Brothers Beyond Blood: A Battalion Surgeon in the South Pacific

George Sharpe was a young surgeon, not too long our of medical school, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. After military training, he was sent to the South Pacific, where he spent years as a battalion surgeon. The author tells of the trauma of repairing broken bodies on the battlefield and describes medical treatment under enemy fire. He details many of the tropical diseases, such as one commonly called “jungle rot”, and the medication developed during wartime. But Brothers Beyond Blood is different from other battlefield accounts in the author’s determination to “capture the spirit of caring for one’s fellow man”. Recalling a reunion of the 20th Infantry Medical Detachment in 1986, he wrote “My personal scars of the war were open and bleeding again. Tears welled up in my eyes and again the sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. It was strange. Our beliefs were divergent to one another, but the ties of experiences shared in the nightmare of Munoz, the Shimbu Line, and the Cordilliera Mountains; mutual morning of those close to us, sorrow for the maiming of friends, had palced dormant seeds of brotherhood in our souls surely as strong as the genes of common ancestors. We were another family–brothers beyond blood.”