ATTEMPTING TO PLACE EVENTS in time at the Barris household when I was growing up usually came down to a couple of descriptives. “Before the war . . .” meant when my folks lived in New York City, when their parents and they as youngsters coped with the Depression in the 1930s, or as a generally understood synonym for when times were tough. Similarly, my mother and father often used “after the war . . .” to distinguish the point in their lives when peace returned, when they got married in the late 1940s, or when they eventually found the means to begin careers, have a family, buy a bungalow, and get on with their lives. While the war in Europe technically ended with the official capitulation of the German armies on May 8, 1945, my father often admitted that he could never really remember VE-Day. He was certainly there. He and his medical unit had taken over a bombed-out apartment building a couple of blocks from the River Rhine in Düsseldorf. There was no furniture in their quarters, just a bare floor on which they set their sleeping bags, half a dozen men to a room.
More memorable for this war-weary medic were the events of April 13, 1945. The day began, he recalled, when a member of his medical battalion entered the apartment room, where they were just waking up. “The president is dead,” he said reverently, and then moved on to another room to spread the news. My father remembered the stunned silence that followed. “I remember we spoke in soft voices of Roosevelt’s death, almost as though he were laid out in the next room,” he wrote. “It felt as if we had lost someone close to us, almost a member of our immediate family.”1
My father had idolized the man since he was a boy in the 1930s. He had just turned ten in 1932 when Franklin D. Roosevelt was first elected. In 1940, when he ran for his unprecedented third term, Dad had been too young to vote. But in 1944, when FDR ran for the fourth time, Alex, like all overseas American troops, received a ballot, and he voted for the president’s re-election. With word of FDR’s death, my father recalled, even those men in his company who had expressed disapproval of Roosevelt’s policies were sensitive enough to the gloom of the day to avoid any provocative outbursts of joy at his death. Much of the preoccupation of that day and those that followed was wondering what FDR’s death meantin terms of the war, in terms of their future. “Nobody among us knew much about this Harry Truman, the recently elected vice-president, who was now in command of everything, including us,” my father wrote.2
For my father, life “after the war” began in Düsseldorf in that empty apartment block remembering his beloved president. Then, as the city got used to US occupation troops running things, the installed provisional authorities began registering the non-military population, revitalizing civilian administration, restoring railway operations inside the city, reopening banks, and attempting to distribute food and medical supplies to those in greatest need, those in the formerly industrialized but still densely populated downtown. The 94th Division arranged for truck convoys to retrieve hundreds of tons of onions, potatoes, sugar beets, and rhubarb.
My father found it particularly difficult to watch children scrounging for food, many just outside their army kitchen, rummaging through garbage cans and picking out scraps they could take home. He noted that a few of the less timid and more enterprising German children tagged along as a soldier made his way to the garbage cans. The child would offer to wash the GI’s mess gear, and if successful in his quest would find a bit of food left for him near the cans. In turn, some of the medics might pile on a bit more food than they could eat in order to leave decent portions for the children. The ritual allowed rules to be observed on both sides—nobody was begging, just receiving recompense for work completed.
My father recalled a skinny teenager the medics named Charley, who had a constant craving for cigarettes. When he cleaned my father’s mess kit, he would ask for a cigarette in return rather than food. Alex generally obliged. Then, for some reason, the ration of cigarettes for the US occupation troops failed to arrive, and he had to refuse Charley’s request.
“You have none?” he said with surprise.
“No, Charley. I really haven’t.”
“Here,” he said, and took out a rusty metal cigarette case. “Have from mine.”3 He had half a dozen in the case.
US Army generals realized the GIs needed more than just a regular supply of Camel cigarettes to occupy idle hands. In Düsseldorf they liberated breweries and took over the Park Hotel to operate as an officers’ mess; the sign outside read “The First American Red Cross Club East of the Rhine, courtesy of the 94th Infantry Division.” Meanwhile, they arranged for 120 English-speaking women from Venlo, Holland, to be guests at dinner-dances at the Rheinterrasse for the men of the 302nd Infantry. By June the 94th had staged softball, swimming, and track and field competitions, the latter at Adolf Hitler Sportplatz, home of the athletic trial competitions for the Fuhrer’s 1936 Olympics. They even reactivated a horse-racing facility just outside Düsseldorf, dubbed it “Truman Park,” and on June 6, 1945, staged a full card of racing that featured the sixty thoroughbreds housed at the track, while a GI band played “My Old Kentucky Home.”4
Meantime, my father had acquired his most precious wartime souvenir. The day before T/Sgt. Barris’s 319th Medical Battalion packed up and left Düsseldorf, the teenager the medics had befriended while hanging around the garbage cans behind their living quarters suddenly appeared. This time Charley had something other than cigarettes to hock—a working portable typewriter that another potential American buyer had declined because it was a German machine and the keyboard was “different.” Alex paid Charley exactly what the boy was asking—a full carton of American cigarettes—and in that moment Dad acquired a significant tool in what would become his first meaningful career “after the war.” He was soon typing stories as a reporter for the 94th Division’s weekly newspaper, The Attack.
JULY 4, 1945—VODŇANY, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
IT WAS JUST ABOUT THE LEAST LIKELY PLACE to stage a national American holiday. Nevertheless, on US Independence Day, hundreds of American troops marched through the downtown streets of Pilsen, near the western frontier of Sudetenland, in a victory parade. It was no coincidence that the celebration took place in that part of Czechoslovakia, the first land conceded by European allies in 1938 to placate Adolf Hitler. Most of the Czech civilians who lined the streets eight and ten deep along the parade route had waited nearly six years for this moment. In place of Nazi swastika flags overhead, they watched the national flags of Czechoslovakia, the United States, and the Soviet Union unfurled amid great pomp and ceremony. They listened to brass bands playing US military marches, and they applauded the passing columns of GIs as their conquering heroes.
T/Sgt. Barris did his bit to contribute to the festivities that July 4th. From his earliest days in the US Army my father had demonstrated his love of popular music and, in particular, of performing it. In the winter of 1943, while in training at Camp Phillips, Kansas, he had organized a vocal quartet from among his medic comrades; Jim McConnel, from New York City, sang bass; E.D. Eutzer, from South Bend, Indiana, and Walter Weeks, from Peru, Indiana, provided the tenor harmonies; and my father filled in all the baritone parts. They’d entertained during basic training and aboard the Queen Elizabeth Atlantic crossing in 1944, and while it wasn’t quite part of his job as a medic, my father hoped he could reunite the group to perform for troops and civilians in newly liberated western Czechoslovakia.
“McConnel had been wounded—so much for the Geneva Convention’s rules protecting medics,” he wrote. “So, we got a replacement for the quartet and worked up a version of Cole Porter’s ‘Don’t Fence Me In,’ with original lyrics.”5
The song choice was highly appropriate. The Czechs loved every aspect of their restored freedom. And when the 94th Infantry Division and its medical support unit arrived at a quickly designated command post in the city of Vodňany, “it felt like an explosion.”6 As American Jeeps and trucks motored into the downtown, radio stations that had been shut down by the Nazis for four years began blaring the Czech national anthem through speakers into the streets. The main square filled with people screaming deliriously. They showered the Americans with flowers and mobbed the soldiers in their vehicles while the children looked for treats in return. Everybody just wanted to touch the GIs, shake their hands, embrace them.
One teenager, Jaroslava Svatkova, had gone to great lengths for the celebration. “We waited so long for this,” she said. “I had nothing fancy to wear. My mom made me a red skirt right out of a German flag. I wore it with a white blouse and felt so pretty.”7
A young Czech boy, Vladimir Krizek, couldn’t believe his eyes. He watched his parents carrying platters of drinks and traditional Czech pastries to the Americans as they arrived. He and the other boys surrounded the Sherman tanks, trucks, and Jeeps and looked for handouts. And the GIs obliged with plenty of chocolate and treats that Vladimir had never seen before. “For the first time we saw chewing gum,” he said. “They gave us some, but we had no idea what to do with it. Almost every American soldier was chewing. . . . It took a bit for us to figure out how to chew it.”8
The Krizek family—two adults and three sons—had run a lumber mill before the war. In Vodňany they owned a modest home. When members of the 94th Infantry Division and the 319th Medical Battalion arrived in the town, the Krizeks offered to billet two Americans, including T/Sgt. Alex Barris. Initially communication posed a bit of a problem, but eventually the Americans acquired an English-German dictionary to explain themselves, while the Krizeks referred to their German-Czech dictionary to speak the proper responses. As the two American billets settled in, their US Army superiors marvelled at how effectively Czech civil and military groups had purged their country of Nazi officials, authorities, and sympathizers. Army diarists reported that the liberated Czechs wrought vengeance upon the enemy so thoroughly and rapidly that they were essentially doing the work of military intelligence in the zone. The division diarists went so far as to describe the Czech civilian population as “one vast counter-intelligence agency, imbued with an intense hatred for things German.”9
Vladimir Krizek, the family’s eldest son, had served in the Czech underground and offered the American billets insight into life under Nazi fascism. When Hitler’s troops entered Sudetenland, Vladimir said, everything changed. Singing the Czech anthem was forbidden. German bosses assumed leadership and control of Czech auto and steel factories. All men over the age of sixteen were scooped up as forced labour. Czech currency lost its value. In September 1941, when Reinhard Heydrich became governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia, all Jewish property was confiscated and Jewish families transported to concentration camps. The German regime seized all privately owned radio receivers, replaced Czech signs with German ones, and made German the official language in school and on the street. In one odd statement of control, the Germans removed all the historic bells in Vodňany and melted them down; however, in a daring move, Mayor Thomas Holat managed to hide one town bell—nicknamed “Mark”—before the Germans could seize it.*
In the spring of 1945, Vladimir Krizek could sense that the Germans were on the run. He witnessed many German civilians who’d occupied Sudetenland during the war fleeing west. Whether on foot, in horse-drawn carts, or in motor cars, they carried away as many belongings as they could. Emboldened Czechs spat on them or beat them up with sticks (or whatever was handy) as they streamed away. But towns such as Vodňany had a greater problem on their hands than simply squaring accounts with the Nazis. Their community infrastructure had disintegrated: no food distribution, no functioning schools, and, worst of all, few means for delivering medical care and no medical supplies to treat the sick and wounded. That’s why the Krizek family welcomed the medics of the 319th so readily.
Medical officers with the 94th and medical corpsmen, including my father, spent the summer transforming a former school into a general hospital, treating first the local population and eventually survivors of nearby concentration camps. They installed 115 sickbeds in the school and then 100 beds in a second building; eventually they began treating the civilian population for tuberculosis, lice, and malnutrition. For some of the American medics, this vital service was beyond their experience; organizing hospital schedules, getting nearby restaurants to cook food for five sittings a day, and treating communicable disease among civilians were a long way from the daily routine orders of front-line warfare. Mind you, if nobody was shooting at them and if they could sleep in a bed with clean sheets, US medics welcomed the trade-off.
Meanwhile, for civilian Vladimir Krizek, having an American medic living with his family brought unexpected benefits. T/Sgt. Barris invited him along to watch the Americans play baseball and volleyball in the city square. The young Czech also got in to see US Army dances, with local girls in their best dresses and the Americans in their pressed uniforms. T/Sgt. Barris appreciated the Krizeks’ hospitality and gave back whenever he could. “The medic gave me a flag and an army sweater, and I never wanted to take it off,” Krizek said. “We were all high on the feeling of freedom.”10
Family meant a lot to the occupying soldiers too. Members of my father’s medical unit had not seen their families since leaving the United States. Alex regularly wrote to his mother, his sister, and his older brother Angelo, who was stationed in Heidelberg, Germany, at the end of the war. Formerly part of the US Army 67th Antiaircraft Artillery, during the occupation Angelo became an MP directing traffic, keeping the peace, and making a few dollars tailoring on the side. “There was an empty high school with a sewing machine,” Angelo explained, “so I started stitching army patches and stripes onto guys’ jackets. I made a fortune at three bucks a stripe.”11
In July, Angelo managed to get a three-day pass and decided to use it to find his kid brother. He learned from the US mobile records unit that the 94th Infantry Division had been posted to Czechoslovakia. So, at five o’clock in the morning, Angelo started hitchhiking the five hundred miles from Heidelberg to western Czechoslovakia. Miraculously, by eight o’clock that night he’d found his way to the 94th’s headquarters in Pilsen and was reunited with Alex the next day. “We laughed and got together with some of the people there and had a great reunion,” Angelo said. “And I kidded him about not having the service points I did.”
Any GI with eighty-five service points—a point for every month in the army, a point for every month overseas, and five points for every battle star—was automatically entitled to an honourable discharge. Angelo had eighty-six points. Alex had less than was required to get out of the service. “So, he’d have to go back to the States and train and go to Japan,” Angelo said. Of course, within a month the US had dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities and ended the war in the Pacific.
Meanwhile, the 94th Division—including the 319th Medical Battalion—had spread itself out across a newly consolidated Czechoslovakian Occupation Zone. About 10,800 American troops had taken on the job of reorganizing services and reinstalling Czech authority in about 3,600 square miles of occupied territory, as well as protecting ninety so-called security targets and manning twenty-two roadblocks along 190 miles of the Russian-American Control Line. The high-stakes security work belonged to other members of the 94th.
Meantime, T/Sgt. Barris had approached The Attack, the division’s daily newspaper, and enrolled in journalism classes to prepare him for future reporting assignments with the paper and, he hoped, a crack at the real thing one day at the New York Times when he got home. Not long after he’d begun journalism instruction, in September my father was faced with a three-day hiatus in classes. And suddenly the world beyond the high-security roadblocks beckoned. Just seventy-five miles away sat Prague, a Czech city my father had always yearned to see. So tantalizingly close. The problem was that Prague lay in the Russian-occupied zone and was therefore out of bounds for American troops.
No matter, decided medic Barris and three of his GI pals. The four Americans decided to go AWOL—or, in their words, to do an exploratory expedition by crossing legitimately at a roadblock, dashing across the frontier, and entering the prohibited confines of Soviet-controlled Prague. First they hopped on a wood-burning truck crossing the border, but they were turned back by Russian guards. Next—with two of the four having aborted the mission—my father and one remaining fellow traveller snuck aboard a civilian train bound for Prague. The following morning they managed to skirt more guards and enter the city limits.
“To the best of my knowledge,” Barris wrote, “except for a small U.S. government contingent in Prague, we were the first Americans, the [city] had seen since the war. They certainly treated us wonderfully.”12
Three days and three raucous nights later, the AWOL pair boarded the return train, using their classroom mock press passes to convince guards they had the authority to be travelling inside the Soviet zone. Back across the Russian-American Control Line, they hitchhiked the last few miles and just managed to get back to the American military installation in Vodňany before roll call. That Monday morning, Barris and company returned to The Attack journalism class, just in time for the lecturing junior officer to announce he had exciting news: “We’re working on a plan to allow you to visit Prague!” he said.
It would be another few months before the 94th Division completed its occupation service and made its way to the French port of Marseilles and a waiting Liberty troopship bound for New York. Meantime, the purpose of his summer-long mission to Czechoslovakia had become abundantly clear. My father’s medical battalion and infantry division comrades weren’t in Vodňany so much to help the Czechs as they were there to prevent the Russians from moving any farther west. “The Cold War had unofficially already started,” T/Sgt. Barris wrote.
SPRING 1951—SOUTH OF THE THIRTY-EIGHTH PARALLEL, SOUTH KOREA
T/SGT. BARRIS MAY HAVE CONSIDERED the Cold War a kind of international charade of force between former allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, in faraway Sudetenland. It’s also possible that when he returned home to New York, my father might have read the topical essays of Eric Arthur Blair (a.k.a. George Orwell), including one from 1945 in which he described the emerging nuclear stalemate as “two monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.”13
But Frank Cullen, a Canadian medical officer stationed south of the thirty-eighth parallel on the Korean Peninsula several years later, would not have used any of the naive euphemisms of the day—“police action,” or “Cold War conflict”—to describe his circumstances. He considered the Korean War a dirty shooting war. “We all carried a Browning pistol,” Cullen said. “I think it was the first time medical officers were allowed to carry arms . . . to protect yourself and to protect your patients.”14
In the spring of 1951, Canadian units of the Canadian Army Special Force, among sixteen member countries of the United Nations supporting the Republic of Korea forces, were on the move north toward the thirty-eighth parallel. On June 25 the previous year, the UN Security Council had told the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) it had illegally invaded and occupied the territory of South Korea, and a state of war existed. As a signatory to the UN peace charter, Canada had deployed Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) No. 426 Thunderbird Squadron to provide transport back and forth across the Pacific Ocean; three Royal Canadian Navy tribal-class destroyers to join a sea blockade of North Korea; and troops of the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR), Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), and the Royal 22nd Regiment (the Van Doos) on the ground in South Korea. Before the early spring of 1951, none of the Canadians had faced North Korean or Communist Chinese forces in combat.
Then, from April 22 to 25, although nearly surrounded in the Kap’yong valley, the PPCLI halted a Communist Chinese army advance on Seoul, South Korea’s capital city; their action earned the US Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation but had cost the regiment thirty-one killed, fifty-nine wounded, and three captured. On May 30, 1951, the RCR advanced through positions held by the Van Doos to meet Chinese troops invading from the Chorwon Plain; they clashed at Chail-li, where six Canadians were killed and fifty-four wounded.
Right behind the fighting forces, in what were called rear echelons but were, in fact, very much within the range of enemy artillery and mortar fire, members of two Canadian units worked to provide supplies and medical support. The Mobile Laundry and Bath Unit (MLBU) provided soldiers with an assembly-line arrangement of showers, washtubs, and clothes dryers that allowed a continuous stream of troops to enter the showers at one end and emerge from the other with a clean change of clothes in less than thirty minutes. Right beside them, and taking full advantage of the cleaning services, the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps set up its casualty clearing stations (the Canadian equivalent of the US mobile army surgical hospitals) to attend to Canadian wounded. Both the MLBU and the RCAMC units always positioned themselves close enough to the line of fire to be of greatest value to their fighting comrades.
On May 28, 1951, as the MLBU set up its cleaning apparatus at a stream near the brigade’s centre line, a Chinese Communist army patrol stumbled into the location and, finding itself outnumbered by the MLBU staff, was quickly captured. Apprehending enemy troops was not considered part of the MLBU or medical officers’ job descriptions. But all that changed in the first armed defence of the UN peace charter.
In the summer of 1950, Frank Cullen had been interning at Toronto Western Hospital, working eighteen-hour days and making sixty dollars a month. He was already an air force veteran; he’d flown Baltimore aircraft with the RAF’s 117 Squadron in the Mediterranean during the Second World War. Despite the rush among infantry to join the Special Force for Korea, the army was short of doctors. Cullen suddenly became a prime candidate for Korea. By the spring of 1951, his superiors in the 3rd Battalion of the Van Doos had posted him as the medical officer in charge of a section of the No. 25 Field Ambulance, attending to Canadian wounded in a regimental aid post amid the dust and heat near the thirty-eighth parallel. Conditions in Korea seemed more like those in North Africa, which he’d experienced in Egypt during the Second World War.
“Nothing was ever really sterile there,” Cullen said. “Rats ate your soap, chewed your toothbrush, and the only way to discourage them was not to organize your medical equipment on open tables, the way you’re supposed to.” Instead, Cullen insisted on keeping surgical tools and dressings in metal panniers to be opened by his staff only when actually administering first aid. Making matters worse was that the battle lines were always in flux. That meant Capt. Cullen was constantly setting up and then breaking camp. “I remember at Chorwon . . . we set up this big bloody tent, got ready for the wounded . . . then nothing happened. Then we’re told we’re moving again,” he said. “I think we set up and moved five times in one day.”15
Cullen’s RAP was the first point of contact behind the front lines—the place stretcher-bearers carried wounded for immediate first aid. Often working at night, Cullen packed shrapnel injuries, introduced intravenous lines, applied tourniquets, or set splints by the light of a Coleman lantern; sometimes he wore a headband with a lamp attached, directing the light at the patient and his wounds. From Cullen’s RAP, a litter Jeep carried wounded to the casualty clearing station, where another medical officer could remove dressings, do minor surgery, and stabilize those patients in shock. Beyond the CCS, the wounded went farther back in four-stretcher box ambulances to the bigger advanced dressing station, where they could be tended until stable enough to move by helicopter to a sixty-to-seventy-bed mobile army surgical hospital or flown all the way to a hospital in Japan. Generally Cullen attended to Canadians, but during his second night on duty, stretcher-bearers arrived with five Turkish officers whose Jeep had run over a land mine; Cullen’s RAP treated and moved them on. “Prepared for anything” seemed to be the motto of the medical corps.
Like Frank Cullen, Keith Besley left an internship in Toronto, at St. Michael’s Hospital, to serve in Korea. Besley also had Second World War experience, flying Spitfires in support of the British 8th Army in North Africa. In 1951, as a medical officer in Korea, Capt. Besley was immediately sent forward to establish the casualty clearing station behind the Van Doos’ front lines. Just like Cullen, Besley too had to grapple with the mobility of the war. On one occasion he found a dry riverbed where he and his medical team set up their CCS for the night. They had just settled down to catch some shut-eye in anticipation of the night’s work ahead, when a British mortar platoon moved in beside them and began firing at nearby Chinese Army positions. Before long the Communist artillery had zeroed in on the riverbed location and began returning fire. Besley’s medical station was forced to make a hasty retreat.
Sometimes, however, encounters with enemy soldiers couldn’t be avoided. At six o’clock one morning that spring, Capt. Besley was up doing his daily ablutions. He’d placed a mirror on a tree to shave when he sensed he was being watched. He turned and found himself facing a Chinese soldier armed with a rifle. The man began chattering at him, suddenly dropped his gun, and threw his hands in the air. Interrogators soon arrived to take away “the first prisoner of war captured by the RCAMC!”16
Capturing Chinese troops was not among Capt. Besley’s responsibilities. But after the morning shaving incident, the medical officer made a habit of carrying his assigned Browning pistol. As the fighting drew the Chinese Communists from the north and UN Command forces from the south closer together across the thirty-eighth parallel, incidents involving medics increased. Before the stalemate in the middle of the peninsula in 1951, Besley routinely found as many as ten armed guards surrounding him whenever he entered an operating room at his casualty clearing station to work on a patient. The guards became more commonplace, even travelling with ambulances behind the lines.
“The Chinese began attacking our box ambulances,” Besley said. “They would stop them on the way down the road. In one instance, one stopped the ambulance and killed the driver. But the guards nearby immediately killed him.
“Yes, the idea of medical officers carrying pistols was foreign to us. And I shot fifty rounds a day and became a very, very accurate pistol man,” Besley concluded. “In order to protect myself.”17
JANUARY 1968—CAM RANH BAY, SOUTH VIETNAM
IN THE SPRING OF 2016, Norm Malayney made a visit to a reunion he chooses to attend regularly—it’s staged every two years—bringing together men with whom he served in Vietnam. Most of the vets served in the US Army, a few in the US Navy or Marines, and, like Malayney, some in the US Air Force. At the 2016 gathering, one of Malayney’s fellow Air Force vets, Cal Schuler—who was well past retirement age but still practised emergency ward medicine—addressed the reunion of the Canadian Vietnam Veterans Association. He reflected on some of his own experiences from his service as a medical officer overseas, and acknowledged some of the others who’d served with him in the 483rd US Air Force Hospital at the Cam Ranh Bay Air Base in the Republic of Vietnam. At one point in his talk, he paused to offer an observation that perhaps startled some of his fellow vets. “Norm Malayney had the worst job in the Air Force,” Schuler said. “I knew that unit. I had guys I served with there. They didn’t want to come back the next day. They wanted a transfer out of there . . .”18
The former medical corpsman at Cam Ranh Bay Air Base wouldn’t disagree with Schuler’s assessment. When Norman Malayney arrived there in April 1967—carrying his Air Force–issue summer and winter uniforms, combat boots (as well as oxford shoes), hospital duty uniform, raincoat, toiletries, towels, washcloths, and other baggage (not exceeding sixty pounds)—the United States had officially been at war in Vietnam for three years, since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.* America had by that time committed nearly half a million troops to the conflict, and in 1967 alone it had sustained more than 11,000 men killed in action. But Airman 3rd Class Malayney had no airborne duties flying fighter jets, or ground duties maintaining aircraft engines or air frames. Malayney reflected on his year-long tour of duty at Cam Ranh Bay as a hospital medic—working twelve hours on and twelve hours off—as gruelling, exhausting, eye-opening, in many ways rewarding, and, as he put it, “one of the two greatest experiences of my life.”
Malayney served in 483rd USAF Hospital, the second-largest military facility in South Vietnam, with 485 beds for general surgery, chest surgery, neurosurgery, orthopedics, urology, ophthalmology, and dental surgery and a 200-bed-capacity casualty staging unit (CSU). Each month, Cam Ranh Bay Air Base handled approximately 8,000 aircraft takeoffs and landings, 40,000 tons of cargo, and no fewer than 130,000 passengers.19 Cam Ranh Bay served as one of three aerial delivery and mobility bases—the other two were at Saigon and Da Nang—supporting the US war effort in Vietnam. Located 175 miles northeast of Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, Cam Ranh Bay was home to the 12th Tactical Fighter Wing of the USAF and was about as close to the action as a non-combat medic could wish to be. It was Malayney’s wartime address for a year.
Twice during Malayney’s tour at Cam Ranh Bay, US Air Force jets crashed on takeoff. The first explosion of a Phantom killed the pilot and left the second airman aboard with burns to 80 percent of his body. The second accident occurred when the jet fighter failed to clear a barrier and tore the aircraft’s fuel tank and two missiles away from the fuselage; the resulting fire killed the two aircrew and then cooked and launched one of the plane’s missiles, which penetrated the jet’s fuselage and struck one of the air base rescuers, a fireman, severing his arm.
Following such crashes, a siren blared a steady three-minute blast, for “Condition Yellow,” calling all personnel—surgeons, nurses, medics, and orderlies—to report to their emergency duty stations. In the missile-exploding incident, within minutes a flight surgeon on the base had raced to the scene and attended to the injured fireman, applying a tourniquet to what remained of the man’s arm, while medics from Malayney’s CSU loaded him into a field ambulance bound for the base hospital for emergency surgery and further treatment. But even under regular circumstances, Malayney and his fellow corpsmen had their hands full.
“Every day, first thing, a [Lockheed Starlifter] C-141 arrived,” Malayney said. Any patients requiring more than thirty days’ attention were carried aboard the transport jet, which was equipped with four tiers of stretchers. “Our job was to load the wounded between 6:30 and 7 a.m.,”20 when the C-141 took off for military hospitals in Japan. But that was just the start of an Air Force CSU medic’s day.
Once medics had cleared the ward of outbound patients, they then had to treat the 120 beds in the ward. First they stripped the beds of their linen and blankets to be washed for reuse. Mattresses were cleaned and turned, the bed frames—from springs to bed rails—were washed down, and the floors were scrubbed with a special iodine cleanser. With the cleaning complete, the medics placed fresh sheets of paper on top of the mattresses, the full length of each bed.
Around noon or 12:30, when the corpsmen had finished disinfecting the ward, the first of the day’s new wounded began arriving aboard transport aircraft. Doctors converged on stretchers coming off the transport and conducted triage, while medical corpsmen like Malayney took patients’ vital signs, recorded findings on placards, and then added ranks and serial numbers before attaching the placards to wardroom beds. Their patients were US Army or Marine Corps troops, but it was sometimes difficult to tell; many of the wounded arrived with red (high-iron-content) soil caked all over their battledress and wounds. During the washing phase of treatment, the medics often covered a soldier’s open wounds to prevent infection. But Malayney recalled one doctor triaging a soldier whose leg wound was covered in the ferrous soil. “Put him in the shower,” the doctor told Malayney. “It couldn’t get more contaminated than it is right now.”
Managing under the circumstances came naturally to Norman Malayney, via his bloodlines. Both sides of his family traced their peasant roots to Bukovina, Ukraine, in the Carpathian Mountains, during the nineteenth century. When they immigrated to western Canada in 1902, they gave farming a try on rock-strewn prairie land in southern Manitoba that was more suited to raising sheep than growing grain; by the 1930s they had abandoned farming and moved to Winnipeg for better work opportunities and to ensure that their children got educations.
Norman’s father managed to find high-paying work after the Second World War building military installations on the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line in the Arctic; he’d go north for a year, come back for thirty days, and then return north; but he died prematurely in 1956, leaving Norman’s mother as the sole wage-earner in the family. By the 1960s Norman had matriculated, tried auto mechanics, and finally found work with a TV sales and repair shop on Sargent Street in Winnipeg. “There was no future in TV servicing,” Malayney said. “So I figured I’d go to the US, get a green card, join the Air Force, and get training in electronics.”
As a registered alien—unable to acquire security clearance or US citizenship until he’d been a resident for four years—Malayney had no choice but to go where the USAF sent him; they posted him to San Antonio, Texas, for basic training as a medical corpsman. At Lackland Air Force Base, recruit Malayney worked in the orthopedic and urology ward, where for the first time he encountered army and marine troops who’d been wounded in Vietnam, men with burn wounds, head injuries, or limb amputations. Then, in the spring of 1967, with US deployments at their highest level since the beginning of the war, casualty rates just as high, and those on a previous deployment coming to the end of their tours, the 26th Casualty Station Unit at Cam Ranh Bay Air Force Base needed capable corpsmen. Malayney qualified. In April his transport landed in the night at Cam Ranh Bay and he found himself in “the living room war.”*
Almost immediately, medic Malayney faced the most horrific of wounds as well as the shortcomings of the treatment system. He dreaded when army wounded arrived with severe burns, because the army did not allow field medics to use Vaseline or other salves on the wounds, only dry gauze packing; when one burn victim arrived and CSU medics removed the field dressing from his back, the man’s skin peeled away right down to his muscles, “blue, just like in the textbook.” Whenever he found time, Malayney observed experienced nurses packing wounds; by the end of his tour he could handle the toughest dressing assignments as well as any of the nursing staff.
For a while during his tour, Malayney wondered why some of the metal-framed beds had bent bedposts; he discovered that some patients feared the embarrassment of screaming in pain, so they grabbed and pulled on the bedposts instead of shouting out loud. Eventually the CSU got an anesthetist from Khe Sanh who used inhalers with drugs that put a patient into semi-consciousness during painful treatment. Whenever he heard the speaker system announce “Section Eight,” Malayney knew it meant a patient had snapped and needed to be put under guard, for his protection and the safety of staff on the base.
One patient left a lasting impression on Malayney. The soldier was at Cam Ranh Bay for only about fifteen hours, but during that time Malayney learned the man had been shot not on a battlefield but at an enlisted men’s club in South Vietnam where a GI had entered and begun shooting; two died at the scene, but Malayney’s patient made it to the 483rd USAF Hospital in time for lifesaving surgery. Norm was assigned to attend the patient until he was shipped out to Japan on a C-141 transport jet the next morning. “I remember this guy. He was semi-conscious, breathing heavily,” Malayney said. “I put my hand on the bed and I could feel his heart pounding, each heartbeat through the mattress.”
Medical corpsmen were lowest on the totem pole at Cam Ranh Bay, it seemed to Malayney, who was promoted to Airman 1st Class in Vietnam. They were often assigned to night shifts, which meant they had to try to sleep during hot, humid days in huts without any air conditioning. Malayney received his basic service pay of thirty dollars a month, plus hostile-fire pay of sixty dollars a month. Yet they still received equal time off. For every five days of twelve hours on and twelve off, medics got two days off, but they were restricted to base, which meant time off was usually spent trying to catch up on sleep or drinking beer with buddies.
Looking for something different to do when he was off-duty, Malayney took his camera and photographed aircraft, landscapes, and people on the peninsula where the 12th Tactical Fighter Wing was located. He received one out-of-country rest-and-relaxation leave, to Hong Kong in December 1967, and returned to duty just in time for the Tet Offensive on January 31, 1968. That day, some 85,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched simultaneous attacks against five major cities and dozens of military installations in South Vietnam. The offensive left 45,000 casualties on the Communist side and more than 20,000 casualties among US forces. In the first forty-eight hours of the assault, C-141s flew five hundred casualties into Cam Ranh Bay.
“There were no days off during the Tet Offensive; some worked twenty-fours straight,” Malayney recalled. “We had one wounded, he was like a mummy. I had just finished dressing his wounds head to foot. [But] they gave him so much antibiotics by IV that it killed the local flora in his gut. He had diarrhea down his legs, through the bedding, to the floor. We had to strip the bed, wash it down, and do his dressings all over again.”
Until he landed at Cam Ranh Bay, Malayney had never had to deal with the dead. But in Vietnam, the job of packing the body fell to medical corpsmen, including Malayney. First he had to prepare the body for rigor mortis, tying off the penis and blocking the rectum with cotton to stop either urine or feces from escaping. The corpsman then carefully cleaned the body one last time, finally stringing one identity tag onto a toe and another onto a hand. Then he placed the remains in a body bag. In Vietnam, despite the intense heat most of the year, hospitals the size of the one at Cam Ranh Bay had portable “reefers”—refrigerators—to prevent the bodies from decomposing long enough for air transports to arrive and fly the bodies home to the United States. “Even if it was a hundred degrees outside,” Malayney said, “inside where we put the bodies, it was freezing.”
Norman Malayney completed his year-long tour of duty, plus an extended tour to overlap with the arrival of new medical corpsmen at Cam Ranh Bay in December 1968. In return for his extension, he earned a thirty-day leave in Europe, visiting England, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. By the end of the year the USAF had posted Malayney to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. For six months he tended to injured airmen and some Vietnam veterans at the end of their convalescence, about to be discharged home. One of his patients seemed startlingly familiar. “You were in Vietnam?” Malayney asked.
“Yeah,” the man said.
“What happened?”
“I was sitting in an enlisted men’s bar, and this guy came in and started shooting people,” the vet said.
“Holy smokes, I’ve heard this story before!”
This, Malayney realized, was the same army soldier he’d attended to in Cam Ranh Bay following the bar shootings, the man whose heavy heartbeat he’d felt through the hospital mattress. For fellow Vietnam veteran Malayney, it was a unique moment; he’d actually witnessed a man he’d tended in an overseas war zone being discharged in good health and heading home.
Before long Malayney was homeward bound too, back to Winnipeg to pursue the other “one of the two greatest experiences of my life”—attending university. Vietnam had given him an excellent education and a sense of self-confidence, but now he wanted the chance to study something of his own choosing, what he’d missed before and during the war. At the University of Winnipeg he gained sufficient training in pharmaceuticals that he was able to build a postwar career in sales around small-town America.
And as for Cal Schuler’s claim that Norm had experienced the worst job in the Air Force? “For the fighter pilots, it was different. They dropped bombs. And the aero-engine mechanics had a tough grind in Vietnam too,” Malayney said. “But they didn’t have to see the blood and guts and disfigurement that I saw coming through my ward.”
2004 TO 2009—IRAQ WAR
COL. DANE HARDEN could definitely relate to Norm Malayney’s feeling of satisfaction, years later, at seeing one of his former patients from Vietnam leave the USAF hospital in Tampa fully healed and homeward bound. A veteran flight surgeon of four tours of duty between 2000 and 2005, Harden had triaged, delivered emergency first aid in the field, and kept scores of wounded alive long enough to get them to operating theatres for life-saving medicine, in war zones as challenging as Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, by the time American troops were operating in the Middle East, Harden and his medical teams had elevated the science to the point that, if a wounded soldier was alive two seconds after the injury and a military doctor arrived in that critical time, the wounded soldier had a 97 percent chance of survival. Despite the statistics of success, decades after America’s involvement in Vietnam, Dane Harden, like his predecessor Norman Malayney, found closure in the simplest of ways.
“Three or four years after I got back from Iraq,” Harden said, “I got a letter from a father thanking me for taking care of his son.”21 Flight Surgeon Harden remembered the experience. The man’s son had been severely wounded. Fortunately, the system had responded with precision, delivering the soldier through a cascade of care. A combat lifesaver had treated him at the point of injury. Then a combat medic had helped him reach a casualty collection point or a battalion aid station, where a doctor and a physician assistant had likely worked on him. That’s where Harden would have flown in to move the wounded man on to the next phase of treatment. Harden felt embarrassed that he’d received all this praise from the father of the wounded man when the whole US Army could be taking credit for it. “The father actually went to the trouble to find out that Doc Harden was the flight surgeon who got his son out of harm’s way and got him squared away,” he said.
Dane Harden was destined to serve in the US military. During the Second World War, his mother, Anna, had worked at the Glenn L. Martin manufacturing plant building B-29 bombers in Baltimore, while Robert, his father, had served in the Pacific during the liberation of the Philippines and the invasion of Okinawa. Dane’s older brothers had both served—Dave with the Marines in Vietnam and later with the 101st Airborne in Kuwait and Iraq, and Darrell in the Army National Guard. The family also had a military lineage going back to the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812–14, the US Civil War, and the Spanish-American War.
Dane’s fate was sealed in 1976, when he asked his dad if he could go to college to study engineering; when his father explained that he couldn’t afford to send him, the army seemed the next best option for an education. Dane was streamed into combat engineering, “an infantryman with a shovel,” building roads, tank traps, and pontoon bridges, conducting demolition, and learning how to map minefields. To add to his credentials, Dane was already a marksman with a National Rifle Association rifle team, had a black belt, and ran cross-country at an elite level.
In eighteen months he’d gone from private to sergeant, and after three years’ peacetime training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, he was honourably discharged. He worked part-time as a nursing assistant to help pay for the science courses he was taking at college. And by 1993 he’d also completed his degree as a physician assistant. To add to his resumé, he joined the Maryland Army National Guard, and because of his medical training he automatically became a second lieutenant. Eventually he decided it was time to visit a US Army recruitment office.
“And your credentials?” the recruiter asked.
“Three years as a combat engineer. I kind of miss the military,” Harden said. And then he laid out his diplomas, certificates, and other papers, adding, “I’m a physician assistant . . .”
The recruiter nearly leapt over the desk to scoop up the recruit’s paperwork. “We’re short of medical officers,” he said.
So Dane Harden re-entered the US Army as a second lieutenant and was shipped off to Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, for medical officer basic training, where civilian doctors, nurses, and dentists got army familiarization. Later, at Fort Stewart, Georgia, Lt. Harden took his first expert field medical badge test—five days of calling in medevacs, setting up triage casualty collection points, and conducting evacuation procedures; he failed on his first attempt. Undaunted and encouraged by a system desperate to graduate more medical officers, Harden kept training, finally collecting his flight surgeon wings at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in 1998. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as a member of the Georgia Army National Guard, he received his first overseas deployments, to Estonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Slovenia, where he recognized the changing nature of military medicine. Harden learned in those war zones that the enemy was everywhere and had no regard for North Atlantic Treaty Organization guidelines.
“If a doc is in that environment and he pulls his weapon and shoots back, that’s actually more valuable and reduces the number of casualties,” Harden said. “If I’m in a firefight and I’m trying to save a patient, it’s my job to kill the enemy first. And that’s an utter shift from the way we normally practise medicine.”
In 2004, Maj. Harden was deployed to the Middle East for the first of three back-to-back tours of duty. Much of his service was routine—80 percent doing flight physicals and ground work, but the rest, where the action was, had him airborne in a dual-engine Black Hawk helicopter conducting emergency medical care. In the rear of a chopper en route to and from pick-up points, it was noisy, wide open (the open doors providing the only air conditioning), and, in 110-degree heat, “like basting a turkey.” Wearing his fire-resistant Nomex flight suit, helmet, and rubber gloves, Maj. Harden would be belted in. At the point of injury, medics would transfer the wounded soldier from a litter to a carousel aboard the chopper; this would lock the patient into a secured position, allowing Harden to move around him to assess and attend.
In flight, the latest Black Hawks had lights, oxygen, and suction equipment, as well as ventilators with automatic PEEPs—positive end-expiratory pressures—that kept a patient’s lungs inflated for better oxygenation. If a soldier went into shock, Harden would request the help of on-board medics working as his assistants to intubate the patient, hook up intravenous fluids, and try to increase blood pressure. All this went on as the Black Hawk crew pushed its aircraft to the limit, at speeds of up to 140 miles per hour, to get Harden’s patient to a friendly base and the next level of medical care.
Even though these could be tense situations, Harden went to great lengths to keep his patient calm, by talking his way through the treatment. He would check out airways, breathing, and circulation and make note to both himself and the on-board medic: “I’m listening to your lungs now.” He might assure the patient by saying, “I’ve seen these kinds of wounds before,” or “We’re going to get you some medication for the pain.” Harden called it his mantra—say what you see and see what you say—while completing primary survey, secondary survey, and follow-up. And though it sounded as if Harden were being as personable as possible, in effect he was focusing on what it would take to expedite his patient from the battlefield to the base hospital operating table. Once the delivery was made, his mission was accomplished. Over his career in the military, Dane Harden completed 122 such medevacs.
“I would normally try to find out if the guy lived or died, but after a hundred or so of those cases, you learned that you can’t follow them all,” Harden said. “I considered that I’d won the battle if they were alive when I got them to the ER.”
ABOUT EIGHT MILES OUTSIDE the northern Iraq city of Tikrit, US Army Medical Officer Herb Ridyard Jr. worked as the surgical chief of staff at Contingency Operating Base (COB) Speicher* during the second half of the US Army surge in 2008. He wasn’t so much concerned about whether he remembered a patient’s name or not, just as long as the COB had enough blood on hand whenever the facility experienced a “mass cals”—“massive casualties”—alert. While in the vicinity of the hospital, US forces on the base numbered in the thousands, inside the hospital itself Ridyard led a staff of about a hundred. That meant that if the hospital faced any more than about half a dozen casualties at once, the workload could overwhelm the facility. Despite the fear of that possibility, which was always in the back of his mind, Dr. Ridyard also had to deal with civilian casualties. In fact, on his very first day at the hospital, Christmas Day, Ridyard had to operate on a young Iraqi girl who’d been admitted two days earlier with burns over 60 percent of her body.
“We had suspicions that she was burned because her family had been accused of conspiring with the Americans,” Ridyard said.22 Had the girl gone to a civilian hospital inside the city, it’s likely she wouldn’t have survived. But at the COB outside Tikrit, the staff pulled out all the stops. The operating room was located in a tent, so contending with blowing sand and the winter temperatures provided several challenges. The staff placed blowers in the tent to keep the air as clean as possible, and they set up heaters to keep the OR at one hundred degrees Fahrenheit during several weeks of surgeries on the girl. “Everybody had worked above and beyond what was expected,” he said. “She was one of our unit’s first success stories.”
Unlike Dane Harden, who seemed to have armed service in his sights from the time he could shoot a rifle at age nine, Herb Ridyard Jr. came to the US Army as a second or third career, when he was approaching fifty. During the Second World War, his father, Herb Sr., had served as a rifleman in the 301st Infantry Regiment of the 94th Infantry Division; he had helped push back the German Wacht am Rhein counteroffensive across the Rhine in the winter of 1945. But the Battle of the Bulge had left its fair share of bad memories, so Herb Sr. had never pushed his son to follow in his army footsteps. Then Herb Jr.’s son John spent two summers at US Marine Corps officer school. The family attended John’s graduation, and as Herb Jr. watched his son march smartly across the parade square at Quantico, Virginia, he was struck by the discipline and order he suddenly saw in him.
Herb Jr. listened to the school’s officers lament the state of overseas deployment. “We never really have enough surgeons,” they said. “They sometimes have gynecologists doing trauma surgery.”
“My god,” thought Ridyard. “One of these guys is going to get blown up or shot and they’re going to have a gynecologist operating on him. Gynecologists don’t typically do trauma surgery.”
At an American College of Surgeons conference in Boston that same year, the overseas medical shortages emerged again at a military medicine exhibit. The US Army was clearly desperate for general surgeons. “But you can’t take somebody who’s forty-eight years old,” Ridyard told the exhibitor. They said they’d issue him a waiver and take him up to age fifty-two. At home in Windham, Connecticut, where he was assistant chief of staff at a rural hospital, Herb consulted with his wife, Kris; he gave his medical partners his notice, then got an offer for a commission in the medical corps and decided to give it a try.
As a lieutenant colonel he packed up and headed back to school—basic training in San Antonio, at Fort Sam Houston, the training centre for US Army Command and, euphemistically, “the home of the combat medic.” At Fort Sam, Ridyard outranked everybody in his class. He had also operated a medical practice longer than most of his classmates had been alive. But he still had to learn how to be a soldier. The culture shock continued right up to the moment he arrived in Iraq in December 2008; that day, he learned that John Pryor, the general surgeon at the Mosul combat support hospital, a man he’d met in training, had been killed in a mortar attack.
Work at the COB seemed surreal for a surgeon who’d led the staff at a rural hospital back in the States. The OR team scrubbed in “third world”–type sinks; blowers helped keep dust from settling on everything; and the surgeons and nurses worked in combat boots and fatigues under their sanitary gowns. Just like in the M*A*S*H television series, the COB leapt into action at the sound of helicopters with incoming wounded. Back home, the toughest surgical calls came from multiple-car crashes; in Iraq it was rocket attacks, shell blasts, and IED explosions. On those occasions, the operating theatre would fill with army medical teams attending severe head wounds, carrying out amputations, and conducting surgeries to extract screws, nuts, nails, and other random hardware, the principal projectiles inside IEDs. It wasn’t too long into his tour at COB Speicher before the day that Lt. Col. Ridyard most dreaded arrived.
“Six or eight patients came in and they were all pretty bad,” he recalled. “We had more patients coming in than we could handle. We made a ‘mass cals’ call.” With the “mass cals” alert, the hospital went into an emergency protocol. There was an immediate call for blood donations. All medical personnel and supplies, not just from inside the base hospital but also from other aid stations around the base, began to converge on the operating theatre. As chief of surgery responsible for organizing the OR, Ridyard soon had a pediatrician on scene, a nurse anesthetist, and a nurse practitioner. At the triage station he posted a gynecologist and other volunteers to process the wounded. Once the casualties were triaged and his two other surgeons had begun their work, Ridyard joined them in the operating theatre and immediately immersed himself in the lifesaving.
But suddenly the operating room had used up its entire blood supply. The COB had hit a wall. “I left the operating room and went out into this other tent,” Ridyard said. “To my amazement, there must have been a hundred guys all lined up to give blood. All the techs, soldiers, everybody dropped everything, rolled up their sleeves to donate. It was really something.”
At what seemed the darkest moment of his military tour, a base full of Good Samaritans had stepped up and renewed Ridyard’s faith in humanity, not to mention replenishing critical units of blood when his patients needed them most.
Herb Ridyard did three four-month tours in Iraq as a hospital surgeon. Dane Harden completed nine deployments overseas as a flight surgeon. As qualified and experienced as they were when they left home, both medical men returned having seen improvements in ways to save lives in traumatic circumstances. Ridyard had his eyes opened by transfusion protocols in Iraq, very different from those followed in civilian blood banks; in Iraq, if they didn’t have whole blood, they transfused components (red cells, plasma, and platelets) in a one-to-one-to-one ratio to mimic whole blood. It worked so well that Ridyard used the procedure in his own practice back home. Meanwhile, in northern Kuwait, Harden had worked alongside British medics and surgeons who’d introduced him to polymerized hemoglobin powder; when administered, it acted like a transfusion to expand blood volume and treat shock.
Both Ridyard and Harden received numerous and appropriate service medals for their multiple tours in Iraq. As a flight surgeon, Dane Harden seemed completely at ease assessing the medical state of a patient and dealing with life-threatening needs, all in the open body of a Black Hawk medevac chopper travelling at 140 miles per hour over the Iraqi desert, with temperatures in excess of 110 degrees. Harden considered such a daily routine not advanced trauma life-support skills but more like “what back in Korea might have been called meatball surgery”—trying to stop bleeding, protecting the airway, and preventing shock, all in an attempt to get patients to doctors in an OR. At some levels he considered his profession science, but mostly he thought of it as well-trained reflexes. “I can’t imagine doing something more valuable than saving the life of a soldier,” Harden said. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”23
Among the lasting impressions Herb Ridyard brought back from Iraq was another civilian case. After much delay and red tape, a young Iraqi boy—carried into the US military facility by his older brother—was rushed into emergency surgery. The patient was unconscious, allegedly hit by a car. Ridyard thought the boy’s head wounds looked less like a collision with a car and more like blows from a rifle butt; someone had likely inflicted the wounds because the boy’s father was a police officer or in the military. Nevertheless, without missing a beat, he and his ER team put the boy through the works—CT scan, blood transfusion, and surgery for skull fracture and brain injury. “I still remember all the technology and all the people helping when that boy came into the emergency room; fifteen or twenty people all trying to save his life.”
Ridyard noted the boy’s brother standing off to the side in the ER, watching this scene unfold. “I’m wondering, what does his brother think?” Ridyard concluded. “[Some] think so little of life that they would bash a nine-year-old in the head with a rifle butt, and here we are putting every effort into trying to save him. . . . Those are moments just imprinted on my brain.”24