A Soul-Searching Shame

The people of South Los Angeles need no longer feel that when their children are cut down by criminal gunfire, they die in vain.

Their suffering now serves a higher purpose. For the United States Army has been quick to recognize what state and local officials would like to ignore--that decades of unrelieved deprivation and discrimination, along with easy access to firearms that never should have been allowed on the streets, have turned South Los Angeles and the communities around it into a war zone. As a result, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Watts now treats more than 100 gunshot cases and dozens of stabbing victims every month. So, the Army, eager to give its young surgeons first-hand experience of a combat situation, is sending them to Martin Luther King’s trauma unit for training. Two army doctors already have served two-month tours at the hospital and, today, L.A. County Supervisors are expected to approve residencies for an additional four military surgeons.

“At King we see the kind of penetrating trauma that we just don’t see at other hospitals,” said Dr. John McPhail chief of surgery at the Army’s William Beaumont Medical Center in El Paso. “ . . . the residents will have to treat a large volume of high-velocity wounds, the kind we would see in war . . . In hospitals like the one in El Paso, you see wounds caused by, maybe, a .22-caliber gun going off accidentally. But there, at King, you see wounds comparable to the kind soldiers receive in combat from automatic weapons.”

The Army hardly can blamed for availing itself of the opportunity to give its doctors the best training circumstances can provide; the overworked and under-funded medical staff at King certainly cannot be blamed for accepting the desperately needed help the military surgeons provide. But the fact that a poor, largely minority section of this community has been allowed to degenerate into a battlefield with casualties rivaling those of Belfast and Beirut ought to be a source of soul-searching shame to every responsible person in this city, county and state.