Military Medicine and Cold War: A Flight Surgeon's Reflections

Military Medicine and Cold War

A Flight Surgeon’s Reflections

Copyright © 2014 Jerald Lee Watts, M.D. FS. USAFRes.

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This is a work of memoir or creative nonfiction.

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recognized implies singular respect and or affection for that person by the author.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-4409-3 (sc)

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CONTENTS

List of Photographs

Acknowledgements

Preface – Military

1961

After Grady

School of Aerospace Medicine

Base Assignment

The Ranch House

Dover, Not a Bad Place

Up Stairs

First Flight – TDY

Our Pay

Sweden to Congo

1962

What Me the Psychiatrist?

We Choose Our Own Poisons

Knew how they Felt

High Flying

October 20, 1962

October 21, 1962

October 22, 1962

Approach

Afternoon

October 23, 1962

The Crash Site

October 24, 1962

Back Home

Secret Flight to Adana

Broken Arrow

HAPPY THANKSGIVING – EAT YOUR SPAM. November 1962

Post Thanksgiving Back to Leo

Leaving Congo

Grounded

1963

A Case of What

New Year’s Eve in London, Oops, Boston

Foggy Night to Berlin

His First Aircraft Command

TDY In Paris, C’est La Vie

A French Town and Linen Table Cloths

Recife and the House of Blue Lights

Back to Recife

Bermuda Triangle

Colonel Crain is on the Line

In the Barrier

A Suspect

Coast Guard Station and a Surprise

Icy Water Survival Exercise

Party Pup

Hot Shot Pilot

Frying Pan

Far East – Pacific Shuttle

War Hell, this is Where the War Is.

Post Script

Reflections

Flight Surgeons Office

Chronological History

Unofficial record of Events

McDonnell Voodoo F-101 B

Douglas C-124 Globemaster II

Douglas C-133B Cargomaster

Boeing KC-97 Stratotanker

Swedish SAAB J-29 - Tunnan

Writings by the author:

Promises Kept has been published and printed by iUniverse Publishers, 2009 www.iuniverse.com

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Copyright @ 2009, Jerald Lee Watts, M.D.

Dedication

To all those who serve or have served in the United States Military.

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

Cover:

Photograph: over NYC – McDonnell Voodoo, F-101B,

(98th Fighter Interceptor Squadron flying over New York City)

Reference: The Airlifter, Dover AFB Photo Lab 1962

(In the public domain)

School of Aerospace Medicine – Brooke Air Force Base

Ejection seat trainer – Brooke Air Force Base

Old Farm House (Ranch)

Lieutenant Bob

Aerodrome – Gate House – Leopoldville, Congo

Congolese Civilians Walking – Leopoldville, Congo

Congolese men carrying fire wood

Congolese women washing in the Congo River tributary

UN Airplanes with jet-fuel cans nearby

SAAB J-29 receiving maintenance

Antiaircraft guns unloaded from U.S. Globemaster

UN Helicopter on tarmac.

High Altitude Chamber Wright-Patterson AFB

Lake house – fire place-Dover, Delaware.

Flight Engineer – aboard C-124

Runway in sight, Globemaster approaching Guantanamo

On the runway – @ Leeward Point, Guantanamo Bay

Leeward Point – C-124 delivering munitions…

U.S. C-130 evacuating dependents from Guantanamo Bay,

Marine machine gun bunker – Guantanamo Bay

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – Then we saw it happen

Guantanamo toward the crash

Guantanamo crash site

Guantanamo, We returned

Guantanamo crash site. Engine in foreground…

Guantanamo crash site. Officer investigates…

Cottage – Back to the cottage

UN Hospital – Leopoldville, Congo

Flight line Dispensary

Sabina Aircraft and UN soldiers.

C-133 on the ground in Congo

Isolated guard gate in Congo

Grounded "On an icy New Year’s Day – small frozen lake

New Year’s Eve in London, Oops, Boston

In the freezing snow and looking at the engine…

Foggy Night – Tempelhof Monument

Burned out building

Berlin Wall – February 1963

Aircraft – Engine maintenance.

Royal Air Force Base – Mildenhall, England

TDY Paris: Hotel view, Paris Street

L’ Arc de Triomphé

Cora’s Place – Recife, Brazil

KC-97 and Crew

KC-97 & B-47 Refueling

Alert - Hanger

98th Chopper Water Survival

98th Fighter Squadron-Water Survival Exercise.

Hot Shot Pilot – F-101 on the tarmac.

98th Pilots and Flight Surgeon

98th Pilot

98th Navigator/Radar Observer

Flight Surgeon, Water survival suit

98th Pilot on the flight line

Big Globemaster waiting in Dallas

The author produced all photos in this manuscript except those noted in the captions.

The author’s photographs have never been published and may not be reproduced in any manner without written permission of the author.

Note: No official USAF Accident Investigation photographs of the Guantanamo crash site are included in this manuscript.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Ellen Hunter Ulken, my dear companion, for her support and affection and to Paul Lentz, retired Air Force officer and friend, for his academic review and suggestions for this manuscript.

Thanks to those men and women who protect our country near and far and to those who made my limited military duty an experience long to be remembered.

Particular thanks to my long time friends Dr. Thomas Pre Ball (retired AF Major General) and his dear wife Paddy. It seems we grew up together.

Thanks to Dr. Herbert Block (retired AF Colonel), my hospital commander and sponsor to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Of all military line officers the best was Col. Franklin Crane, commander of the 98th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, a gentleman and an American hero.

Thanks for the friendship of Col. Robert (Bob) Prochko and his lovely wife, Judy.

As one author said in his writings, The names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. * In this case name changes are to maintain privacy.

Any errors are mine and mine alone.

Any individuals named or identified are those for whom I have great admiration, respect and or affection.

* My friend and teacher, the late Dr. William Waters III in his book Before I Sleep.

PREFACE – MILITARY

There was a time in the past century when every able bodied American male, eighteen years of age or older was obliged to serve a compulsory two or more years in the United States military. An alternate volunteer service group known as the Peace Corps was as an option for those eligible, but not in the military. This program was initiated during the Kennedy Administration. During the Nixon Administration the national compulsory draft ended. The country was tired of the controversial Viet Nam War.

We now have a volunteer professional military representing only a small percentage of our population. Unfortunately we are again engaged in controversial conflicts. Good as the voluntary military is, this country has not called upon the major portion of its youth to assume any responsibility for the country’s safety. We have left that responsibility to those volunteers, largely a group of patriotic individuals, both men and women, while the rest of us look on and go about our business as usual.

Despite the anxieties of international tension of the early 1960s most of us went along life’s way with our own agenda, often not aware of the great dangers that seemed so far from our immediate experience. As young members of the military we met every day life situations in the most personal manner, often not thinking of the greater picture.

It was not until the escalation of the Viet Nam War that we realized the true horrors of our generation. Such is the scope of this narrative, one doctor’s personal experiences in the military during a period of the Cold War, the early days leading to the intensification of that Cold War to the Viet Nam Conflict. Recent twenty-first century international events suggest that the embers of that Cold War may still exist.

INTRODUCTION

AFTER GRADY

Early that summer morning slivers of golden sunlight peeked outside my window, high above the city I loved. I arose slowly from my bed, slapped cold water on my scratchy face, shaved, showered in steamy water, all the while thinking, this is my last day at Atlanta’s Grady Hospital. I slipped on a fresh laundered set of worn and frayed, but starched hospital whites, put on my dried blood stained white hush puppies, picked up a cup of coffee at the dining room, and headed for the surgery ward.

At 7 a.m. on 1 July 1961 I handed the ward over to the new resident who would begin his first year of surgery residency. A year before I walked onto the same surgery ward after a year of internship and began my first year of real responsibility. The new guy would no longer be the boy intern, the lowest rung on the medical professional ladder, but would be in charge of the surgical care of the patients and direct the training of the new group of uninitiated young doctors.

I would end two years of cloistered confinement. Outside those hospital walls was a different world, a world that I had almost forgotten, except for the grief, sorrow, and disturbance that we daily received from it.

The call to active military duty began 6 July. I was scheduled to travel to San Antonio, Texas to The School of Aerospace Medicine or simply the flight surgeon school. We would be trained to extend our medical knowledge to the military’s requirements. That involved our care of the flying personnel of the Air Force.

I was relieved as I walked out of the huge hospital onto busy Butler Street, glanced at the shuffling of patients as they were directed to our new hospital and heard the shrill siren of the ambulance that would for a while, not be my call to duty.

I gazed into a bright summer morning. At that moment I began a new phase of medicine. I was filled with anticipation for a new venture, a moment in another world.

SCHOOL OF AEROSPACE MEDICINE

The early 1960s were times of anxious international conflict. Post World War II pitted two major super powers, the United States and the Soviet Union against each other. China, a rising communist government, after the withdrawal of the colonial French from Indochina presented a threat to the stability of the Far East.

It was apparent to most Americans that the Soviet Union was out pacing the United States in the space program with the 1957 international coup, the sending of its satellite Sputnik into space orbiting the earth. America was in catch-up mode. As a nation we suffered the anxiety of falling behind in world technology and leadership. I was to feel that anxiety mixed with a twinge of excitement as I entered the School of Aerospace Medicine.

San Antonio was dreadfully hot from July until October 1961 when our class of over a hundred flight surgeons completed the intensive three months of aerospace medicine. The course included training in the recognition of and treatment of medical implications of flight. The greatest problem included high altitude physical problems, flying stress and how to manage those pilots, navigators and aircrew members who experienced such difficulties. Physicians were placed in the altitude chamber to learn first hand the symptoms and dynamics of altitude changes, anoxia and decompression sickness. The training courses produced near specialists in ear, nose, and throat medicine as well as visual and pulmonary physiology.

In one exercise, the physicians were placed in training ejection seats and were literally blown to the top of the ejection hanger to experience simulated ejections from inflight planes. That was a kick in the butt, said my classmate, Epson, as he was unstrapped from his ejection seat. He was a New Yorker. A delightful guy, he had no understanding of military dress or regulations of conformity. He rarely wore the correct uniform combination, right shoes or socks. He had difficulty figuring out whom he saluted and who saluted him. We are under cover when we have on our dress hats with plastic covers. An officer never carries an umbrella, the instructor advised. Once my classmate was stopped and forced to stand in the pouring rain by a senior field grade officer that caught him using a yellow and purple flower print umbrella.

The doctors of my Aerospace Medical class were nothing more than undisciplined rabble-rousers. As individuals, conformity was difficult. Under the blistering Texas sun the medical class of flight surgeon candidates was drilled by a master sergeant. One of the sweating docs stepped out of ranks, removed his cap, rubbed his sweating face with a handkerchief and arrogantly asked, Why are we being drilled by a noncommissioned airman. Aren’t an officer’s two silver bars more than five or six stripes of an enlisted man? Shouldn’t we be drilling him? When the column of marching doctors heard the question, they broke ranks, scattered and wandered back to their prefab, gray, sweltering, wooden barracks.

The following day we were assembled by an angry, red faced, husky major who yelled at us at the top of his voice, You guys be damn sure to remember a major’s gold leaf is higher than a captain’s two silver bars. He commanded our marching formations from that day on.

Because of the developing space race we were introduced to planned missions beyond our atmosphere and space travel and the potentials of space as a defense umbrella with future space marvels.

During one lecture a former German physiology scientist and early investigator of altitude effects on the human body, Dr. Hubertus Strughold, working with the American government, showed us plans for future rockets and lectured us on space effects of the human body.

He enticed us by quoting the prediction of President John Kennedy when he stated, We will land a man on the moon within the next decade. It seemed incredible, yet we believed it was possible.

Upon graduation, we received our wings and were assigned to our distant bases.

* Dr. Hubertus Strughold (1898 - 1987), a German scientist during World War II served under the direction of the German Luftwaffe in controversial experiments using pressure chambers simulating altitude challenges to the human body. He served as director of our early aerospace medicine unit. His reputation has been diminished by later evidence from secret allied files identifying him as a participant in human experiments with Nazi concentrate camp prisoners.

School of Aerospace Medicine – 1961

Brook Air Force Base – San Antonio, Texas

Ejection Seat – Brook Air Force Base

That was a kick in the butt.

BASE ASSIGNMENT

Where in the hell is Dover, Delaware? I asked. When I learned I would be assigned stateside, I sought a change in assignment to overseas, something different from the routine of the academic and hospital life that I had known for the last six years.

I wanted to get away from a schedule of twelve hours on and twelve off and thirty-six hours on and twelve off. In the flight surgeons school I had the first full weekends off that I had experienced in more than two years. It was hard to believe that any one had more than one night off at a time.

Adventure in new and far away places, that’s what I needed. Stateside and Dover, Delaware didn’t seem to measure up to my idea of adventure. I looked at a map and there it was on a little peninsula on the eastern seacoast away from everything exciting.

A letter arrived from a medical school mate, Dr. Pre Ball, telling me that I was assigned to his base and that he would be my immediate commander. I should not to attempt to obtain a reassignment. He wrote, Dover is a Military Air Transport Service and Air Defense Command base. You will be working with those aircrews.

He further advised, The base has an overseas flight mission and the air lift squadrons fly worldwide. He guaranteed a good