Medic: How I Fought World War II with Morphine, Sulfa, and Iodine Swabs

Despite occasionally awkward writing, this account of Franklin's experiences during WWII brings combat to life. With woefully little training, Franklin was assigned as a medic to the 45th Infantry in June 1943 and spent the next two years assisting wounded soldiers in various military campaigns from Sicily to southern France, learning on the job how to treat wounds. His descriptions of horrific casualties and deaths of both Americans and Germans are vivid, and so are the more human moments, such as when, with bullets flying around him in Italy, he treated a wounded German and found himself trading family pictures with the enemy. Franklin set up a farmhouse aid station in France and provides a harrowing narrative of a severely wounded young French couple and their mutilated baby. At this station, too, he watched a friend, "brought in with his brains hanging out," die just months before the war ended. He also tells of confronting racism and anti-Semitism expressed by some U.S. soldiers. The author, now 88, writes that not a night goes by without his thinking of those who died: "The tragedy of war for those who have fought it... is that it never ends." 32 b&w photos, map.(May)