Medics in Arms

Last week, on its 175th birthday, the Medical Service of the U.S. Army was, in the words of Surgeon General Raymond W. Bliss, "in the most difficult place it has ever been in--Korea." Over the years, the Medical Service had grown mightily from a pipsqueak, penny-pinched outfit (five doctors for 20,000 men in 1775) into a veritable army of healers: 10,200 officers (doctors, dentists and nurses), some 25,000 enlisted Medical Corpsmen. But the nature of war and the hapless plight of the wounded, the agony of torn flesh and the superhuman burdens on the "medics" had not changed. From the Korean war zone, LIFE Staff Photographer Carl Mydans cabled:

THE chief shortage of the Army medics in Korea is in doctors and trained corpsmen. In a schoolhouse clearing station at Kwanni I saw doctors who worked the clock around for three days and three nights, resting on their feet with their eyes closed and heads against a wall for a few moments, while corpsmen moved one litter from the surgeon's bench and reached for another.

No Crosses. But the doctors and corpsmen and nurses who are available are magnificent in effort and skills. Their concern for each casualty despite their own exhaustion--and, in this kind of war, frequently their own danger--is one of the finest things about the U.S. Army. Figures are not available but I am sure that proportionally more corpsmen and doctors have died standing by their casualties in this war than at any time since Bataan. The North Koreans give them no quarter, cut them down with their wounded.

All ambulances moving to the front are forced to paint over their white crosses and all medics? are now armed. Said one ambulance driver: "I drove wounded in the fighting from the English Channel to Germany, but this is the first war I had to shoot my way through to get them." Ambulances in Korea today have the driver flanked by a rifleman on each fender.

As in the last war, our greatest lifesaver is bottled plasma and the rapidity with which it is injected. The jeep which can carry up to four litter cases, sometimes with two or three corpsmen hanging on with one hand and holding a plasma bottle high with the other, is one of the most dramatic of war scenes.

No Rest. After the corpsmen who travel with the foot soldiers pick up the wounded, casualties are moved in stages by litter jeep, ambulance and train or plane to a rear field hospital. In gravely critical cases I have seen pilots bring tiny L-5 planes down on dirt roads or cleared fields to carry out one litter case.

The other day I saw one exhausted L-5 pilot, after eleven straight hours over enemy territory, stagger to his tent and flop on a cot. A moment later his commanding officer shook him and said: "We've got a kid over here shot through the throat. We've got to get him to Taegu. Can you keep awake?" The pilot struggled to his feet and muttered: "Litter case? I'm awake." He walked over to his plane and looked in at an ivory-faced boy with a tube dangling from his throat. The pilot stepped in and his little L-5 buzzed down what was once the main street of a Korean village.

Apart from battle wounds, the greatest medical problems in Korea today are malaria, dysentery and flies. This month the Army brought out a new drug, a large white pill which seems to be both a preventive and cure for malaria, and has to be taken only once a week. Halazone tablets [to purify water], which were used in the last war, offer protection against one source of dysentery. DDT is effective against the flies, but so far it has been in critical supply in Korea, and most soldiers have scratched themselves into infections from the maddening bites.

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