DOCTORS' LOUNGE
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WAR AND OTHER WOUNDS AUTHOR Mary Barry, MD
V
eterans, I learned in my youth,
came in many stripes. I knew
many vets: both my parents and
all my Barry and Hennessy aunts
and uncles, except Uncle Bill,
who had complications of rheu-
matic fever. He stayed at home
with Grandma Barry. Daddy
told us stories but nothing gory, only the as-
tounding or funny ones. Uncle Joe spent his war in Brazil, and
ever after lamented the stateside lack of a 25 cent breakfast plus his
clean laundry, delivered every morning by a lovely lass. My moth-
er Bennie served as a WAVE in DC, “where admirals chased her
around the desk,” and received so many proposals that my Aunt
Helen, in desperation, had to mail her a ring she picked out, from
her brother. It worked.
We spent months as medicine housestaff at the Atlanta VA,
where unforgettable teachers cracked the whip and our patients
taught us the ropes. I soon learned that, just as on surgery rota-
tions in Louisville with Drs. Lou Heuser and Lou Martin, the vin-
tage of the veteran spoke volumes. The youngest were the saddest,
by and large. They were far more likely to have wounds that had
never healed, terrible cancers, and in Atlanta, AIDS.
One of the oldest was Mr. X, a World War I Navy veteran of 87.
I loved him to pieces. He had suffered intermittent seizures since
an oil barrel had got loose and broken his head, just about. He was
Greek and his real name involved a pronunciation far too difficult
for the small town of Dahlonega. He got admitted over and over
for either seizure or Dilantin toxicity, since alcohol mixed poorly
with both. He told me he had gained citizenship at 15, volunteered
for the Navy at age 16, and served as a Greek translator for Admi-
ral Niblack at Gibraltar. He got a medical discharge at age 18, and
married a young woman he had met at Bethesda. We kept after
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LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
him to move into the VA nursing home, but he refused; he would
lose his front porch view. He told me that the eeriest things in
the world were the night sounds of Gibraltar: the caves, the mon-
keys, the bats, and the feeling that all these sounds were Germans,
trying to land boats and attack. The German U-boats of the First
World War had plied the Straits and terrorized the convoys.
He had found a supply cache of theirs once, and led Marines to
the spot, where the enemy was eventually ambushed. First, how-
ever, he had stolen a bottle of beer. “NIK beer.” I had never heard
of it. I was so afraid they would miss it and then they would know
we were waiting. But the Marines got’em coming around the cliff
and they never knew.”
“What about the rest of the beer,” I wondered. “The Marines
got it all. It was only fair,” he said. “That place looked like they had
used it for months. It was the creepiest feeling. I just knew I had
been watched once but saw nobody, you know, that funny feeling.
Then there he was, dead on the cliff.”
He had suffered nightmares ever since; it was the first person,
he felt, who had died because of him. He wouldn’t tell me about
the other people he had killed. “There was fire. You don’t need my
nightmares.”
One of the youngest was Horace, who had Coccidioidal men-
ingitis, itself extremely rare. He caught it when based at Kirtland
Air Force Base (AFB) and my resident, Brian, and I had worked on
him throughout one night when his Ommaya reservoir gave him
Staph sepsis. Emergency removal of the reservoir saved him but
only after our attending, Dr. Jack, tracked down the neurosurgery
boss and lit him up. We did daily spinal taps for weeks afterward,
to deliver his antifungal medicine.
He was enraged that his love for airplanes had been derailed by
the desert. He talked about life in the air, and how it was the closest
to heaven he cared to be. He was terrified of dying, and so was I;