Medicine: Well, I’ll Be Damned

On a battlefield near Metz lay a wounded rifleman, clutching his neck and writhing in agony. His windpipe had been fractured by a mortar shell fragment; he was suffocating. Medical Corpsman Duane N. Kinman, 19, crawled to his aid through heavy machine-gun and mortar fire; 2nd Lieut. Edwin M. Eberling of Lincoln, Neb. joined him.

The medical corpsman, who in peacetime had been an automobile mechanic in College Place, Wash., went to work on the rifleman’s throat. He knew, at second hand, the delicate operation that had to be done; his Army instructors had lectured on it, months before—a tracheotomy (incision into the windpipe) to provide an air entrance through the neck. (Common peacetime use: to save children strangling from diphtheria.) Even under the best conditions, the operation is risky; surgical books say that a good light is essential, that the patient’s neck must be held very steady to avoid cutting the nearby jugular veins. While Lieut. Eberling held the struggling rifleman down, Private Kinman had to do as best he could by the murky light of the battlefield.

Said Private Kinman to the patient, as he opened his jackknife: “I don’t like to do this, but it is the only way you are going to live.” He made a vertical incision in the exact middle of the wounded man’s neck stopped the blood as well as he could,’ made an up & down cut in the windpipe, which he wedged open with the top of a fountain pen. “Now,” he said, “keep that pen in your windpipe and you’ll be O.K. You can’t breathe through your nose or mouth, but if you keep your windpipe open with the pen, you can breathe through the cut I made.”

In a few minutes the rifleman felt better. He stood up, fingering the tip of the fountain pen. A passing tank carried him to the battalion aid station. There the surgeon stared at the queer arrangement in his neck and sent him on. Next stop was the clearing station, where Captain David Dunn of Westminster, Md. removed the pen top, put in a regular tracheotomy tube (which the air passes through, not around, as in the case of the makeshift wedge).

Surgeons who later heard the rifleman’s story almost invariably remarked, “Well, I’ll be damned.” One of them wrote a commendation for Private Kinman’s presence of mind, resourcefulness and skill.

Last week, soon after Private Kinman was promoted to technician fourth grade. Western Reserve University offered to see him through medical school. T/4 Kinman, who has had only three years of high school, was so stunned at the news that he had to sit down.