WORK IN PROGRESS

PIERCE BARNES

"The Brooke Army Medical Center overlooked a meandering river carrying grain barges downstream to the Gulf. Cottonwood trees lined both embankments arching their arms of verdant foliage over the water. Now for the first time since Korea I felt safe. Strolling the riverside footpath, I walked past patients lounging on the grass, enjoying the hot Texas sun. Survivors of our nation's wars sat on benches, some autistic, staring out over the flowing stream with unseeing eyes. Some smoked, napped, read or played cards, while others occasionally left their seats to urinate in the river, while a few wandered the embankment picking flowers that grew only in their shattered minds. A regiment of casualties enduring their final triage of body and soul.

Walking Wounded, I thought. Like the prisoners I liberated from Chanjin. A Korean POW camp, A wretched compound of log huts burrowed into frozen soil. Abandoned by guards to die of cold and hunger, only a few survived this abattoir of frozen corpses. Inside unheated Huts, the living and the dead huddled together under thin blankets stained with excrement. Rows of naked cadavers, stripped of clothing by the living, lay frozen in death's inevitable rigor mortis,
bones visible through transparent flesh. Lifeless mouths frozen in rictus grins seemed to ask:
- What took you so long soldier? What took you so long?

Holy Mother of God! Holy Mother of God! I shouted , scanning faces with a flashlight, searching for life, hearing not a groan or whimper. Only my sobbing broke the mortuary silence of the hut.
I fled into the cold. Outside, my men stared at me, immobilized. "Light the Coleman," I ordered. "Get anyone alive out." I stumbled through waist high snow to the next Hut, choking on the odor of decayed flesh, searching frozen faces, fearing to miss a flickering eyelid, a groan, a trembling hand. In four Huts I found ten prisoners alive before staggering out into the cold and collapsing on the urine-stained snow, shattered.

"How do you classify a wound like Chanjin, Sir? What disability rating do you give it, Sir?"