The Memory Project: Robert Stewart

Robert (Bob) Stewart (Army Medical Corps) of Victoria, BC was a medic with 3 Royal Canadian Regiment in Korea from 1953 to 1954. He remained in the forces until 1989 when he retired as a major. He was on the front lines, and recounts caring for seriously wounded soldiers.

Excerpt:

So I was down at battalion headquarters and the first thing that I knew that anything was going on was when the sky started lighting up like a, you know, and then you start hearing the noise and the shells. And so you know something’s going on. And so you start getting ready for casualties. And they started to arrive pretty quickly.

There was everything, I mean, there was everything. Abdominal wounds, there were guys that didn’t make it of course, with half their heads missing. I’m trying to remember the things that I specifically looked at. Amputations. And a lot of guys, like some of them, you could hardly see a wound at all. Maybe one shell, you know, a very tiny hole. And the guy would be dead, you know. So like it just kept getting busier and busier. I think there was about 23 casualties that we had there over the night.