<Begin Segment 20>

TI: And so from there, from your... it sounds like this wonderful stay in New York, what was next? Where did you go from there?

JY: To Carlisle Barracks, that was the medical feed service school. And all the young doctors, as they were being inducted in the army went through this basic training to introduce the role of a doctor in the army.

TI: So this is like, was like basic training for doctors to really get them ready for that front line experience.

JY: Exactly.

TI: And so how long was this training?

JY: Month and a half or two, something like that.

TI: And so these were all young doctors who were just finishing up their probably shortened internships.

JY: Not necessarily. There were also older doctors, they at least to me looked very old. There's a doctor forty-two years old, and I just felt so sorry for him. Old doctor like that going into combat, I felt sorry for him.

TI: That's interesting. And during this military, or this training, so you were getting ready for front line experience, but they also put you through some, like, basic training, like how to fire a rifle and things like that?

JY: I'm sure something. I recall firing at targets, but I don't know exactly where. Looking at tanks and how they ran in situations.

TI: So when you finished at Carlisle, then what happened?

JY: We get an order as to where our next duty station would be, and that was to O'Reilly General Hospital in Missouri in the Ozarks.

TI: Okay. And this was, so this was a stateside hospital, and was your thinking then that you might just stay in the States?

JY: We had no idea what our next assignment would be.

TI: So what was your role at O'Reilly? What were you supposed to be doing there?

JY: They called you a ward officer, you're assigned to a ward and you take care of the patients in that ward, and then you may be given other assignments as they were needed.

TI: And at this point, what was your rank?

JY: First lieutenant.

TI: And in a place like, as a ward officer, as a first lieutenant, how many people reported to you? Was it kind of a big deal to be an officer in these hospitals, or were there a lot of other officers that were higher than you?

JY: Oh, there was a lot of other officers that were higher, and just coming into the army, in the army's order of rank, you were at the lowest point. They sort of let you know you were the youngest and the newest, and needed a lot of training of some sort.

TI: Well, I imagine not only the upper officers, but how about things like the experienced nurses? How did they treat sort of the green, sort of, new doctors?

JY: God, I can't recall the nurses for some reason. I guess I was just married, so my attention wasn't at the ward. [Laughs] In fact, I can't recall any nurses when you speak about them.

TI: Because I would think they would be so critical, because here you'd have these patients, and they're the ones really on a, on a daily basis taking care of the patients, aren't they?

JY: Well, we didn't have real acute conditions where we had an emergency surgery or anything like that. Looked like there were a lot of these soldiers that were being rehabilitated from combat wounds, and they had gone through a lot of their initial procedures, surgical procedures. Still it was a large, maybe a couple thousand beds in this hospital.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.