Pacifica Military History Free Sample Chapters.pmd

122 Pacifica Military History
called out to them as I got near. They were six Frenchmen who had
come out to start cleaning up the mess made by the Germans.
They placed me in the bed of their old truck and started to drive up a
trail. The jolting of the ride was more than I could physically bear, so
they took the long front seat from the cab and placed me on it. Four of
the men picked up the seat, one at each corner, and carried me up the
trail. The truck driver drove ahead to arrange for an ambulance. The last
man spelled one of the men who was carrying me, and they continued to
spell one another until we reached the road, where an ambulance was
waiting.
On the way to the hospital, the ambulance stopped at a house where
a French lady fed me some soup, my first meal in ten days. Needless to
say, I thought the soup was the best I had ever eaten. Next, the ambulance
took me to a hospital in Aix-en-Provence, which was close to the bythen
liberated city of Marseille.
My stay in the French hospital was almost as bad as my ten days on
the beach and in the swamp. Until then, shock had spared me the
excruciating pain that now came over me. No one at the hospital spoke
any English, and I spoke no French, so there was little communication
with the hospital staff. On my second day there, August 31, they put me
on an operating table, and ten or twelve people stood around me. The
doctor had antiseptics but no anesthetics, and the additional people were
there to hold me down while the doctor dug shrapnel out of my legs and
left knee. After this ordeal, I found an orderly who understood a little
English and I convinced him to go find any Allied soldier and bring him
back to the hospital. Shortly, the orderly returned with a British soldier
whose Cockney accent made him almost as hard to understand as the
French. I gave the soldier one of my dogtags and begged him to find an
American officer and explain to him where I was. I asked the soldier to
hurry, because I was not sure I would be able to endure the medical
treatment I was receiving.
When no one showed up that day or the next, September 1, I became
very discouraged. Late that night, however, I was awakened by a U.S.
Army captain with medical insignia on his shirt collar. He gave me a
shot for the pain, and I passed out.