Lots of Git

A dozen photographers were huddled together at the airport when the heavy C-47 hospital plane landed. After a short wait, the wide door of the plane opened and the word was passed along quietly: Private Smith did not want pictures made --"yet."

Without protest, hard-bitten photographers put down their cameras, as attendants gently lifted down a stretcher and loaded it into a waiting ambulance. On it, swathed to his neck in heavy G.I. blankets, lay Pfc. Robert L. Smith, a 20-year-old soldier from Middleburg, Pa., who had suffered as grievously as a man could and still live. He was the first quadruple amputee of the Korean war.* Both hands were amputated, one leg was amputated at the knee, the other slightly below it.

Eleven Days. Brown-haired, likeable Bob Smith had been in the Army only since last April. He had joined because he was fed up with his hand-to-mouth life in Middleburg: his father had died when he was nine, his mother was on relief, and Bob Smith--the youngest of five kids--had had to quit school when he was in the tenth grade to take a job as spinner in a Middleburg silk mill.

In the heavy fighting around the Chang-Jin reservoir in northeast Korea, Bob had been slightly wounded by gunfire and had lain in a gutter for three days,' covered only by a raincoat. "There was a medic there,'' he said, "but every time I started to call him, I heard someone else call, and I figured they were worse off than me." When Chinese overran the area, Smith played dead, even when some of them stripped him of parts of his clothing. Finally he made his way to a nearby house, where he found other wounded G.I.s. It was eleven days before the 1st Marine Division rescued them. By then, his hands and legs were so badly frozen that surgeons at an evacuation hospital had to amputate to prevent gangrene.

At the Army's Walter Reed Hospital, Pfc. Smith found plenty of care and solicitude, and a visitor. His mother had been flown to Washington in a plane chartered by the American Legion. She had fainted when she was first told of her son's injuries, but when she met him in the hospital room, there were no tears. She leaned over and kissed him while he feebly tried to put his right arm about her. The room was filled with legionnaires, and one of them took the occasion to explain that Bob would receive full disability for the rest of his life: $360 a month.

Peace & Quiet. When they were left alone, Mrs. Smith said that her son had kept telling her "not to worry" and that "I am not the only one to get hurt."

Later, she visited her son again and confided that he had "had a crying spell." She added: "But he's got lots of git and will come out on top. You'll see." She said a stranger had telephoned and promised Bob a new car when he is discharged. An anonymous donor had already had a television set installed in his room. "People are very considerate," she said. "But all we want now is some rest and quiet. Bob's not licked."

*There were two in World War II, both now doing well: Master Sgt. Frederic Hensel is an Alabama farmer, and Pfc. Jimmy Wilson a law student at the University of Colorado.

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