United States Army

The United States Army appears in the novel chiefly through the soldiers whose wartime injuries Jenny Fields treats and through the service of Technical Sergeant Garp, the wounded airman who becomes her patient and the father of T. S. Garp. The Army’s wartime casualties bring the violence of combat into Boston Mercy Hospital, where Jenny’s nursing practice and her later family life become closely bound to the consequences of war.

Wartime casualties and medical care

In early 1942, soldiers formed the principal group of patients receiving the treatment Jenny observed at Boston Mercy. Before penicillin became available to the Army in 1943—and before many soldiers received it in 1945—medical care for sexually transmitted infections relied on drugs such as sulfathiazole and neoarsphenamine. The novel presents this treatment as one of the ways military service carried bodily consequences into the hospital, where Jenny encountered the effects of war and of the conditions surrounding soldiers’ lives.

As the war continued, Jenny moved from obstetrics to intensive care. Hospital staff separated her from mothers and newborns, believing that her deep interest in babies made her too emotionally involved; Jenny understood the decision but resented their assumption that her wishes meant she lacked self-control. Intensive care exposed her to patients sent from service hospitals: alongside elderly patients and victims of accidents were soldiers whose injuries, she recognized, were not accidental. The Army is thus present not only as an employer of servicemen but as the source of a steady stream of combat casualties for civilian medical care.

Technical Sergeant Garp’s service and injury

Technical Sergeant Garp served in the Eighth Air Force, which bombed the Continent from England. Before becoming a ball-turret gunner, he had served as a nose gunner in a B-17C and a waist gunner in a B-17E. He disliked the B-17E’s paired waist-gun arrangement: when he and the other gunner moved their weapons at the same time, the other man’s gun struck Garp. Later aircraft models staggered the gun positions to prevent this interference, but the change came too late for him.

On his first combat mission, a daylight sortie against Rouen, France, on August 17, 1942, Garp served at a waist-gun position. The mission was completed without losses, although his fellow gunner struck him three times. Later, Garp became a ball-turret gunner and suffered catastrophic head injuries. The Army’s air service therefore supplies the military history behind the novel’s portrayal of him as a man acquainted with violent death, while his service record and injuries also explain how an airman came to depend on hospital care far from the battlefield.

Garp as a patient and the aftermath of service

When the injured sergeant arrived at Boston Mercy, Jenny struggled to place him within the categories she had devised for patients. He was docile and childlike, and she classified him as an Absentee. A fire aboard the transport ship had also burned his hands and face; because of the burns, Jenny counted him as an External as well. His brain had been penetrated by fragments, some too dangerously located to remove, and doctors feared his damage could continue to worsen.

Garp had difficulty communicating and depended on others for care. His single-word vocabulary meant that he could not complain to reporters, while the medical papers described the damage and his condition. Jenny’s response was practical and attentive: she sat with him when he became distressed, rubbed his back, and tried to keep him engaged rather than merely quiet. These scenes make military injury more than an abstract measure of wartime loss. The Army’s serviceman is also a vulnerable patient whose needs require ongoing, personal care.

Garp’s injuries had consequences beyond the hospital. His son, T. S. Garp, later grew up without a living father and became part of a family story marked by the damage war had done to the older man. The novel’s treatment of the United States Army is consequently indirect but consequential: it traces the path from air-force service, through lasting disability and hospital care, to the family relationships that outlast the war.