‘Just let them know you’re going to make them better’
Army surgeon recalls treating wounded soldiers during WWII
CLERMONT — A practicing surgeon until age 96, Pierce Jones Moore Jr. recalls war more fondly than most GIs.
Moore, now 98 and living in Clermont, was drafted into the Army during World War II with the rest of his senior class at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California and then dispatched to treat soldiers who had limbs blown off in combat.
Many were maimed in the Battle of the Bulge, a ferocious German offensive that killed 19,276 American troops.
“The fact of the matter is we were helping them,” he said of his military patients during an interview to mark Veterans Day, which is Sunday. “To take these ragged field amputations and clean ’em up, make ’em better ... it was a good feeling for me.”
Moore is a member of a shrinking number of the World War II veterans. The men and women who fought in the war are in their 90s now. According to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, about 496,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II were alive in 2018, though 348 die every day.
Moore lives each day like he’s much younger.
His hair is thinning but still black — naturally he swears. He was remarried 10 years ago to a retired nurse 16 years his junior. They walk two miles a day, he still golfs and they split time between a winter home in Lake County and a summer place in North Carolina.
Moore remembered efforts at Lawson General Hospital in Atlanta to help crippled soldiers.
A man was arrested Saturday who is suspected of killing one woman, then kidnapping and committing sexual battery on another, according to an affidavit from the Orlando Police Department.
Ruddel Pierre, 25 of Orlando, faces charges of first-degree murder, armed kidnapping, sexual battery with a deadly weapon and carjacking with a firearm.
Authorities responded to a shooting just after 8 a.m. Saturday and found 40-year-old Tamalari Renee Arnold unresponsive with a gunshot wound in the 4700 block of Harwich Street. She later died at the hospital, police said.
A second victim told OPD she had previously dated Pierre and recently broke up with him, according to the affidavit. The second woman didn’t feel safe leaving work on Saturday morning, so Arnold, a co-worker, accompanied her home.
According to the police report, Pierre confronted the two at gunpoint in the second victim’s residence. He then shot Arnold and forced the second victim into her car, OPD reported.
Two witnesses told police they heard three gunshots, and saw a man, later identified as Pierre, point a gun at a woman who screamed “please don’t kill me,” as the two entered the car, the affidavit showed.
Pierre drove off, pulled over and sexually battered the victim on an unknown road, according to the police report. Afterward, Pierre drove the victim back to her home, where she called police. Police arrested Pierre later Saturday afternoon. Pierre
Newspaper stories in the Atlanta papers recounted hospital programs to teach amputees to dance and skate, and Moore was photographed by the Atlanta Journal Constitution with a group of his patients swinging golf clubs.
“It was good psychology,” he said.
Moore said he never detected bitterness in his soldier patients, though some probably resented their wounds.
More often, they were sad or fearful a girlfriend wouldn’t accept them anymore, he said.
“You just let them know you’re going to make them better,” Moore said.
He was one of six surgeons assigned to a ward of 33 beds, all filled with amputees.
“When they were better, they were discharged and another 33 filled the beds,” he said of the wounded soldiers and sailors he tended to. “For the whole year, 1945, I operated every day except for Saturday and Sunday on amputees.”
He never tallied the surgeries but estimated it was hundreds and hundreds.
The retired surgeon is more at peace with war than those who saw combat. He witnessed the results of war.
“They say war is hell, and it is,” he said. “But if it hadn’t been for World War II, I never would have met my [first] wife. She was a farm girl from Ohio, I was from South Carolina. We met in San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the Army Hospital.”
She was a nurse. They were married nearly 58 years before she died.
They had five children, including two doctors, a dentist, a mathematician and a nurse.
In civilian medical life, Moore delivered more than 1,000 babies and performed over 30,000 surgeries in a seven-decade career. When he retired his license in 2016, he was believed to be the oldest practicing surgeon in North Carolina.