the yellow skin color the disease gave him matched nicely with the Army green of his uniform.

 

     2) The Medic Helmet, ammo belt, and gas mask belonged to Dad. He never had to use the gas mask, except in training where his platoon had to enter a room where tear gas was released.

     The idea was, they entered the room wearing their gas masks, tear gas was released, they then had to REMOVE their gas masks and stay in the room for a FULL minute. A minute doesn't seem like a long time, but try holding your breath for 60 seconds and see just how long it is. After that minute they could exit.

     They came out coughing and crying and throwing up. Some kind of liquid coming out of every hole in their head, except their ears.

     If anybody left the room before that minute was up, they had to go through the training drill all over again, until they got it right, for as many times as it required.

     Dad didn't have to do it again.

 

     3) Dad carried the M-1 during his tour in the Philippines during World War II. Dad used the rifle numerous times during battle and the gun killed it's share of Japanese soldiers. The binder My Dad In The War that I mailed a while back has a picture of Dad holding the same rifle as he stands in front of a Jeep.

 

     4) There are two foreign rifles, a Japanese Arisaka Model 99 and a Chinese SKS. These rifles are known as battle rifles because they were taken after a fire fight. The Japanese soliders who had been shooting  at Dad with theses rifles were killed. They were taken after two different gun battles. These stories are also told in My Dad In The War.

 

     5) The Medic Helmet was given to Jim. Jim loaned it to me to add to my collection. Jim also loaned me the Army shovel Dad was issued
  .
     When Dad became a Medic--or, as he liked to call it, "an instant doctor"--he received six weeks of training and then he was officially able to pronounce people dead.

     The Army did not issue factory-painted Medic Helmets. All Medic Helmets were painted by the Medics themselves. Dad painted his before he left Hawaii for his war tour in the Philippines. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He was told that according to the Geneva Convention no one was allowed to shoot, or otherwise injure or kill, Medics. But then he found out that the enemy wasn't up on the Geneva Convention. The lifespan of the average hospital corpsman, from the time his foot hit the water to the time his foot hit the beach, was 7 seconds. The harsh truth was, there were two main targets in battle: Officers and Medics. The big red cross Dad had painted on both sides of his helmet only gave the enemy soldiers a target to aim for.

     "You want to buy a helmet with a red cross on it?" Dad asked his best friend, Bennett. I don't remember Bennett's full name, but I do remember Dad saying that he and
Bennett became closer than brothers. It was a strong bond they had, one that could only be forged by soldiers in war whose lives depended on one another. Still, strong as that bond was, Bennett declined to buy Dad's helmet.

     One interesting story of Dad's time as a medic was when his platoon was under attack by the Japanese. Everybody was in their foxholes. The shovel that in its later years was used to pick up dog poops in Jim's backyard, had dug the hole that saved our father's life that day.

     One soldier was in the wrong foxhole, and he wanted to jump out of the one he was safely in and run over to the one where his buddies were. Dad warned him to stay where he was. The soldier said he was going. Dad told him again to stay where he was. The soldier scrambled out and made a dash for his foxhole like it was the popular table in the high school lunch room.

     BAM! The soldier got shot, fell to the ground, and what was the first thing he did?

     "Medic!" he cried out.

     Dad peeked out of his foxhole and saw the soldier laying some distance away. He wasn't shot too bad. It looked like a leg wound. He took a bullet to the upper thigh.

     "You should have stayed in the foxhole!" Dad yelled, and ducked back out of harm's way. Dad didn't make house calls. Especially when people were shooting at him.

     After the battle was over, and everybody was able to finally come out of their foxholes, Dad went over to finally give the soldier some medical attention. Miraculously, he hadn't been shot again.

     "You'll be okay," Dad told him.

     "I should have stayed in the foxhole," the soldier said.

 

  (a tip of the hat to the great and cranky comedian Bill Cosby who also served as
an Army medic)

   

   

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