By Thomas W. Butler

Crew members at Fleet Radio Unit Pacific FRU­PAC-Iwo Jima looked for medical attention only as a last resort during the spring of 1945. For serious mat­ters like removing an arm or a leg, there were Navy and Marine Corps surgeons who would do the job at the drop of a hat. Lord knows, they had a lot of practice. Amputations were a frequent result of the combat wounds received by USMC/USN personnel during the battle for Iwo.

For that reason, all of us at FRUPAC gave the USN Field Hospital on the other side of the island a wide berth. The “cutters” there had done so much surgery during February and March, we were sure they would be inclined to whip out an appendix at the first vague complaint of a pain in the stomach.

NCVA member Marty Leonard still tells the story of being at the USN Field Hospital and hearing the Chief Surgeon, with swelling pride, tell some visitors he had performed every imaginable type of surgery right there on Iwo, excepting that of a Caesarean birth! Marty got out of there as soon as he could. To us Sick Bay was an inordinately DANGEROUS place. No one went there unless they were really sick.

Even a visit to the dentist had its hazards. I was/am somewhat obsessive about seeing a dentist every six months to get my teeth cleaned and pressed. In May 1945 it was six months since my last visit…so, despite the primitive conditions, I went to the nearby Army Field Hospital…a collection of tents…and got in line for the dentist.

As usual in pre-fluoride days, inspection revealed a cavity in one tooth. It was a small cavity, so I declined Novocain and we proceeded.

First thing, I noticed the dentist seemed to be ex­tremely nervous. His knee kept bouncing up and down and then I noticed that the loud, pulsing shirr of the drill seemed to be directly associated with his bouncing knee. I glanced down and was horrified to see the drill was powered, not by an electric motor, but rather by the dentist’s right leg activating a treadle mechanism not unlike that on my mother’s Singer sewing machine.

I was speechless. Before I could protest, he had started to drill on my tooth with the medieval instru­ment! Fortunately, the cavity was quite small and he was done in a couple of minutes. He jammed in some amalgam scraped and cleaned my teeth and off I went. The whole thing didn’t take much more than ten minutes.

To be fair I must say the filling lasted until 1976. Thirty-one years. Not bad.