Shell Shock

I don't know of a single field surgeon who hasn't seen shell shock, at least none who've served under fire. Sometimes they're catatonic, sometimes they're rocking back and forth screaming or crying for their mothers. It's all the same - overload, the mind snaps under the burden of what a soldier's been through. And I don't care how many movies you've seen, unless you've been there with shells blasting sand into your eyes and nose and mouth and ears, unless you've stepped in a pile of guts that are spilling out of a Kansas farm boy who's still alive, you don't know anything about it. At some point it's just too much and the thinking, rational part of your brain shuts off and you go somewhere else.

I remember the kid with the faraway eyes. It was day three on Tarawa, on the beach at Red two - the bodies were piled up and the trees were blown down and every man on that beach knew they'd seen horrors beyond anything they'd experienced in that whole war, and most of them had served in the Pacific theater for months at that point. I was crabbing along the trenches - or what was serving as trenches given the constant fire we were under - trying to fix up who I could. Evac was flat impossible at that point and field surgery was more dangerous nine times out of ten than whatever wound the marine was suffering - they'd either end up with sand caked deeper in their wound, or with a deep septic infection that would set in and rot them out from the inside. The best I could do was douse the wounds with sulfa and bandage them as tight and thick as I could.

The kid was sitting with his back up against a palm stump. There was a small thicket out on the beach and though most of it had been blasted away by nip 50 cal, there was enough trunk left that four or five guys huddled behind it for shelter. One of them was screaming for a medic so I scuttled over to check on him. He'd taken a round through the meat of his calf - painful but in this place not much more than a paper cut. I hit him with the sulfa, jabbed a morphine styrette into his leg, and started to wrap his leg in bandage.

As I worked I looked at the other marines huddled there. Two or three of the others were alert, scanning the jungle line for telltale muzzle flashes and opening fire on anything they saw, but there was another, a kid, who sat with his back to the stump staring out at the sea. At first I though he was looking at the armor abandoned on the reef, tanks mired in sand and water, but as I worked on the other guy's leg I saw that the kid wasn't blinking. He wasn't looking around, he wasn't flinching when a mortar shell went off, wasn't showing any signs of movement at all. In fact I'd reached the assumption that he was dead when a fly landed on his cheek and an involuntary muscle spasm twitched the fly away.

The fellow I was working on had calmed down, sinking into a morphine cocoon, and I asked him,

"Who's the kid?"

He looked over at the catatonic marine and shrugged.

"Dunno. He was here when me and the boys dug in back here."

"How about you boys, any of you know this guy here?" I asked the others.

They all glanced briefly at him, then shook their heads.

Done with the bandaging, I reached over and checked the kid's tags.

Pfc Will Stewart. That was his name.