Just in time for the holidays, here are 4 stories not for the weak of stomach. In chronological order, by location.
The Violent Mouse
The call came in saying a horrible accident had occurred at a radar site near the base. It was a secret base so no one knew where it was; took us 20 minutes to find someone with clearance to give us directions. On the way there the dispensary radioed that it appeared there was a dead man but they weren’t 100% sure because the caller had apparently had a cleft palate. It had been repaired but when excited it was difficult to understand him.
We finally got there and found a very dead man laying on the floor near a gun rack with a small hole in his chin and the back of his head missing. We didn’t have a doctor with us so we had to administer CPR; put the oxygen on him and heard it whistling out the hole in his head.
What had happened was that the man had been chasing a mouse which leaped to a shelf over the gun rack. The man climbed on a stool, the stool fell over, he hit the gun rack, a rifle discharged. The end.
There’s a lot of blood with a head wound. I’m glad we didn’t have to clean it up.
The Navy guys ain’t meant to fly.
A Navy jet with two Marine pilots came in to refuel. As they were taking off they couldn’t get altitude and hit trees on the end of the runway. The jet flipped end over end. The Marines ejected; the co-pilot at a 90 degree angle to the ground, the pilot directly into the ground. Co-pilot looked awful, blood pouring out of his mouth, compound fracture of his right arm, unconscious. Turned out he’d bit his tongue, there were no internal injuries.
The pilot was more like a puddle of jell-o. There were few bones in his body which weren’t broken. We had to slowly roll him onto a tarp so we could get him on a litter. There was no morgue in the dispensary so he sat in an ambulance until we could get him to a civilian hospital. Well, he didn’t actually sit but I’m sure you figured that out.
All bubbly
A prop plane was shot down and we couldn’t find the crew chief for a couple of days. Finally the corpse was located in a swamp about half a kilometer from the crash site. The ambulance parked as close as possible, we put on gloves and waders and went to the body. After 2 days in the swamp he was fairly bloated, multi colored, ripe and critters had been dining. The body floated in about a foot of water. We very carefully pulled a body bag on to him then floated the bag onto a litter. There were three of us, the biggest guy on the foot . We started lifting the body into the ambulance and we could hear it deflating and all the fluids sloshing about. The body bag had a flaw, it wouldn’t close properly and all the yummy stuff poured over the end man. He puked, we laughed. He stripped naked, we sprayed and dusted him with everything we had to avoid infection and smell. He rode in the back, naked as a jay bird with him fragrant friend.
A doctor shakes
A C-47, an old prop cargo plane, went down with a crew of six. Witnesses said it’d corkscrewed into the ground. We got to it close to ten minutes after the crash, a doctor rode with us. Everyone was dead, most torn into parts. There was one man who had been thrown straight into a bulkhead, his head was split from top to bottom. The doctor still had to check for vital signs. He put his fingers on the man’s throat and turned pale. He started shaking and saying: Oh fuck, oh fuck. He tried the pulse again and after a few seconds took his fingers away. He looked at me and said for a moment he thought he’d felt a pulse and knew there was nothing he could do. When he felt the second time, there was nothing.
…and people wonder why medics drink.
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