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MT: And in time I started getting knowledge of a lot of stuff, and also, the other thing is how people react to going to sick call. Some people just fake it and so I found out how people fake it, and I would ask them questions and I would be able to outsmart them and they'd wonder how. Well, I was getting, as people found out that I was being serious about trying to treat them properly, more and more people started coming. I would tell people who had a dental problem, with, particularly with a cavity, I said, "Don't go to, I won't send you to the dentist unless you want it pulled out 'cause that's all they do, is pull teeth. What I want you to do is go to a civilian doctor out here in Santa Maria and get your teeth taken up so you save it. But if you want to have it pulled I'll send you over there." That's what we used to do. That's what I used to do. But one day, then we got a new doctor, a civilian doctor, Dr. Spencer from, Opie Spencer from Utah, Bryce, Utah. A tremendously nice man, very capable, obviously much more capable than I am. And when he came in he didn't know anything about military and we had to teach him how to dress militarily and stuff like that so he wouldn't look like a greenhorn. So anyway, he appreciated that, and so then he started looking at patients and I could take all the ones that I had any doubts about, send it to him and he'd be able to take care of them. One day, though, a National Guard guy who, a corporal who was taking care of the bar chart, of how many patients come each day, he's yellin' at me, "We saw two hundred and fifty patients today." Meanwhile I'm going crazy, a nervous wreck, seeing so many patients, just trying to do a decent job, and I was just so nervous and I was just having real trouble trying to do a good job at the same time. And when the doctor heard that he came to me, he says, "What can we do to, that's just too many patients for you to see. What can we do to..." I said we have, there's a way to doing that. All the medics have been trained already and they're assigned to the companies, so they could take a sick call and they could put the band-aids on, they could give the APC pills out, they could do things like that and take care of the bulk of the people coming in.

TI: So just treat that out in the field more, just taking care of.

MT: And he said, "That's a good idea. I'll give that order." And the numbers just went way down and it became -- don't forget, at three o'clock I had to be through with all the patients 'cause we had the GI, the dispensary. We, not the National Guard, we had to, the draftees and RAs, and we, initially they gave us the GI soap, the green bar, greasy soap, and it would leave residues and so we'd have to do it over again, so we used to chip in and buy powdered soap and so we would use that so that it'd be easier for us, we could do it just one time. And so to do two hundred and fifty patients, GI afterward, I was, I was a nervous wreck. And then when this happened then everything became really easy for us, became a slam dunk, was not hard at all. So, but I started enjoying doing that.

TI: What a tremendous learning experience for you, to, to...

MT: Yeah. And what it did also for me, to get to know Doc Spencer, and then he understood what I can do. Every time we, from there we went to Japan. We went to Japan because northern Japan was exposed because all the troops went to Korea and they were afraid of invasion from Russia or from North Korea, so they put the 45th Division there, the other National Guard division from Oklahoma, put them into Hokkaido and put us into Tohoku in northern Japan, and that's where we went. And first we went to repo depo in Zama. Zama is outside of Yokohama, southwest of Yokohama, and we were there about a month. I was put on advanced party.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.