' God, give me strength!"
Mustering my strongest voice, I screamed: "Everybody! Listen to me!
These patients are all bleeding. We've got to stop the bleeding
quickly - right now! Elevate extremities! Use anything you can get to
stop the bleeding! Tourniquets! Compression bandages! Hemostats! Even
your fingers, if they are clean! Bring all bad cases to the operating
room!"
During the next thirty-two hours, our medical staff worked around the
clock, applying tourniquets and compression bandages, amputating arms
and legs (many dangling by only a few shreds of skin or tendons),
tying off bleeders, giving tetanus shots, laying the dead in the
garage for identification. As soon as we could get each patient
through his emergency, we sent him by ambulance to one of the civilian
hospitals in Baguio for definitive care, and a few miles distant from
any future bombing.
I was very fortunate in obtaining Dr. Beulah Allen (the wife of our
Post Quartermaster, Lt. Col. Henderson Allen), a retired surgeon, to
assist me. She was a tower of strength. While Dr. Allen and I were
operating, Civil War General Sherman's remarks that "War is hell!"
kept haunting me.
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