By Short Wave

One night last week, while taking off from tiny Palmyra Atoll, 1,000 miles southwest of Hawaii, an Army C46 and its crew of six smashed into a reef. Radioman Buster Bailey, 19, reached for a fire extinguisher, found that he had no hand. He crawled from the burning plane into knee-deep water, stumbled and discovered that his right leg was gone, too. His fellow crewmen got him to shore and tied their belts around his bleeding stumps.

There was no doctor on the atoll (pop. 60)--but there was a radio ham, Steve Barnes. Barnes went to work, finally tuned in an old friend and fellow ham, Joseph Bonsted, 6,000-miles away.in Audubon, NJ. Said Barnes: "Joe, there's been an accident here. Can you get a doctor?" The nearest doctor was operating in the Audubon Hospital. Surgeon Ralph W. Davis paused long enough in his operation to give some terse instructions: "Tourniquets, loosened every 20 to 30 minutes, plasma transfusions. No morphine; he may have a fractured skull."

Across 6,000 miles, Joe flashed the message. The anxious group on the atoll carefully followed the doctor's orders. A nurse on the island, Mrs. Robert Steed, though eight months pregnant, turned out to give the plasma transfusion. By that time, Radio-Ham Barnes was talking to surgeons attached to Hawaii's Hickam Field, getting more instructions. When a rescue plane and an Army surgeon arrived five hours later from Hickam, they found that Radioman Buster Bailey was still holding on. By nightfall he was resting comfortably in a Hawaiian hospital.

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