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Doc Davis
Lieutenant David Davis, our battalion surgeon, was a round little man with soulful
brown eyes. When he took off his helmet, the top of his head shone like a mirror framed
with dark brown hair. He was usually cheerful, amazingly so, considering his situation.
In the first place, although he was an M. D., he felt out of place as a surgeon; in
civilian life he was a pathologist. He was probably a good one, but he had little chance to
use his specialty while with us.
He did have some background in the treatment of wounds: he told of his
internship at a hospital in one of the rougher sections of Los Angeles. Cuts with a
straight-edge razor, the weapon of choice for barroom brawlers in his area, were his
favorite, he said, because they were usually clean and not deep. Unless they had opened a
major blood vessel like the carotid artery or the jugular vein, they could be stitched
neatly, leaving nice thin scars. In this respect, they were unlike wounds from shell
fragments, which tended to be random, jagged, and often deep.
However, he studied the latest theories on the treatment of battle wounds and
waited for an opportunity to use them. Meanwhile he was the family physician to our
battalion. On desert maneuvers he washed out a plug of wax that was making Major
Costain deaf in one ear. In England he treated the sty in my left eye. He dispensed nose
drops for head colds and gallons of bismuth and paregoric, the current specific for
diarrhea, and took care of occasional cases of VD. But with a practice limited to some
five hundred healthy young men, he really had little to do. On maneuvers he would
usually have finished his work by nine in the morning and found himself with the rest of
the day to kill.
The aid station, his place of business, was always set up near the battalion CP, a
location handy to the firing batteries as well as Headquarters Battery. Doc got in the habit
of wandering over to the S-2
section to see what was going on. Sometimes he would
spend most of the day there, chatting with me and anyone else who came by. I was happy
to have him, because he was cheerful and witty, and because he was sensitive enough to
see when we were busy, and to stay out of the way. He speedily learned not to enter the
fire direction center, where they had to be ready for immediate action in an already
crowded space.
His life must have been one of loneliness as well as boredom. Although he
associated with the other officers of the battalion and ate at the officers' mess, he was a
lone M.D. surrounded by artillerymen whose conversation consisted mainly of shop talk
carried on in a technical jargon with its own "in" jokes and dramatic pauses, meaningless
and bewildering to the uninitiated. I'm sure he often longed to work in a hospital in the
company of other doctors, whose conversation would also consist mainly of shop talk,
but carried on in his technical jargon with "in" jokes and dramatic pauses that meant
something to him.
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