World War II veteran 88-year-old George Chrisman, describes treating a tank driver who stepped on a land mine during the Battle of Okinawa, in April 1945, and how he ran into him again 40 years later. The Battle of Okinawa lasted 82 days, claimed the lives of 7000 American soldiers and left 40,000 wounded.
Burst transcript:
Well one tank driver gotten off his tank and he'd gone to shore, kinda looking around to see where he was gonna go and he stepped on a land mine, it blew his heel, whole heel just opened up in his shoe, that heel part just opened up. He come back, and he'd gotten back on the tank some way, he come back and wanted to see what he could do, so he got off and we looked at it and it just peeled off like the sole under your shoe would just peel off, and I opened it up and took the tongue depressors and scraped it out whatever in there, blood and stuff, and then I put a butterfly bandage, we had to make our own, because they didn't have them, we made them out of tape, put that all around it, had to cut his shoe off to start with, then taped his foot up with an ace bandage, and I said why don't you just lay down here and we'll get somebody take you back to the ship, "I'm from a farm up in Oregon, he says, I don't need all that kind of stuff, just get me back on my tank" so he climbed back on his tank and away he went. Wow. And I had his name and number and I gave that to his officer and so they checked it later. And about oh must have been 40 years later I was up in Oregon, Yachats, Oregon, they have a big camp ground like, my wife's uncle was there and we went walking to get the mail, and here comes some guy down the road, limping, kinda limping, walking, sways, older than I was, he was probably in his 80's by then, come limping around, and he looks at me and he's about a hundred yard away and he still sees me and I hear this guy cussing at me "You SOB, you SOB...you're the one the SOB" and my uncle says "What's this? Are we gonna get involved in something?" And I said I dunno who it is, and I got closer and he said "You're the SOB that fixed my foot!"
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