New Friends
On the long voyage to Okinawa I had made new friends; Ray
Whiteside, J. D. Sheppard and I, along with B.O. Way, (a friend of Whiteside)
shared a house. Things were looking up;
Whiteside was now the Motor Sergeant, a position of considerable influence and
Sheppard was head of Recreational Activities.
Shep was 6'8" and had gone to East Texas State Teacher's College on
a basketball scholarship.
Before we could open the hospital for patients, we had to
get rid of all the Japanese equipment (much of it superior to our own) and
supplies. We couldn't just dump it in
the garbage to make its way onto the black market: first we had to inventory
everything, then take it somewhere to be stored before finding its way to the
black market. By then I was a Sergeant
(actually a Technician Fourth Grade or T/4) and was put in charge of one of the
crews; Corporal (T/5) Jimmy Maupin was my assistant. Maupin was the Hospital barber and had shared
many hours on deck between the winches with us on the cruise. He was convinced that his fiancée was
cheating on him and we almost drove him crazy by making up stories of what was
probably happening. He would buy it all,
"When I get home I'll shoot that 4F son of a bitch, but not her because
it's not her fault". Entertainment
was hard to come by and Maupin seemed to perversely enjoy his misery as much as
we did weaving the story line between three or four of us.
Our crew consisted of about a dozen Koreans and we soon
discovered they were stealing us blind.
I saw one of them slip a surgical instrument (we were inventorying and
packing up an operating room) inside his clothes. I immediately initiated a strip search and we
discovered there were more surgical instruments hidden in rolls of cloth
wrapped around their bodies under their outer clothes than were included in the
inventory. Before Maupin or I could do anything, the oldest of the Koreans
began hitting and kicking the rest of the crew.
It was probably all show, but we bought it "hook, line and
sinker".
We made him the "straw boss" over the rest of
the Koreans and our problems stopped. We
gave him American cigarettes, an occasional beer and a few cans of food from
the mess hall. In return, he ran the
crew with an iron hand; they were happier under a boss they could understand;
he was happy; and Jimmy and I were both happy and relaxed. They were probably still stealing, but he was
controlling it at a reasonable level.
When we got to the Pathology Laboratory and I saw my first Microtome
blade and handle, I appropriated it before the Koreans could steal it. It was the best butcher knife/meat cleaver I
had ever seen.
We got an entire new set of Officers and Nurses in as
replacements. From the Hospital
Commander on down to the newest 2nd Lt. Medical Administrative Officer, they
didn't know "rollover from sickum".
They relied on us "old timer" enlisted men to run things and
we sure did. We helped them, but we also
helped ourselves. The biggest coup was
"liberating" a 55 gallon drum of 95% ethyl alcohol from the first
truckload picked up at Inchon and convincing the Medical Supply Officer it had
bounced off the truck on the cobblestone roads on the trip to Seoul. We placed it on a sawhorse beside the diesel
barrel and everyone assumed we just had an extra drum of fuel in case we ran
out in the middle of the night. We ran a
line through the hole in the wall and installed a spigot on the end of it. That was a secret we kept from our best
friends, 190 proof booze available at the touch of a hand.
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