100 Women Creating Transformation In Their Own Backyard

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on the show, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. And up next, well, a great history story. And all of our history stories are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College. In 1927, the iron lung was invented. This machine helped keep people alive who were stricken with polio, a disease which today is mostly eradicated, but in the late 1940s disabled an average of more than 35,000 people a year. Here’s our own Monty Montgomery with the story of this life-saving device. The first half of the twentieth century, there was nothing quite like polio. Here’s Darren Glassburg of the Mobile Medical Museum with more on that. You know, polio was a really serious virus that affected mainly young children, children between the ages of five and nine, through the mid-1950s. The peak year was 1952, when there were 58,000 reported cases. This is polio, the cruel, centuries-old quibbler of children at large. Seventy-seven thousand times they use are actual polioviruses. To the University of Michigan campus in 1955 came hundreds of scientists hoping to hear the word that would signal the end of polio’s long and ruthless reign of terror. Fortunately, the vaccine was developed in 1955, but before Jonas Salt discovered that vaccine, the only way to mitigate the effects of advanced polio was through a device known as the iron lung. It’s used for when people develop paralytic polio, about five out of a thousand cases, and it paralyzes your diaphragm and you’re unable to breathe independently. What it is is it is a respirator that you are supposed to stay inside. You’re strapped down, you’re lying on your back, your immobile. Your head is resting on this pillow, and when this is closed, they lock it up. So, nowhere circulating on the inside of this machine. And this electric motor is going to turn this bellows back and forth. It has a handle. In case the motor breaks down, you can manually operate it. But what that’s going to do is create negative pressure on the inside of the machine, and this is actually how your lungs and your respirator worry system are supposed to work. But since there’s lower pressure on the inside of the machine than outside, that is going to actually force air through your tragea and into your lungs. And then when you’re inside, you stay inside basically twenty-four to seven until you recover. And meanwhile, nurses are providing care for you through these portholes, washing you off, massaging your limbs, changing your bedpan. There’s a wider hole on the other side. They were very costly, like in the 1930s. Is one of these costs about $1,500, which was as much as a single-family home, and you know, this was before health insurance, and so not everybody could afford one, but hospitals invested heavily in them, and they were, you know, very common during this era. It’s not men as a permanent treatment, but some people ended up using it for the rest of their lives because they never recovered, like Frederick Snipe, who was subject to much media attention at the time due to the iron lung’s quote-unquote “new factor.” Frid Snight Junior, the Man in the Iron Lungs. He’s his daughter for the first time. The little girl was born on September the twenty-second, weighing eight pounds. The snide has lived in an iron lung for four years, being stricken with infantile paralysis in Peping. He madded his childhood sweetheart last year, and now he’s the proud father of a bonny little girl. Zon magazine covers. They called him the Man in the Iron Lung, and Frederick Snipe was one of those people who never recovered, and he spent the rest of his life in the iron lung until he died of hard and lung failure. It’s very hard on your body to be, as you can imagine, motionless, stuck inside all that time. By 1959, there were still 1,200 people using the iron lung. By 2004, there were 39, and by 2014, only ten people were still using the iron lung on a daily basis. Today, there’s about three. Often, we get people that come in here, older people who remember growing up and seeing somebody who had one of these in their home. You know, somebody being treated in their home and an iron lung. Do you know? These are not made or manufactured anymore or serviced anymore. And so if you do get an advanced case of polio, you are more likely to be given a portable respirator that allows you freedom of movement, better access to your caregiver. But these individuals fell that they were getting better results with the iron lung, and so they were fortunate to have people in their family could jerry-rig it and keep it running for them, and that’s what they used on a daily basis. Though close to becoming only a museum piece, iron lungs are a reminder of a dark time in our past, but they’re also proof of how far we’ve come in less than a century. For Our American Stories, I’m Monty Montgomery, and great job is always to Monty, who himself is a Hillsdale grad. And a special thanks to Darren Classbrook of the Mobile Medical Museum. What a piece of history! This is medical history, and all of our history stories are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, where you can go to learn all the things that are good in life and all the things that are beautiful in life. You can’t get to Hillsdale. Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu. That’s Hillsdale.edu. Since 1988, polio cases worldwide have gone down nine, and the number of cases in 2017 was a mere 22. Again, compare that to 35,000 a year being paralyzed or disabled just in this country. The story of the iron lung here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we returned to Our American Stories, and up next, a story from one of our regular contributors, Richard Munyes. Rich is a listener out in Colorado, and his story today is entitled “Midnight at the Live Fire Exercise.” Here’s Rich with the story. ADC. This is World. He is tonight with Peter Jenning. Good evening. The deadline has come and gone. The Iraqis are living on what President Bush calls a borrowed time. It is no longer whether the war will start, but when. In 1991, we had a little thing called the Gulf War, and in it, we sent armored divisions, infantry divisions into Iraq. And I’ll be honest with you, we cleaned the clock. I mean, it’ll look a little bit like War of the Worlds, only we were the Martians. Now, one of the things that happened here is were we definitely had the superior tank. I mean, the M1 tank, fantastic piece of hardware. The other thing we had going for us, we had better training. Now, granted, they had some actual combat experience, but we had trained to our razor’s edge. Where did we do this training? At a little place called National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, out in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave Desert. Now, the first time I ever went out there, it was about 1988. What had happened was, see, I was working military police investigations at the time. Now, that’s exactly what it sounds like I was doing. I was a detective, not put on a suit, put on a tie, and I went out there and I played detective. Well, in the FM manuals, there’s always need for an MPI investigator to go out with division. Well, no one ever had, so I was kind of a little bit of a pioneer here, just the first time an MPI investigator was going to go out with division out in the National Training Center. Now, here’s the problem. No one knew exactly what my job was, so my mission kind of wound up being a catchall. What I wound up doing was investigating an awful lot of accidents. And if you want to see some horrific accidents, do it where you got high explosive rounds going off, being shot from some of these fantastic equipment in the world, and see what happens. Add to that unfamiliar terrain, things like that, and I mean, it’s a recipe for getting people killed. This is a story about a couple of soldiers that managed to dodge the bullet, and I’ll be honest with you, they came very, very close. Okay. Now, what they did with me was I wound up having to stay behind at the Provost Marshal’s office, and I got to sleep in a jail cell for the 29 days we were deployed. Well, one night, I’m in there, I’m sound asleep, and the dispatcher comes back and wakes me up and says, “Rich, there’s been a terrible accident out on one of the ranges.” “What happened?” “A tank fired up an APC.” And my first one is, “Oh my God, this is not going to be pretty.” So I got up and got dressed, and I walked over to the officers’ BAQ, that’s where the division safety officers were staying, and I said, “Guys, we’ve had a bad accident on the range. We’ve had an M1 fire up an ABC. What else do you know?” “That’s all I know right now.” We said. We loaded up into their four-by-four, and we started out, and they made a few phone calls like that, so we knew where we were going. And I remember we’re driving through and it’s pitch black outside. I mean, you have not seen pitch black until you’re in the middle of the Mojave Desert. So we’re driving along, and I wound up falling asleep. A person. I woke up, and we’re stopping, and we’re stopping at what looks like a trailer house, and still pitch dark outside. And one of the officers got out, and he went in. He comes out, and he’s got a cassette tape, and he said, “You guys have got to hear this.” They plugged it in, and you hear them talking and stuff like that, and this is routine stuff. You’re hearing what we call a FiST. A FiST is a fire support vehicle. It calls in targets. In this case, this was an E3 setting up on a little hill there. It has a small crew, and they were calling in targets. And all of a sudden, you hear a scream, “Cease fire! Cease fire! My God, my God, we’re hit! Cease fire!” And you hear other people screaming, “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire! Shut it down! Shut it down!” Then it goes dead. By the time we got out to where this accident had occurred, the sun had already come up. The M1 that was responsible for firing, doing the firing, is still sitting there, setting over on a hill maybe about 500 yards away, is the FiST. Now, the first thing we got to determine is what happened here. And we’re talking to a major who was in charge of all this, and he’s telling us what had happened was they were doing a live fire. Now, the way they did this was this is a response to an attack or assimilated an attack by enemy armor. The way they would handle this is one tank would roll up, and it would fire. It rolled back to reload. Another one would roll up, fire, and they’re just alternating back and forth, only this is, you know, dozens of tanks doing this. And they had these range safety stakes, big long posts pounded into the ground. They do this for safety reasons. Well, I get out, and I’m looking at the tank there, and the first thing I notice is that there is a red paint transfer on the gun turret. And it became very clear what was happening here. Every time the tank moved back, the gun tube was rubbing up against the gun stake. The safety stake. The field of fire is progressively getting wider and wider and wider. Now, whether I checked some of the other stakes, and they were in very, very firm, but not this one. This one was loose. I mean, I can set them and shake it with my hand. Like I said, the field of fire is getting progressively wider and wider. Well, eventually, what happened is that when they roll up, they got maybe two to three seconds to acquire a target and fire. Well, they get up there, I guess what’s in the field of fire? Now, the FiST. They fired at it. Now, the weapon they used was what we call a SABOT round. Now, SABOT rounds are kind of an interesting weapon. When this slams into a target, whatever the missile’s made of, the shell’s made of, vaporizes almost instantly. The needle, which looks a little bit like a cone, melts through the armor or whatever it hit and then goes inside. I know them to go for. I saw tanks that have been hit by SABOT rounds on the outside. They don’t look too bad. Look down the hatch. That’s what they hit this tank with, a little APC. An APC is, I mean, it’s nothing like a tank. It’s a very lightly armored vehicle. So, we went through all that. You know, we know what’s going on here now. Now, we went over and checked out the APC. It surprised me at the amount of damage to it. The round had come in low. By that, what I mean, it went in between the tracks and into the engine compartment, down underneath. If it had hit the APC square on, there’d have been no survivors on this thing. I mean, they would just boom. As it was, the entire top of the APC itself was melted off, and there was a machine gun, an M60 machine gun, setting on the machine gun mount. This thing was actually melted, and it was bowed down in half. Okay. Now, I had to go back to base, and we kind of have a division of labor. Now, what the safety officer would do, they would go talk to the crew and the commanders and everybody else that was associated with this. I would go to the hospital and talk to the crew of the APC. And this is where I got the rest of the story. Now, when I went in there, and I told him what I was there for, they were nice enough to put the crew in the entire in the same room. And these guys were messed up. We had a young lieutenant there that was in charge of it, the sergeant E6, and a couple of EM’s. This is the story I got. Here they are there doing their thing, they’re calling in, they’re calling in their fields of fire and stuff like that. And then the round hit. The lieutenant told me when it hit, I mean, it actually rocked the APC and everything, and everything in the tank almost seem to catch fire instantly. And he’s screaming, you know, over the radio, you know, “Cease fire! Cease fire! My God, my God, we’re hit! Cease fire!” And he’s trying to get everybody out of there. He’s getting his EM’s out there, and they’re probably out of the burning thing, and all of a sudden, he looks around and realizes he’s missing a man. He didn’t know where his sergeant was. He goes back into this burning tank trying to find his sergeant. Okay, here’s what had happened. A few moments before the round hit, these guys were what we call MOPP Level 4. That means you’re in a chemical environment. You’ve got protecting masks on everything else. Well, a couple of minutes before the round hit, they were told to stand down from MOPP Level 4, which you mean to take off your masks. So they’re taking the masks off. The sergeant had his mask in his hand and was folding it up to put it away in his carrier when the round hit. He said, “The mask caught fire instantly.” So here he is, he’s on fire. What does he do? He panics. He jumps out of the tank, starts running down the hill before he remembered to stop, tuck, and roll. The lieutenant didn’t know this. He went back into the tank looking for the man before the heat and smoke finally forced him out of there. It’s a miracle from God. These guys even managed to survive. These are the kind of accidents you see happen out there sometimes. I mean, this is terrible. I don’t know what happened to these men. I’m pretty sure the lieutenant and possibly the EMs were discharged because their injuries, so they’re probably have to collect an at pension today. I guess I’ll say that was too bad because the lieutenant was an officer, was worth something. And a great job. As always, to Monty Montgomery for his work on the piece, and his special thanks again to Richard Munyez. Richard Munyez, his story “Midnight at the Live Fire Exercise” here on Our American Stories.