Aid Station

MEN AT WAR Aid Station

From the Korean central front TIME Correspondent Tom Lambert cabled: THE aid station, a big, green-canvas structure, was warm with the heat of a single stove and bright with the glare of eight electric bulbs. Its dirt floor was muddy at the entrance, where the wind blew the rain in through the flaps. Outside, an artillery battery fired steadily to the north. The concussion drummed on the ears, of the men inside.

Through the tent flaps, walking or on litters, came men of the 23rd and 38th Infantry Regiments (2nd Division). They had fought their way out of Chinese encirclement in the rain-shrouded mountains and muddy valleys to the north. They had been coming in all day, and now it was midnight, and still they came, blinking and squinting, out of the night.

"Litter Case!" A youngster with a mop of red hair gritted his teeth as the medics swabbed and cleaned a gash in his left leg; he grinned quickly and muttered

"Thanks, buddy," as someone handed him a lighted cigarette. A stout medic at the flaps suddenly shouted, "Litter case!" Two soldiers walked carefully into the tent, laid a stretcher on packing cases in the cone of light from a spotlight. The man on the stretcher moaned faintly. A field dressing lay across his eyes. His face was dirty, bearded, bloody. A doctor in an undershirt looked at the medical sergeant across the stretcher and shook his head in pity. Then he leaned over the wounded man and began gently to remove the field dressing.

On a bench against the wet canvas wall a towheaded young Ranger, his left forearm swathed in a bloody dressing made from the sleeve of his green fatigue jacket, asked with weary anxiety if anyone had seen any others of his company. Then, through the tent entrance came a 19-year-old boy. His eyes stared unseeing, he had the face of a man of 90. A chaplain gently forced him to sit down, asked his name and his outfit. The boy did not hear.

"Maybe, Father, if you write something, he might know it," suggested a slim youngster with a leg wound. But the writing, like the voices and the questions, stirred no response.

"Acute Anxiety." The medic at the door continued his record of those who came into the tent, putting notations beside names: "Gunshot wound . . . acute anxiety . . . broken wrist." Outside, the rain ceased and a single star broke through a rift in the clouds. The artillery hammered on.

The soldier with the field dressing over his eyes was shifted from his stretcher to an ambulance for another stage of his painful journey from Korea. A blond youngster with a gaping hole in his right thigh was carried under the spotlight. The chaplain tugged gently at the soldier's sodden combat boots and blood-soaked trousers and joked with him about rotation. "I nearly had my time in, Father," the boy said. "I guess I get out a little early." He shivered and flinched as the artillery fired another salvo.

Beside the tent flap, the recording of pain went on. The officer in charge dragged heavily on a cigarette and squinted bloodshot eyes against the light.

"It's slowing down," he said. "I think maybe the worst is over."

The medic at the flaps shouted again: "Litter case!" Two stretcher-bearers, ponchos glistening, carried in another wounded man.

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