Clarence "Gus" Este

The Americans had been almost forced right off of the peninsula.  So, just outside of Pusan we became engaged with Chinese and North Korean forces, almost, just, you know, kilometres away from the city of Pusan.  We drove north, for a month or two before we finally got up around Seoul, the Seoul area.  So that’s where we encountered experience as a medic.  I saw – handled several casualties.  Wasn’t funny.  It was no longer exciting.  But, it had to be done, and we did our jobs.

First casualty I ever saw, was a Canadian soldier getting into a half-track, which is a tracked vehicle.  And he had a Sten gun, which is a short semi-automatic weapon.  And he put his weapon in first, and then climbed in after it, and accidentally shot himself.  He fell back to the ground, and they called for medics, and I rushed up there, and there was one of our doctors standing nearby, a captain, and he said, “What are you going to do now, Este?” and I rolled the guy over, to where I thought the exit wound should have been and it wasn’t there.

So, after panicking a little bit, and I dug into my first aid kit and thought about it a bit, and I rolled him over the other side and there was a gaping big hole on the opposite side midriff.  So, all I could do was put a shell dressing on it, and marked his forehead that he hadn’t had any morphine, and that we - in fact, we evacuated him by helicopter and he died on arrival at the nearest military hospital.

A pioneer, I think he was an RCR pioneer from The Royal Canadian Regiment.  And, he had stepped on a mine, and we brought him into a casualty clearing post from the frontlines to – you know, a few miles behind the lines where we had what is called a casualty clearing post.  And while I was checking him, and – they wore beards, pioneers wore beards – so I was checking his face and removing some hair to encounter shrapnel that was coming out, that I was taking out of his face.  And he hollered at me.  He was madder than can be and yet still all the while his, one of his legs were hanging off the stretcher and his foot had been blown apart from his leg and it was just being held by the tendon that’s there.  He didn’t seem to worry about that, just about his beard, losing his beard.

Each infantry unit had a medic posted directly with them, but they had a whole series of stretcher bearers.  They would bring casualties back to what we called the RAP, Regimental Advanced Post,* and they would be collected there in jeep ambulances or helicopters depending - we had small choppers in those days - depending how swiftly they need to be medevac’d.  I traveled most of the time with a Service Corps drover who drove a jeep ambulance and we just moved people from the front to about seven or eight miles behind the line, to what we called a casualty clearing post.  And there, there were doctors that looked after them.

The real threat that we faced as medics was – the closer you got to the front the better off you were, but some of the medics that did evacuation from the casualty clearing post, that I mentioned before, back to MASHes** and other larger units. There was no Geneva Convention in Korea, so those ambulances marked with the big white circles, red cross, were often the target of infiltrators.  You couldn’t tell who the enemy was in Korea.  So, I mean, there were civilian refugees always moving south as we were moving north, and half of them were probably North Korean or Chinese troops that we couldn’t detect.

*Regimental Aid Post

**Mobile Army Surgical Hospital