And every weekend on cspan 3. Army heritage days is an annual event held in may at the u. S. Army heritage and Education Center in carlyle, pennsylvania. Hundreds of hobbyists are selected to conduct demonstrations and talk to the public about military subjects ranging from the American Revolution to the war on terror. Next, on american artifacts, we visit a medical tents set up as a battalion aid station, a mobile emergency room that would have been located close to the front lines. Hi, folks, im dr. Moody and this is battalion aid station. Wee part of the second battalion of the 506 101st airborne. Im a physician. Eye a doctor that plays a doctor. So im an internal medicine physician in harrisburg, pennsylvania. And this is this is my hobby. This is my i love it. I love the guys out here. I love speaking to the public. I love the educational factor that were trying to keep all of this alive. And the kids really, they enjoy it too. I try to make it enjoyable and let them know how important this is to understand what the history was. What this is, this is basically a mobile emergency room. Youve heard of m. A. S. H. , mobile arm surgery hospital and this is a mobile emergency room and like any emergency room, what we do is we assess, we treat, we stabilize and then we get them out, get out of my e. R. Were basically located as close to the front lines as possible. Weve got to be. Because weve got troopers coming in here that are in pretty bad shape. The battalion aid station operates just behind the lines. Here the train corpman takes over many jobs that the physician would otherwise have to perform. This frees the doctors time for more attention to the serious cases. Now the medics, and theyre the real heroes of war, theyre out there triaging with gunshots and fire and mortar rounds all over the place. Theyre triage in the field. They come to one guy that has a cut on his shoulder, they said, hey, putz on a bandage and get back to the rear. The second guy has both legs gone and this guy is going to die and there is nothing in gods green earth that is going to save this guy. So theyre going to get some lipstick that they got from their girlfriend in london and write f for fatal and give him as much morphine as they could spare and let the guy die in peace and go find somebody they could save. The fire and smoke of it. This is the first job of the medic. A man is hit and an aid man gets to his side. Stopping the first spurt of blood is all important. Months of training have gone into dressing a head wound. Giving a shot of morphine to dull the pain. So they got another guy that they come up to and hes got a bad wound, is bleeding and hes got really clammy skin, not answering questions very well, this guy is going into shock and he doesnt have much long to go if we dont get medical attention. So he brings him in here. And then the Battalion Surgeon, i have to triage the triage. And ive got to discern and decide which one is the most critical and also which one i can save. Now, remember, these guys are coming in in shock. Blood pressure is low. We dont get the Blood Pressure up theyre going to die. Or they go into renal failure and that is a death sentence because there is no dialysis in the second world war. So what the main reason that i think we saved so many lives was because of the plasma. Eto blood bank, european theater of operation and that held the plasma. The plasma is the fluid component of blood with red and white blood cells spun off. That is a volume expander. It increases intervascular volume. We get the iv starts and hopefully get Blood Pressure up and stabilize them to call transportation and get them out. The second part of the war, it or not, they came up with freeze dried plasma which looks like corn starch and they mix it with distilled water and then that would reconstitute it and there is your value expander and that is what we would give. Now somebody asked me the other day do i do surgery . No, i dont do surgery because number one, i dont have general anesthesia equipment, and number two, i cant take time to that do. I spent an hour in there cutting off somebodys leg and ive goat five or six more troopers that are out here. The main thing that i have in here, the main quality of this battalion aid station that is worth their weight in gold is a seasoned medic. Because a seasoned medic is just they could start the ivs while im working out here and advise the doctor because, remember, some of these docs, how much combat experience did they have . Unless they did their residency in inner city detroit, not much. So the seasoned medics were great. Just like today in the hospital with the residents and the interns and how much they rely on the seasoned nurses to help them out. So we got the guys here. We got them assessed. We stabilize them and then we call them on my cell phone over here. This is an e8 phone, all right. What it is, it is got two dcell batteries attached in here. It is got a generator thing that i can twist on here and this generates a charge and this could go to the phone on the opposite end. And that will wring it and then ill toggle to talk and ill untoggle to listen. And then ill call for transportation. Now say ive got somebody with a really bad chest wound that needs surgery like two hours ago. Ill call them up and ill say, we need somebody here now. We need to get them into surgery. You better get a chest cutter because he aint got much longer. So we could get transportation here to get them in. From here they would go to what is called a collecting station. And at the collecting station, what they would do, they would reassess the patient, and decide, well this guy needs to go to the Field Hospital, this guy, he has too much vascular issues, lets get him back to england. This guy, we could get him back to the rear and get him to recover back there. Medical experts sought the patients and determined their disposition. Urgent cases needing certain specialized type of surgery are turned over to the Field Hospital which is set up close by. The great majority of operations here are for perforating abdominal wounds and sucking wounds of the chest like this one. Now, one thing about the battalion aid station, every battalion aid station is different. We all have the same purpose, we all have the same concept. But everything is hell, you could have a piece of canvas over a ditch and call that battalion aid. But the main thing is to be as close to the front lines as possible and to be able to get these guys in and get them treated. About 80 of people that left this place survived. Where it was 50 in world war i. And the main reason is because of the volume expanders and the plasma and because of the penicillin. Do i have time to go over all of the antibiotics, we have this pena sillin and. But pina sillin was discovered in england. He is like what the heck is this. They shelved it and rediscovered it back in the i think it was 38. But england was concerned back in 1940 about one thing and that was not getting taken over by the germans so they brought the penicillin over to the United States and found the right mole to produce the best yield and then had a log rhythm curve of developing penicillin. And i would use that prophylactically with a patient with a dirty wound, i would wash it out and gift him a slug of penicillin and put a loose dressing on him and call for transportation. Get out of my e. R. Also just to let you know, no doctor in their right mind wants to be a Battalion Surgeon. I dont want to be here. I was to be in an english hospital with good looking nurses and a nice bed. I dont want to be 200 yards from the front line and bullets overhead and idiots shooting at me from the rear. But this is my job, all right. And if i didnt do my job, what would happen . People would die, all right. For the most part, the Battalion Surgeons didnt jump into combat. They would establish a front and brought in by ship. However, the more i read, the more doctors did jump. There was one doc with the third battalion of the 506, name dr. Stanley morgan, captain morgan, all right. He actually did jump into normandy on june 5th. He immediately sprained his ankle and immediately captured by the germans. Where do you think they put him . A prisoner war camp . Hell no. They put him to work. He worked right alongside the germans. Couldnt understand a dam word they said, but it was the same technique. Where did we learn most of our technique from . It was from the germans. Fis part of the war first part of the war we had a hard time getting surgical instruments, because where were they made . Germany. What is a Battalion Surgeon. I have four years of medical school. Ive got one year of general medical internship, then im a licensed physician. There goes my deferment. Because i was deferred from the draft because they didnt want a medical student. They wanted a doctor. So then i was eligible for the draft. They would me or else i would enlist, all right. I enlisted in the airborne, i jumped they pushed me out of the airplane five times screaming all of the way and went on to be part of the 326 Hospital Corp, all right. And this was the Hospital Corp that was attached to the 101st,al right. But any way, a lot of the docs were green when they come in here. They had seasoned docs, sure. But some were green and that is why it is so important to have a seasoned medic that would help us out immensely. Welcome through and look around if you would. The medical cabinets that you see, i try to have the things that im going to use. Now Blood Pressure cup. Youre saying, well this is a Blood Pressure cup from world war ii. It works. It works with a column of mercury and it is accurate. I mean, basically you get the laws of gravity and you have the density of mercury and those things never change but how am i going to here Blood Pressure in the heat of battle. Not much. So normally i would assess them clinically. If he was sitting up and say hey, doc, how about more morphine, i could feel a pulse, his Blood Pressure is fine. But if i got a guy that looks cold and clammy and i cant feel any pulse and every time he sits up he passes out, that is a guy going into shock, all right. Also remember, when we dont when were not doing battle here, this is your dog in the box. This is your dog in the box. Some guy gets into a fight and ill him up or somebody comes back with the dribbles, i give him a slog of penicillin. So everything is in boxes and crates. Because, remember, i have to pack this stuff up. You know. There are times that we may have to bug out and retreat to the rear if ive got people that are coming in that are the bad ones, all right. Germans for the most part did honor our group, all right. For the most part. The ss is a different story, okay. And we honored their medical personnel for the most part. There was one story, i had a patient one time that was in the ardens and it was foggy and you couldnt see your hand in front of your face and ben said that he saw there were two germans and carrying something. So they were getting ready to open fire. And the germans said next season, dont shoot and there were two german medics that had found one of our troopers that waz in bad shape and they brought the trooper in and they fixed the guy, all right, and saved his life, all right. Got the germans and they provided tried to scrounge out as much food as they could spare because everybody was starving back then, including the germans. Skrouded up some american cigarettes and then smuggled the germans back to their own lines. So you hear stories like that. You hear good stories like that. There were atrocities on both sides. But in it tent, as far as im concerned, as the Battalion Surgeon, there is no nationality in this tents. I got got six guys in front of me. Four are americans and two are germans, im going to treat the one that needs the most critical first. Im sure there are other Battalion Surgeons with different type of thoughts but im a doctor first. All right. What else we got back here . You want to come back into the rear of it. Battalion a. , it would be nice to have something we could get the trooper out of the element. You would never see a stretcher here by itself, all right. Would you also see the stretchers in the field obviously. And we would have saw horses and boxes and crates. Something to get the trooper off the ground so the surgeon could assess and treat. And, again, i dont do major surgery here. I dont have time. I dont have general anesthesia. But somebody comes up with a laceration that needs to be looked at, ill clean it up a little bit and irrigate it out with some water and give them a slug of penicillin and put a loose dressing on but were not going to close it, okay. Okay, so people the other day asked me, where are my gloves. Here they are right here. Because we didnt have disposable gloves back then. Yeah, they had gloves for surgery. But after surgery they had to wash the gloves. Then they had to put them on a blower to make sure they were competent and then put them in a steam otto clave. I dont have room or time for that. I dont have electricity. So i wash my hands the best i can. Put alcohol on it and then go for it. But again, im not my hands arent in somebodys somebodys guts. I hope not. Say somebody has a major wound, a hunk of shrapnel in their belly, im not going to pull that out. That can work as a tampnod to prevent further bleeding. I pull that out, i have something skirting in the face and im in a world of hurt. Say i have a bayonet wound to the chest, what im going to do, im going to put compression dressings on, stabilize them and get them out. I guess if the guy had a tension knew mow thorax, i could relieve that. But the skills i have here for diagnostics is between my ears. Theres no radiology, ultrasound, nothing like that. Sterilization, we talked about my hands. What about the instruments . Over there, thats the steam not steam sterilizer, but that boils water and then i sterilize my instruments. Okay. The suture i used, if i were to close something, which most of the time i didnt, would be surgical cotton, and then if for some reason i could close up any fascia or muscle, i would use this. What these are i dont know if you can see it there. Lets see. There it goes. It says plain. Plain o. This is cat gut suture attached to a curved cutting needle. This is a little glass vial that has a little crimp in it. And you would break this out on the sterile field. This is still sterile after all these years. I dont think that the suture would be any good, but its just amazing. They all game in little packages like this that had the little vials in it. Nowadays, you know, it comes in the little tinfoil packs. You know how they open the tinfoils, they put those in the field. So this is a well put quotes around this portable operating room table. When i get this out, the troopers run because this is a monster to put together. Battalion aid usually you see most of these in the surgical area but its nice to have this here because like i say, these stretchers were not here, they were in the field. So i have an off period, somebody comes in, needs work, i can put them on this thing to work on it. Iv fluids. We talked about iv. The bottles they came in, that we would reconstitute the plasma after we used the bottles, what would we do with them . Would we throw them away . No, we wouldnt throw them away. Wed reuse them. Wash them, the bottles, the hoses. Nothing was thrown away around here except second lieutenants. No, just kidding. Didnt say that. Sometimes you would see a medic coming from the field and half his tunic is gone. What happens when he runs out of dressings . Necessity is the mother of invention, right, so he tears off his uniforms and starts using that. This would be my quarters because im here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I dont have a beeper so they cant get me on the golf course. So this would be my bunk. And again we try to make everything work here, all right. Because we didnt have the luxury of going to rite aid and getting resupplied. When am i going to get more bandages . I have no idea. We had some german bandages around here someplace. I dont know where i put them. Anyway, a german prisoner of war, first thing i ask, does he have any bandages. The germans, the first thing they ask of us, do you have any american cigarettes. But anyway, this is battalion aid. And they did a remarkable job. We all love world war ii, were all history enthusiasts, we love the war. It helps to keep it alive. It helps to educate the youngers. I mean, you get a kid today and you ask the kid about pearl harbor and their kid is going to say, wasnt she a singer . So i mean, its important. And its also to pay tribute. Pay tribute to the men and women, you know, that have died for our country and the men and women that are still serving our country. I always tell the kids, see a veteran, you go up and shake his hand. If it werent for those guys wed be eating sauerkraut and fish heads. Its important to keep it alive. This is why i do it. I still dont understand how these guys they were making life and death decisions. I mean, all doctors do but they were making life and death decisions on an hourly basis. And some of these guys, some of these Battalion Surgeons were the equivalent of a third year medical resident. To decide which one of these guys were going to live and which one would die, i also had a Battalion Surgeon and he is a patient hes gone now, but he said that later on in life he used to have nightmares of people he killed. Im like, what do you mean killed, bill . You saved all these lives . He said, but if i had worked faster, worked faster, maybe i could have gotten to some of these other people. But they and i ask him, i said, how did you do it . He goes, it was easy. I had to. Because if i didnt do my job, people would die. So thats one of the Amazing Things about these guys. Weeknights this month, were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight the National History center which hosts events on capitol hill for members and staff to learn the history behind the contemporary issues. We begin on the role of middle east oil on american policy since the end of world war ii, American History tv, this weekend, every weekend, on cspan 3. Good morning. I name is al kose, im one of the volunteers here. Wer