November 11, 2009 10:12 AM
I was in the Army from 1947 to 1953, serving in Korea from 1950 to 1951 at the 8055 MASH Hospital. they require and are either treated at our facility or evacuated to another hospital in country, to a hospital ship offshore or to Japan, depending on their need and medical skills available.
The Korean War is often dismissed as being a mere skirmish, a police action, but I can assure you that for those who died or were maimed in that action it was not a small war. It couldn’t have been bigger. Neither will the loved ones of those men ever recover from their loss. And yet when I returned from Korea in 1951, during a critical point of the war, many Americans seemed to be blissfully unaware that their countrymen were over there fighting and dying on their behalf.
I suppose I should be saying that we should avoid war at all costs, but that is not always possible, nor desirable. In the case of Korea, we not only held back the spread of communism but the development of South Korea has brought that country from abject poverty to one of the most highly developed countries in Asia. In this case, the war has resulted in a positive ending. I am proud to have had a small part in this.
At the onset of the war, I was stationed in Japan and soon after I was assigned to the 8055 MASH Hospital in Korea as company clerk. We moved from the port of Pusan to a point far into North Korea before the Chinese forces pushed us back below Seoul. After the U.N. forces counterattacked, we moved up north of Seoul to Uijongbu, a few miles from the front, where we stayed until I rotated back to the states. My unit stayed there until the end of hostilities in July 1953.
A MASH Hospital operates a few miles from the front in order to render quick emergency surgical care to our wounded, as well as to provide care to civilians and enemy prisoners of war. The wounded arrive at the MASH by ambulance, truck, jeep or by helicopter. Upon arrival they go through triage to determine the degree of care
