Letter from Guimba (50)

     The fighting was fierce for Munõz and the operating rooms in the school were busy for the 92nd Evacuation Hospital, but now the hostilities have moved elsewhere.  The doctors and ward men can breathe easier for a time and just care for their patients, and Gene can write letters home.

The officers' ward set up in the Guimba school

10 Feb. '45
Beloved,
     Here I sit at some school marm's desk - a fancy hardwood job with drawers and everything (the desk I mean, not the school marm).  I'm O.D. (officer of the day).  I hope it will be quiet.  Our casualties have fallen off.  They cleared the town [Munõz, but Gene can't mention it in a letter or the censor's will cut it out] at last.  The radio said our patch of fighting was the fiercest so far.  Wouldn't we get the spot!  But thank goodness, they haven't bothered us yet.  Our working hours have been without disturbance by Jap planes, air alerts, artillery shelling or anything!  Certainly not like out other affairs.


Guimba carabao grazing



Guimba women washing clothes

Guimba man "dunking" carabao and cart

    This morning about 10 I took a look at the sky and mountains and loaded some color film and tore out.  The sun was bright, but with a bank of clouds rising.  I'd been watching for days for the conditions to be right to photograph some rice stacks with the mountains clear enough to show.  Well, in about 20 minutes I'd taken a whole roll.  One was of a carabao grazing near us (I leaned over the fence).  Then some F.'s [Filipinos] coming up a path.  Then some women washing clothes at a little stream a few hundred yards away.  Then a man "dunking" his carabao in the stream, still yoked to the cart and his little boy sitting in the cart, then two of the rice stacks.  Then one toward the hospital.  Then one of a lady and her possessions with some cute girls in a carabao cart.  I talked to her a while.  She is the wife of a physician who is with some guerrilla outfit.  Her home at ------- [censored] had been burned by shellfire.  She had things done up in straw bags.  But she was happy - the Americans are back!  "We can build another house!"  Her husband's father and brother are both doctors.  The father was in another cart.  He was a nice-looking elderly gentleman but spoke no English.  He spoke Spanish!  The daughters were about 7 and 8, very cute and bright-eyed.  They each wore small gold earrings.  Later - I was just over to Cohen's ward to see a patient.  He's a ward man now..  Back to the (this will be interrupted frequently!) photography.  I have hopes that it will be a very good roll - the sky was quite blue. Usually there is a good deal of haze in the sky.


Physician's wife in Guimba

     It's interesting to have the officers' ward.  I find out lots of things that are going on that I wouldn't otherwise.  Did you notice on the rim of the [artillery] shell ashtray the indentation?  That was where a shell fragment hit the shell.  I had to smooth it down with a file so it wouldn't dig into the table.  You've no idea the number of days we sat on that blank blank boat!  But golly I was tired of it.  Remember Harper?  He came around today and we found he was on the boat ahead of us.  It was the one we had trouble with at night!  It was always dropping back and we'd be just a short distance from them and it made their skipper jittery and mad.  The men at the bridges [of the two boats] would hurl insults at each other in great style.  It was funny!  Harper looks the same though much grayer.  He's with a malaria control unit.
     Yes, that's right about the Jap planes being practically non-existent here and I'm glad!  I was a darn sight more scared to have to be in a tent operating and not able to see the - - planes than I was the night the Nips visited us!  This afternoon we had a 10-piece orchestra (F.) playing for the patients.  One guitarist had a very nice voice and sang some Spanish and American songs.  The men especially liked one song that had "Pom Pom" in it [in WWII, pom poms were bombs and also slang for women's breasts].  I'm certain it didn't mean the same as it does among the N.G.'s [Pom Pom Valley is in New Guinea]!
     We had a wounded Jap in one of the wards.  A GI patient saw him, grabbed a stick and began to beat him!  He's apt to be court marshaled for such an act and he should be.  The poor devil [the prisoner] (rather a big one - he's a whopper!) hid out for 4 or 5 days waiting for an American Patrol.  He knew better than to try to surrender to the guerrillas.  When he did find one and came out with his hands up, they thought he was a decoy so dumped a bunch of mortar shells behind him to clean out any lurkers.  The Jap flopped but had a piece of fragment in his leg.  They got a lot of information out of him.
     I laughed at Mary X's remark re the pictures of coral, "What a lot of handsome table centerpiece material goes to waste in the Pacific!"  I'll never forget the odds and ends she picked up in the woods one day and made the cleverest item.
     All my love, Eugene