Good Medicine

I received a number of immunizations in Navy Boot Camp mostly administered with air guns. We would line up “nuts to butts” and two corpsman would fire vaccine into each arm. If you moved it would cut you like a razor and it was not unusual to see a lot of blood. I lost a friend in the latter years to Hepatitis contracted from these devices. I remember watching in disbelief as two corpsman used them as water pistols against each other. We were all just kids.

We received one shot that is sometimes called “the peanut butter shot”, a massive does of Bicillin L-A. It was administered in the buttocks and formed a hard lump which hurt like hell and caused all of us to limp while marching. I have no idea how this could be useful and I imagine it decimated our intestinal flora.

I was given another series of shots before I deployed for overseas. The good news is that they were administered by injection instead of the gun but the bad news is that they were all given at once. I had shots for yellow fever, plague, and who knows what else. For a few days afterwards I felt I had a mild case of plague, yellow fever and malaria all at the same time. The vaccines were effective, I managed to stay relatively healthy in spite of encountering some questionable environs.