The Wounded

Thousands and thousands of the Army's seriously wounded and sick are flowing back to the U.S. each month. The Army's 60 general hospitals are filling up. What can be done for them now--for the men with mutilated faces and legs and minds?

Fed Up, Built Up. A new arrival is usually tired, fed up with the war and the Army. He thinks that no one, least of all a civilian, can understand what he has endured. He dreads civilian life. (The 15-day furlough some men get before treatment often makes them uneasier than ever.)

In a ward with 29 other similarly wounded men, the newcomer is first allowed to do as he pleases: sleep, stare at the ceiling, or think. As soon as he comes out of the medical and surgical woods, pressure is gradually put on him to rouse his interest in the Surgeon General's Reconditioning Program. This program schedules every hour that a man is not eating, sleeping or undergoing treatment. It aims to build up his strength and keep him cheerful through physical and mental exercises. Though few have much interest to start with, all eventually take part with good grace. Asked to explain why, one officer said: "They love it. The hospital gives a fellow the first pampering he's had since he was in the Army."

Some of the things the soldier patients do:

P: In a sunny Atlanta courtyard, men with only one arm and men on crutches throw baseballs at dummies of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. In another, men with hooks for hands, in airplane splints and on crutches take a half-hour calisthenic drill : "Hup, hoop, heep, one; hup, hoop, heep, two. . . ." The men whistle when a girl goes by. In the wards, they hop around playing shuffleboard and indoor golf. Some of those still in bed play darts, watch movies. A Red Cross worker brings a birthday cake with candles to a smiling 24-year-old whose leg is fastened to a weight and pulley. In the recreation hall others hear a lecture on the future of Atlanta's housing industry.

P: In a Tuscaloosa, Ala. hospital, a sick-looking boy slowly knots a tufted bathmat. "Well," says he, "they talked me into it." In the gymnasium a muscular Negro happily plays basketball while his attendant waits (only a couple of weeks ago, he had to be held down by five men to be forcibly fed). Outside, other NPs (neuropsychiatric patients) and men with the new scars of plastic surgery drill with 50-lb. dumbbells.

P: At Sand Hill, N.C., men apparently well from tropical diseases, acquired in an average of 18 months overseas, play a variant of ring-around-a-rosy -- walloping each other with a loose boxing glove. There is a terrific din of shouting. Their six or eight hours of heavy exercise a day (pushups, pullups, hikes) seems to bring on relapse, thus winnowing out those who need more treatment. One man has had 22 relapses.

P: In the swimming pool at the famed old Greenbrier Hotel at White Sulphur Springs, paralyzed men exercise their flaccid limbs. In the wards, men with legs scarred by vein surgery and men with tantalum plates in their skulls read books on diesel engines, cattle raising, soil conservation. (They cheerfully show their wounds to anyone willing to look.) In the recreation hall, some of the wounded watch the Army training film Baptism of Fire and hear the day's war news. A man in the occupational-therapy department is absorbed in making a set of four-leaf-clover buttons of clay.

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