Marc Eisenmann 20 October 2009 Stories and Appreciations 832 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

I lived with the son of an undertaker from Holyoke, Massachusetts, and an Indian from North Scituate, Rhode Island, in a two room apartment across from the Abbott Pharmaceuticals plant in North Chicago. All three of us were in on-the-job training after graduating from Navy Hospital Corps School, awaiting orders to attend the Marine Field Medical Technician School at Camp Lejeune. We worked all day and spent our nights at the local pub, drinking the swill that found its way down from Milwaukee in union trucks.

The Rathskeller was a sailor’s bar that had one, and only one, tradition: There had to be at least one fight per night. If there hadn’t been a fight by closing time, one or more of the sailors would just cold-cock someone with a beer bottle or whatever was handy, including pool balls, cue sticks or barstools. The tough ones just used their mangled hands. It was bad luck not to have a fight, like boarding a female on ship. The tradition finally ended in a purple haze one February morning, when someone lobbed a violet smoke grenade into the bar, and the sailors kicked it around until it finally crashed into the gin, burning the place to the ground, but not before a few bottles of whiskey were snatched on the way out, to be consumed watching the hellish spectacle of flames lapping at the cold midnight sky.

Our on-the-job training at the time consisted of rotations through the numerous wards of the huge Naval hospital, where broken wrecks of leather-faced sailors lay in various states of agony; recruit sick call at basic training; and ambulance crew duty.

I despised ward duty, which ranged from giving 200cc Fleet enemas to old sailors compacted from lack of motion of the seas, to thumping the age-spotted and tattoo-warped backs of consumptive veterans who took demented pleasure in missing the receptacle with their infectious sputum.

Recruit sick call duty was less disturbing, but it was monotonous and boring treating — for the most part — sicknesses incurred as a result of taking thousands of young men from across America and cramming those head to toe in tight barracks. Inevitably, one person would bring a virus, bacteria or fungus that nobody else was exposed to, which then would run rampant throughout the barracks until every member was infected. Sometimes a potpourri of diseases was in the mix. In addition, when they came to sick call hoping for some relief, they, would inevitably pick up a strain of something else their bodies had yet to be subjected to, graciously acquired from the pallid recruit from an adjoining barracks who sat next to him, wheezing a Hoboken strain for his body to test its weakened defenses on.

Sick call was boring. I’d keep packets of medicine from the pharmacy in my partitioned stall to hand out. If they had diarrhea, I’d hand them a bottle of Kaopectate and direct them to drink the whole bottle while I wrote in their medical records, then I’d hand him another bottle and tell him “if you still have the shits tomorrow, drink this.” The treatment never failed. If they had an upper respiratory infection and congestion, which two-thirds of the visits were, I’d hand them a packet of medicine and send them on their way. We quit giving them whole bottles after a few recruits tried committing suicide by swallowing a bottle of Actifed. Crabs – Kwell. Athletes foot – Tinactin. Headache – aspirin. Boring. Occasionally we would get to suture someone up, or to practice real medicine, which would break the monotony.

Ambulance duty was where the real excitement was. Stopping arterial bleeding, hearing the crack of ribs during CPR, packing someone’s intestines on top their abdomen after a knife fight, gave you something to talk about at the Rathskeller that night. The only aspect I didn’t care for was the occasional drunk, found choking on their vomit; we’d have to resuscitate and I didn’t care for extracting vile vomitus from their mouth and nose, and they’d make such a mess of the ambue bag.

Like the Navy ads proclaimed during the time, this period of my life was an adventure. I entered it with one scar on my face that I obtained in childhood from a neighbor’s Chihuahua, and left with seven scars, the largest of which required thirteen stitches in my forehead. It was a time of Canned Heat and bawdy drunken riots, of reading Kant in soup kitchens, and of taking life as it was handed out to you. It was a time of discovery and measurement. It went by in a blur, like Jean Cocteau’s quote: “Life is like a horizontal fall.”

- Marc Eisenmann