Surgery In Buna

In a dripping Army tent in Buna last week a heavy-set Boston surgeon, Major Neil Swinton, wiped the sweat from his balding head, looked down at the soldier on the stretcher--newest patient of the "fourth portable." The boy was dirty, his eyes were closed, his chest was taped where the Major had cut out a sniper's slug the size of a silver dollar which had torn through from the back, just missing his heart. But because of the soothing hypodermic and the yellowish fluid now trickling into his arm, he was breathing easily. Only 40 minutes before he had been patrolling the Sanananda shore in the steaming rain. Said Major Swinton: "Those people at home should know how their plasma is being used."

The fourth portable under the Major was one of five in the area--medical units designed to bring tents and equipment for 25 patients within 10,000 yards of the firing line. But the jungle portables have evolved into something else: they creep up to within 750 yards of the battle line, expand their capacity by making use of rude huts of native grass, do their work only 30 or 40 minutes by litter from the spots where men are wounded.

Senior surgeon of the third portable is blond, athletic Major William Garlick of Baltimore, a chest and diaphragm specialist. His present wardrobe consists of shorts and sneakers. In the first three days of one battle he had 68 cases of chest and abdominal wounds--right down his alley. The portable took care of them so fast that no serious peritonitis developed. They were only a small part of the wounded. Most of the cases were less dangerous-- arm, leg, back or buttock wounds. There was only one amputation. Major Swinton's portable had to dig four wells on their bit of dry land before they found a place that was not full of dead Japs.

The fifth portable is established on an abandoned battlefield which has not yet been cleaned up because rain and mud makes it impossible to burn the place over or carry anything away. Jap corpses still inhabit the pillboxes (which the Australian tanks crushed), and sometimes the rain washes them into view. Humorous, bird-like Surgeon John Lambert of the fifth portable had a dream the other night: he found a Japanese map showing the whole Buna area under water, and he remembers saying, "Gee, the Japs make much better maps than we do."

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