Sick call for cuckoo clocks - B Battery 2nd Battalion 56th ADA Veterans Website

I was in Overseas Package 5 which came to Germany, joined up with the 95th AAA battalion in 1957, set up the Nike batteries in Germersheim, Landau, and Pirmasens. We were terribly short-handed, and not until I was ready to be released from active duty did the batteries approach full strength. We were assigned multiple duties. While my MOS was in the launching control trailer. I was also assigned duties as an instructor, a medical monitor, and helped run the Special Services facilities. We used the abandoned pre-fab barracks to set up an EM club, a photo lab, and an activities center.

We had only one or two medics on the post, so a couple of men in each the IFC and launching areas were designated medical monitors. We were given first aid kits, which we kept in the vans, a little training, a thermometer, and a pad of sick call permission slips. Aside from writing out sick call permissions for men who needed to go to the VD clinic and did not want to face the chewings out they would get from the regular medic, our main job was driving people to sick call. Or because they wanted to play sick to go to a big PX to buy a cuckoo clock to send home to mama.

We pulled 24-hour shifts on the equipment, got a day of rest, and then a day of general duty. On the rest or general duty day, we were assigned the sick call runs. At first, sick call was in Pirmasens and dental call was in Karlsruhe. We generally made the sick call haul in a deuce-and-a-half, unless we had to take a dependent. Then we took one of those damned, top-heavy, under-powered Opel ambulances. which were a real pain on the drive to Pirmasens. The Germersheim drivers were often made to stop by B Battery in Landau on the way to Pirmasens to pick up people for sick call there.

The biggest pain on the sick call haul was that the medical monitors were in charge of all the medical records. We had to pull the records for each soldier or dependent, get them to the medical staff at the hospital or dental clinic, and then collect them when they were all updated before we could leave. Some of the doctors took their sweet time in filling them out, so we did not get back to base until evening. That really interfered with any PX or gasthaus stops we had planned on the way back. When medical services were consolidated at Heidelberg, the records were kept at the hospital.

The instance I recall at a stop at B Battery was when I met the medical monitor there and picked up the records and then went to the billets to get the men on sick call. The floor of the barracks between the bunks was covered with a yellowish-white powder. When we asked, "What the hell is that?" we were told it was DDT powder. Some guy had crabs so bad that the men put the powder on the floor to keep the critters from crawling from bed to bed. I don't know if that was an official medical measure or if the medical monitor thought it was a good idea. But it sure impressed the rest of the men on sick call. I had the ambulance that day and the men from A battery made the men from B Battery sit on one side by themselves. What was worse was that we had the ambulance that day to take a pregnant woman dependent for her check up. She was almost hysterical when she heard the story about the DDT powder and she told the German civilian doctor, who insisted that the medical officer make all the men on that ambulance be checked for crabs. We put up with a bunch of wise-cracking medic and comments about the crab patrol, some really pissed-off soldiers who went on sick call to go to the PX, and a woman who was not comforted when the occupants of the ambulance were pronounced crab-free. It was a very sullen drive back to Landau and Germersheim, with no cuckoo clocks to show for the effort.
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