Hey, Popov! Here ya go.

The doc that fixed my foot was a real character. This was maybe 12 years ago.

I told you about pissing off his assistant in an earlier post.

Anyway, the doc that came in I got along with. He was a former GI doc and had pulled a tour at Benning which, of course, means that he learned a lot about busted feet thanks to the proximity of the jump school there. I got along good with him.

"Too bad this wasn't still the army," he said to me.
'How's that?" I questioned.

"Hell, I'd just put you in a cast for 6 weeks and then remove it and get you to buy a new pair of jump boots and hobble around in them. When you'd have the boots broken it, you'd be good to go," he said.

"We can do that," I said. "I'll just get an old Corpsman I know to pull the cast off in six weeks."

"Yeah, but when your company sends you to their doctor near your home, he's going to put you in a camwalker, but I suppose we can try it." he said.

So he put me in a cast and as he was he told me about how he became an MD.

The doctor in question that fixed my busted foor had dropped out of high school and spent about a year fixing and reselling cars in his backyard. He was facing the draft and decided to get it out of the way so he went to his draft board and signed a voluntary indiction slip or something along these lines.

Vietnam was running hot then and because he tested well and there was a shortage, he got sent to Fort Sam, trained as a medic and shipped out to Vietnam.

From what I gathered he did something to save some poor bastard and when the guy got to the rear some clown wihth a stick up his ass wanted him court-martialed, but someone else intervened and pointed out that even though it wasn't by the book it saved the poor guy. A couple of months later he was assigned there and was picked up by the same surgeon that had put the kibosh on his court martial. He worked for the doctor as a surgical assistant.

Anyway, the MD recommended him for some such program or another and he agreed to re-up for it and I guess somewhere along the line he wheeled and dealed with the army exchanging time in service in return for education.

He retired as an orthopedic surgeon!

The funny part about it is that somehow nobody ever checked to see if he had finished high school and he seemed to take great pride in telling me that after he became a doctor he started getting invitations to his high school reunion but keeps sending them back because he never graduated.

You have to love a guy like that.




my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/