Reporter remembers surgeon prying into ripped throat, wasn’t frightened of death
By Keith Wheeler, North American Newspaper Alliance
Keith Wheeler, severely wounded on Iwo Jima, is now writing from the base hospital on Saipan. This is the second of a series.
ARMY STATION HOSPITAL, Saipan (Feb. 26, delayed) – I suspect the most vivid single memory of my life will always be the blow of the bullet that smashed through my throat and jaw at 1:30 p.m. February 20.
Exactly as I remember it, I cannot describe it. It was a violent blow, with a quality of redness and a quality of precise, intended savagery. I felt it strike the right side of my face.
And this is a curious thing, because three days later I learned the bullet actually had struck the left side, going out again on the right.
I was in the regimental command post of the 25th Marines, where for an hour I had crouched in the bottom of a two-man foxhole with young Maj. John R. Jones while the Japs threw 400 screaming artillery shells into our position. The earth quaked and we sucked occasionally on a blessed canteen which Maj. Jones thoughtfully had filled with Benedictine and brandy.
When the Jap barrage shifted to the right, I stood up to watch the shells bursting among the American tanks on the airfield above us. That’s when I got hit.
I fell forward slowly, doubling my chin against a bright, hot, red freshet of blood that leaped before my eyes. Somebody yelled: “Lie down; lie back; quiet!”
I obeyed.
I did not question that I would die. I had seen a Marine hit the same way at Tarawa and had watched the life gush out of him in less than five minutes.
I wasn’t frightened. I only wondered how long it would take and whether I would know when it came.
There was a strange feeling in this because more than anything else about war, I have always hated the corpses – the pitiful, smashed, helpless, yellow, black, swollen and stinking things that were once men – and always I had dreaded the chance that I might look like that. Now it didn’t seem important and I understood that being one of them, I would be with good companions.
I wondered why I hadn’t heard the bullet coming, remembering all the whines and crackles I had ducked fearfully for more than three years.
And I thought with regret about the lost future and I wondered how Soon my wife and daughter and parents would learn of what had happened to me.
The hot, gushing flood spread across my body and face with incredible swiftness. Two slippery hands clutched desperately at my throat.
“You’ll choke him,” somebody said. Both hands shifted to the right and I could breathe again, the harsh gasping of my lungs sounding strange in my cars.
I opened my eyes and with a sort of detached curiosity watched and listened and felt the earth tremble as the Japs began to shell again. I could see that Maj. Jones was holding my head while Lt. Cmdr. Howard S. Eccleston, the regimental surgeon, and Lt. Jack Mortell, the dentist, bent over me, working.
I could feel fingers and instruments prying into my ripped throat, but there was no pain, only numbness and a sort of patient waiting.
“Can you get it?” somebody asked. Cmdr. Eccleston grunted, then said he had the upper one but the other was hard to find in the wound and the rush of blood. I understood they were trying to get clamps on a severed artery.
Cmdr. Eccleston grunted again with satisfaction and then cursed as the clamp slipped off. The pumping spread again swiftly and I wondered why I was able to stay conscious so long.
Except that my neck was stiff and some blood gurgled in each breath, I was not uncomfortable. I was growing sleepy and thought with a sort of quiet, friendly gratitude how these men I had barely met were exposing themselves to deadly danger trying to save a life already nearly lost.
