First-Aid Post: Mental

The 5th Cavalry Regiment was hacking its way up another of the unnamed, unnumbered hills of Korea. Back at the ist Cavalry Division's headquarters, Captain Richard K. Cole, 28, of Orlando, Fla., was waiting. A corpsman stuck his head through the tent flap and called out: "Patients for you, doc." Psychiatrist Cole picked up his only instruments, a notebook and pencil, and sat down on a packing case. The corpsman led the first patient in, handing his medical record to Cole.

While Cole thumbed through the record, the patient eased his lanky frame on to the edge of a chair, cupped his chin in one hand and stared fixedly at his scuffed combat boots. The record showed that he was a good soldier: in eight months he had jumped from private to sergeant, had become a squad leader in combat. The psychiatrist looked up from the papers and asked softly: "Charlie, can you tell me what happened?"

"I Can't Take It." Charlie answered in a halting voice, without raising his eyes from his boots: "I can't tell you. I just can't take it any more. We were going to take this hill and mortars started coming in and I just couldn't take it any more. The first sergeant told me to come on down."

"Were you doing anything?"

"Just sitting in my hole. I guess I musta been shaking and crying. After I came down I tried to go back up. I tried and I just couldn't do it."

Cole asked a few more questions before he decided that this was a genuine case of combat exhaustion. He told the sergeant: "I'm going to send you back to another hospital. I don't think you should be back on the line. We'll give you another job to do. No one's going to look down on you for it. You've had too much. It could happen to anybody."

As the sergeant ducked out, the corpsman guided in another patient, also a sergeant and squad leader. His face was unshaven, his bushy brown hair uncombed. As Cole studied his record, the man pulled nervously at a cigarette. Cole used his standard opening: "George, can you tell me what happened?"

"It Got Next to Me." George flicked his cigarette butt away. "The other day," he said, "we had to pull off a hill after we took it. Before we went up. one of my men told me if anything happened, to write to his mother. He got killed. I put his body in a hole. After we got back off the hill, I found that nobody had brought him out. I'd been up there and couldVe got him. It kind of got next to me. I just couldn't get it off my mind. I guess I got pretty shaky."

Cole tried to make the sergeant realize that he hadn't intentionally left his buddy behind. He said: "I'll have you stay here for a day or two and get a little rest before you go back. You'll be all right. I'll talk to you some more tomorrow."

Next came a lieutenant with a headache and pains in his back. The doctors who had examined him had found nothing physically wrong. The psychiatrist patiently explained to the lieutenant that his pains came from nervous tension, and that he would just have to go back and make the best of it. "The only thing I could give you," said Cole, "would be medicine to keep you from being afraid, because fear is what causes your nervous tension-and there is no such medicine."

Cole does very little in the way of psychiatric treatment: he is too close to the front for that, and the simplest cases of combat exhaustion do not need it. They get rest, then go back up.

In Korea in 1951, the psychiatrist's biggest job is to prevent permanent damage to nerve-shattered soldiers' minds. After World War I, thousands of "shellshocked" veterans remained mental cripples for the rest of their lives. Some of them had learned how to dodge responsibility; others felt guilty because they had not been able to bear responsibility indefinitely. The policy which guides Captain Cole and his colleagues is to send each man as far forward as possible, as soon as possible. A soldier who can no longer face rifle fire is usually a good man to carry ammunition to those who can.

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