Nick’s Ankle 

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Sandy was standing behind the counter with her hands on her hips when I returned to the clinic from a morning farm call.

“Skip is on his way here with Ted’s dog,” Sandy said. “They found him in the river, and Skip said he has a broken leg.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw Skip pulling up to the clinic with a couple of boys in the back of his pickup.

“Looks like I need to wash up,” I said. “You guys can get them settled in an exam room, and I will be right there.”

When I returned to the exam room, Nick, Ted’s old black Lab, was on the table, soaking wet but waging his tail. The boys, both the younger sons of Skip and Ted, were also soaked. They must have been the rescuers.

“Looks like you guys have been swimming,” I said. 

“Nick was way out in the river,” Matt said. “We don’t know how he broke his leg.”

Nick’s leg was a mess. His hock joint was completely disarticulated, with all the tissue on the lateral side of the hock gone. All the lateral soft tissues were gone, including blood vessels. There was river sand in all the tissues. I even flicked a few small rocks out of the wound as I examined it.

“This is pretty bad, Skip,” I said. “Where is Ted?”

“Ted is out of town,” Skip said. “He won’t be home for several days.”

“I don’t know if this is repairable,” I said. “It would be best to have Dr. Slocum in Eugene look at it.”

“I don’t think Nick is going to Eugene for surgery,” Skip said. “What do you think you can do for him?”

“My first impression is this leg needs to come off,” I said. “I don’t know if there will be enough circulation in this foot to heal.”

“I guess you could try to fix it,” Skip said. “You could always take the leg off later. I don’t want to make a decision for Ted that is so final as an amputation if there is a possibility of fixing it.”

“Well, you’re right about the leg,” I said. “We can take it off later if things don’t work. But I want to be clear, repairing this leg is over the head of this clinic. Fusing this hock joint is the only real chance of healing this leg. That is best done with a bone plate. That kind of surgery is available in Eugene, but not here.”

“Doc, you do what you can,” Skip said. “We will give it the old college try. If it doesn’t work, we can deal with that at the time.”

With that said, Skip and his crew patted Nick on his head and left him with me.

“Where do we start with this mess?” Dixie asked.

“We start in the tub,” I said. “We have a lot of sand to wash out of this wound.”

We sedated Nick and sort of pressure-washed the exposed bone and joint. Sand seemed to be everywhere, but with several scrubs of the entire leg, we were at a point where we moved to the surgery room for the final prep.

Once the wound was scrubbed and draped, I started to put things back together. 

The first and probably most challenging task was removing the cartilage from the joint surfaces to get a boney fusion to hold the foot in place.

Once that was done, I positioned the hock in a functional position. I drove a pin from the underside of the hock through the joint and into the tibia. The stability surprised me a bit.

“This looks pretty good,” I said. “It might even work.”

“How are you going to close this wound?” Dixie asked.

“I will do what is called a pedicle skin graft,” I said. “I will take a strip of skin from the upper leg, turn it around and suture it over this wound. By leaving it attached above, hopefully, the skin will survive.”

After closing the wound, I placed the leg in a Thomas Splint.

“I usually don’t use a splint when I use internal fixation, but if Nick were to walk on this leg, he would likely break the pin,” I said. “This way, we can get some boney fusion and remove the pin before he walks on the foot.”

“Do you think it will work?” Dixie asked.

“There is not a book written that would say this will work,” I said. “It is so contaminated, the whole thing might just blow up on us. Couple that with the loss of significant blood flow to the foot, our chances of this working are slim.”

I called Skip to tell him I would keep Nick at the clinic until Ted got home. That way, we could monitor the wound healing and keep Nick on pain medication. I think Skip was relieved that he didn’t have to take care of Nick for a couple of days.

***

To everyone’s surprise, including mine, Nick went on to heal well. The joint fused nicely, and we removed the pin with a brief procedure. The skin graft survived. It added a little character with the hair growing in the wrong direction.

Nick’s leg was never normal, and it looked somewhat fragile. But it served him well for the remainder of his life.

Photo by Mali Maeder on Pexels.

Dumb and Dumber, From the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

By the summer of nineteen sixty-seven, I had been elevated to Quality Control NCO in our maintenance shop for the 177th USASA Operations Company located at Camp Humphreys, South Korea.

The year I was there is often called the second Korean War. We were besieged by many infiltrators from North Korea that year. Firefights on the DMZ were regular events. In that year, we lost over six hundred UN soldiers. Over one hundred of those were Americans.

The 177th was the hub of the low-frequency radio intercept and direction finding operations in the country. We had a lot of equipment to maintain, both installed in our operations and mobile vans.

This position removed me from the rotating trick maintenance position and gave me a day job. That was a blessing, but the position also gave me a couple of headaches, namely, in Dumb and Dumber. The two trick workers could also be called Mutt and Jeff. They seemed to do everything together, and their work often had to be redone by someone more competent.

Promotions were given out almost automatically in Korea. Nearly everyone in the shop was promoted to Specialist Five when they had two years in the Army. I wondered why these were still Spec Fours, and they were close to rotating to their next duty station.

“Dumber, I have a job for you,” I said as I assigned Dumber to fix a mobile jamming transmitter located down at the motor pool.

“Great,” Dumber said, “I will take Dumb with me. We can go to lunch when we are done. That will get us out of the shop for a few hours.”

I had a strange foreboding as the two left the operations building, carrying an armload of equipment each. They still managed to laugh and butt shoulders as they went through the exit door.

Starting at ten-thirty in the morning, most of the guys in the shop would have had the job done well before lunch. But actually, having the pair out of the shop for a few hours was a good thing, so I let them work at their own pace.

When Dumb and Dumber returned to the shop, it was nearly two o’clock. 

“I thought you two would be back right after lunch,” I said.

“We got the transmitter fixed and checked out its operation,” Dumb said. “Then, after lunch, we had to go back to the motor pool and get all our equipment. We got back as soon as we could.”

Their explanation was marginal, but there was no sense in questioning their time frame. They settled into the afternoon work schedule, and everything was going along fine.

That is, going fine until Chief Warrant Officer Neal, the officer in charge of the shop, stormed across the hall from his office.

“I have the old man on the phone, and he is really pissed,” Mr. Neal said. “It seems we have been jamming a local radio station for the last several hours. Do you know anything about this?”

I looked at Dumb and Dumber; no words were needed. They immediately fessed up.

“We fixed that transmitter and rolled it up on this Korean radio station, just to check it out,” Dumber said. “I guess we must have forgotten to turn it off when we went to lunch.”

Mr. Neal fumed. Steam was coming from his ears.

“You get your ass down there and turn the thing off,” he yelled to Dumber.

Then he turned to me. “You should know better than to send that pair to do anything without direct supervision,” he said. “That means they don’t do anything out of this shop.”

So Dumb and Dumber were sent to visit with the commanding officer. They were given an article fifteen for lack of detail in the performance of their duties. Article fifteen, a company-level punishment, just about confirmed that they wouldn’t be promoted before leaving Korea.

***

It was a sweltering hot August afternoon when the Swing trick took over for the trick on days. Everyone wanted to be in the operations building. It was about the only place with air conditioning in this section of Korea.

I was just leaving the shop when I heard the trick chief handing out assignments for his crew. They had to run the emergency generators today. I cringed when I heard him give the job to Dumb and Dumber.

“You know the situation,” I said to the trick chief. “Those two are not to be doing anything outside of the shop without direct supervision.”

“The generators are inside the compound,” the trick chief said. “They have done this every time we have the assignment.”

We had two massive diesel generators for emergency power that were manually started, stabilized. Then they were switched over to run the operations building. The Comm Center had its own generator that would automatically switch on in the event of a power failure.

We ran the operations building on emergency power for a half-hour every month. Just to make sure the generators were operational and that the maintenance crew was familiar with the operation and switch over protocol. 

That protocol required the generator to be started and stabilized before switching the site over to emergency power. Although the switch would only cause a blink in power, we would always have the equipment turned off before switching over to the generator.

I left with the rest of the day crew, and we went down the hill to mess hall for dinner. We were through the chow line and had just started to eat when one of the swing trick guys came running into the mess hall.

“You guys are needed back at the shop, stat,” the guy said.

“Can we finish dinner?” I asked. The mess hall had Korean servers and cooks, and the was no shop talk allowed at any time.

“No, we need all hands on deck immediately,” the runner said.

Climbing the hill back to the operations building in the afternoon heat was not the most pleasant exercise method. But the gem at the end was an air-conditioned building, so that made the task bearable.

When we checked in through the security gate, the guard said, “You guys had better hurry.”

We walked into a completely dark operations building. The smell of burnt power supplies was overwhelming.

“What happened?” I asked the trick chief.

Mr. Neal almost ran over me as he rushed through the door of the operations building. 

“What happened?” Mr. Neal asked.

“Every light bulb in the building is burned out,” the trick chief said. “Even the light bulbs in the comm center. Apparently, their lights are not hooked into their emergency power supply. And almost every piece of equipment has a blown power supply.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” Mr. Neal said. “I want to know what happened.”

“Apparently, when Dumb and Dumber switched the site to emergency power, they hadn’t stabilized the generator. It dieseled on them, and it must have put three or four hundred volts of power into the building. They hadn’t told anybody they were making the switch, so all the equipment was still turned on and operating. Most of the power supplies are toast, as you can smell.”

“I want those two out of operations,” Mr. Neal said to the trick chief. “They can pull weeds for the old man until they rotate out of here. And you knew they were not to do anything out of the shop. You are going to have some explaining to do.”

“They only have a couple of weeks before they rotate out of here,” the trick chief said.

“God, I hope they aren’t getting sent to Vietnam,” Mr. Neal said. “They will get a lot of guys killed down there if they pull a stunt like this. It is bad enough here. How long until we can get things back online, Larsen?”

“If we get some lightbulbs working, we can get some stations working in a couple of hours,” I said. “We are going to be limited on the supply end.”

“You let the operations officer select the stations he wants up first,” Mr. Neal said. “I will start working on the supply issues. We are probably going to have to bend a few of those Army rules.”

And so it began, nearly forty-eight hours of work before the operations were fully functional again. Then a few hours of sleep and a big party to celebrate the fix.

Dumb and Dumber were just gone. I have no idea what became of them, but they were shipped out to Seoul, I would guess.

Photo from Victor Hugo, seated, front left.

Four-Leaf Clover 

D. E. Larsen, DVM

They called Korea the Land of Morning Calm for a good reason; there seemed to be a slight fog hanging over the rice paddies, and only a couple farmers were moving down to check on the water flow through the paddies. It was early May 1967, and the country was warming up from a chilly spring. The sun was warm as we walked up the hill to the operations building. 

“It looks like it will be a warm day,” I told Truman as we walked along. I had to consciously lengthen my stride to keep pace with my tall friend.

“Some of the old timers were saying that we will have good weather now until the monsoon rains start sometime next month,” Truman said as we checked in at the guard station.

Mr. Neal, the new warrant officer in charge of maintenance, was waiting for us when we got to the shop.

“I have been waiting to talk with you, Larsen,” Mr. Neal said. “Major Dillon, the new CO, has decided that he wants to have an honor guard for the 177th.”

“That sounds like a bunch of military BS,” I said.

“Yes, you’re probably correct, but you have to put up with those things from time to time in this man’s army,” Mr. Neal said. “Anyway, the shop has to supply a body, and since we moved you to your new job as the quality control NCOIC, it looks like your schedule is the one with the most free time. So, Larsen, you’re the body. You are to report to supply this afternoon and pick up all the uniform additions. Then you will have drill practice every day at eleven.”

“I guess I don’t have any say in this selection,” I said. 

“Major Dillon has an open door policy every Tuesday evening,” Mr. Neal said. “You are free to go talk with him if you would like. But my guess would be it won’t do you any good. His plan is to have an honor guard performance every time we have the big brass visit. It won’t be a big deal for you, Larsen, just give your house boy an extra ten dollars, and he will take care of your uniform, brass, and boots.”

Mr. Neal was right, of course. Major Dillon would not budge an inch on my participation in the honor guard. I spoke with him every Tuesday evening at six or eighteen hundred hours. His story was always the same, I was doing a great job, and it would only help my career in the Army. 

My house boy was ecstatic. He had been on an honor guard when he was in the Korean Army, so he knew all the tricks.

“You will be the best dressed on the honor guard,” he said with a bit of a puffed-up chest. “I know all the tricks to make things shine.”

Per capita income in South Korea in 1967 was about twenty-six dollars a year. The Army paid These house boys well, and then they were tipped five dollars a month by each of the twelve guys he cleaned house for. An extra ten dollars a month was a significant increase in his pay.

I picked up my stuff from supply, and my houseboy went right to work. When I got back to my room that first evening, my silver helmet was on my nightstand, shining in sunlit, filtering through the window.

Then drills started. We worked hard, and in the summer heat, I was tired when I got to the mess hall for lunch.

The routine at each practice was the same. The close-order drill was easy for everyone to pick up. Some of the tricks with the rifles were harder to master, but we were coming along.

As the summer progressed and the monsoons were approaching, the days were hotter, and the humidity was high. We started taking a break in the middle of the practice.

On one sweltering morning, everyone sort of melted to the ground when break time came. I laid on my back for a few minutes and then rolled over. I noticed that I was lying on a small patch of clover when suddenly, a four-leafed clover caught my eye.

I plucked the clover and got to my knees as I showed it to the other guys. Then I looked at the patch of clover a little closer. Nearly all the clovers had four or more leaves. 

Now the whole bunch of us were going over this small patches of clover, maybe six feet in diameter. The drill sergeant came over to see what we were doing. I handed him a clover with seven leaves.

He looked at it closely. Then he sort of surveyed the area where the parade field was located.

“You guys know, they fought a war right here not too many years ago,” the sergeant said. “I wonder what was dumped on this sport to cause this abnormal growth in this clover patch?”

Everyone looked around, and we all sprang to our feet at the same time. That was the last time we took a break on that parade field.

My stint on the Honor Guard lasted until my departure at the end of October. Major Dillon was true to his word and placed a letter in the personnel file attesting to my outstanding performance on his honor guard. It was probably a bit overstated, but it was likely helpful in my promotion to E-6 the following September in Germany.

Photo by Djalma Paiva Armelin on Pexels.