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Description
Mr. Este describes his work as a medic and the shock of seeing casualties for the first time.
Gus Este
Mr. Gus Este was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1931. He is the oldest child with two brothers and two sisters. His father worked as a porter on Canadian Pacific Railways. After attending school and achieving grade 11, Mr. Este decided to find employment onboard ships as a skipper. In 1950, Mr. Este made the decision to join the Canadian Army Special Force obtaining medical assistant trades with training in Camp Borden. He then went to Seattle, Washington and received advanced training in the medical field and gave service during the Korean War effort as a medical assistant. He was discharged from the service and worked at Canada Post for three years. Mr. Este later decided to re-join the service in postal corp and held rank of corporal participating in tours to Egypt and Germany. In 1987, he retired with recognition of 33 years of military service.
Transcription
I was a medic so I encountered some of my first wounded folks and it was difficult because as a young fellow you really don’t expect what you eventually see. And one of our experiences early on was we came across a group of American soldiers who had, who had camped and they had only posted the minimum sentries and they were about 40 of them all killed in their sleeping bags. So as a Canadian soldier we discarded our sleeping bags and used blankets from then on. I realized that war wasn’t pretty by that stage.And, as a medic you know, like, it was a shock to see a casualty. My first one was an accident. A soldier tried to get into a half track vehicle with his weapon pointing towards him and it discharged, hitting him in the chest and I looked, it hit him on the right side. So I rolled him over so I could see his left, his right back. There was nothing there. In the meantime a doctor was standing there and said “Este, turn him over to the other side.” I turned him over to the other side, the exit would was way down low on his left side and that really shocked me.