DeVore Basil Gordon

Enlisted US Navy Reserve, 9 July 1943; assigned to US Naval Hospital, San Diego, for training as a corpsman. Under basic instruction from 28 August through 8 October 1943; additional training in specialized nursing course. Assigned duty at San Diego as Hospital Apprentice Second Class on 4 December 1943.

I didn’t like the Navy because I wasn’t in combat and they weren’t putting me aboard a ship, so [/] four of us got together and we demanded, we demanded the Captain of the base to send us to the FMF as it was called, the Fleet Marine Force. And finally he says, “You want it that bad? That’s what you’ve got.” He sent us to Camp Pendleton and we did our boot camp all over again, except the Marines are a lot tougher in boot camp than the Navy. The only thing I really flunked was on the shooting range. I didn’t tell ‘em I couldn’t even see the target, no more hit it, but I was still accepted.

Transferred to Fleet Marine Force Training Camp, Camp Elliott, on 25 April 1944. Completed Field Medical School on 9 June 1944 with rating Pharmacist’s Mate Third Class. Deployed to Hawaii with 62nd Replacement Draft; assigned to Fourth Medical Battalion at Camp Maui on 19 July 1944.

Joined First Battalion, 24th Marines at Camp Maui on 6 September 1944.

Outfit: Medical section, First Battalion, 24th Marines (attached to Able Company)
Rank: Pharmacist’s Mate Third Class
MOS: Corpsman
Important Events: 
February 24, 1945 – wounded in action (shrapnel); evacuated to USS Solace for treatment.

Admitted to US Naval Hospital #10 (Aiea Heights, Hawaii) on 8 March 1945.

Campaign Narrative

Returned to duty at Camp Maui on 12 April 1945.

On 2 July 1945, while on a training exercise, suffered shrapnel injuries in neck and back from a short mortar round. Admitted to V Amphibious Corps Hospital same date; transferred to US Naval Hospital on Oahu on 12 July.

As a patient and a teacher, I started teaching occupational therapy to the amputees, to the blind, tried to make them a little happier with their life, with what they had to endure. I had been doing leatherwork and copper work for quite a few years, and I just started doing it with these patients. After a while the hospital got to be boring. I told the doctor I wanted to go home. That they weren’t doing anything for me and that [my facial] paralysis was something that [I] just had to get over.

Honorably discharged from the service on 27 November 1945.

The doctors by the way, when they released me, they said I had about five years because of a heart condition which I didn’t know anything about. They said “you just go out and have some fun for five years because that’s all you have left.” I survived, I had to stop my desire to always be a doctor. My father was a doctor. He was wounded in World War One very badly. He got his MD and he lived for four years after that…. Otherwise he went to school almost all his life. I didn’t want that to happen to me either, so I let go of that dream.