Army & Navy: Afternoon in Balboa Park

Pale, intent men lay on white cots in the San Diego Naval Hospital last week listening with radio headsets to the news from the Pacific. They were casualties of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Palau, and they understood the cost of victory. They were armless, legless, diseased, blind. They knew that more would join them.

The hospital itself was a strange asylum. In days of peace it had been San Diego’s lush Balboa Park, scene of the 1935 California Exposition, resplendent with gardens, art galleries, museums. Of art treasures and exhibits nothing now remained except two stuffed elephants in the Natuarl History Museum..

San Diego’s sickbay population, around 1,000 in peacetime, had swelled to more than 9,000, with a turnover of 5,000 a month. In Balboa Park, cots ‘were jammed so close together that men felt their neighbors’ pains.

In Stitches. But there were few complaints. One day was typical of any day at San Diego. In the orthopedic ward men with arms in casts or limbs elevated in the air by counterweights tried doggedly to write, wove lace doilies, made sketches of battle scenes they remembered. Some with wounded arms and hands played poker while Navy hospital corpsmen stood by to handle the cards.

In another ward they watched a movie. Leg patients clapped their hands; arm patients whistled. A bawdy revue, written, produced and staged by patients and staff members had been playing in the park’s Old Globe Theater. Its title: Keep ’em in Stitches. Raucous audiences happily applauded such parodies as Corpsman, Keep Those Bedpans Quiet.

On a balcony promenade boys lay on their sides reading or dozing, holding the stumps of legs and arms out to the warm California sunshine. A corpsman went past wheeling a garbage can full of plaster casts which had been removed that day.

A group of Navy A.W.O.L.s, now sentenced to the brig, marched up the walk towards the mess hall with three armed marines shepherding them, while the patients hooted: “Who cut your hair short, dearie?” The silent prisoners kept their eyes straight ahead.

Letter from Home. In the Grotto, where the Nudist Colony had sported during the Exposition, men sat around working with plexiglass and leather, boisterously joking. A Catholic chapel has been built in the basement of the old anthropological museum. There a boy in Navy uniform knelt at a golden altar, his new artificial leg stuck out behind him at an awkward angle. In a smoke-filled billiard room in the old California Tower Building a marine with a black patch over one eye cocked his head back so he could use his good left eye for sighting.

Behind the barred windows of the psychoneurotic wards, a boy sat in bed, carefully and interminably folding and unfolding a letter from home.