“I’m Infected”
An 18-Year-Old German POW, Nine Shrapnel Wounds, and the Examination That Shocked an American Camp
Camp McCain, Mississippi — Late April 1945
The boy speaks before anyone tells him to.
“I am infected.”
His English is broken, but his tone is not. There is no panic in it, no plea. He says the words the way a man might report the time or the weather. Flat. Certain. Finished.
The examination room at Camp McCain smells of antiseptic and old wood. The overhead light hums softly. The doctor—Major William Brennan, U.S. Army Medical Corps—has not yet touched the patient, but he already knows this is not routine.
The boy stands shirtless, shaking slightly, not from fear but from exhaustion. He cannot be more than eighteen. His ribs show clearly beneath pale skin stretched too thin. And across his torso—chest, abdomen, back—are wounds. Not one. Not two.
Nine.
The First Look
They are scattered like impacts on a battlefield map, each one a separate story of violence. Some are old scars—white, puckered, improperly healed. Others are scabbed but wet beneath the surface. Two are open, raw, inflamed.
One, just below the left ribs, is the worst. Red streaks radiate outward from it, climbing toward the armpit like veins of fire.
Brennan smells it before he finishes counting.
Infection. Deep. Rotting.
He looks at the boy’s face, expecting terror. Instead, he finds resignation.
This is someone who has already accepted death.
A Prison Camp Far From the War
Camp McCain sits among pine trees and farmland, thousands of miles from the front lines tearing Europe apart. More than three thousand German prisoners of war are held here—most captured in North Africa or Italy, shipped quietly to the American South.
By POW standards, it is not a cruel place. The barracks are clean. The food is adequate. Prisoners work in cotton fields and lumber mills under guard by soldiers too old or injured to fight overseas.
Men survive here.
That is why this boy is so jarring.
He arrived that morning on a transport truck from a processing center in Virginia—twenty prisoners unloaded, counted, marched forward. Nineteen looked like defeated soldiers.
The twentieth looked like a corpse that had not yet realized it was dead.
“Klaus Hoffmann, Age 18”
The intake paperwork lists his name as Klaus Hoffmann. Eighteen years old. Captured near the Elbe River in central Germany two weeks earlier.
He is barely five foot six. So thin his uniform hangs on him like fabric on a fence post. Dirt still clings to his face. His eyes are hollow, sunken not just by hunger but by months without sleep.
When told to remove his jacket for a lice check, Klaus hesitated. Slowly, carefully, he peeled it off.
The undershirt beneath was stained brown and yellow at multiple points.
The intake officer did not finish the form. He called for a medic immediately. One look was enough.
Klaus was sent straight to the camp hospital.
The Examination
Major Brennan tells Klaus to sit, then to remove his shirt.
Klaus does it without hesitation. No embarrassment. No resistance.
What Brennan sees makes him stop.
Nine wounds.
Three on the chest.
Four on the abdomen.
Two on the back.
They are in different stages of healing—if “healing” is even the right word. Some have closed without ever being cleaned. Others are swollen, hot, leaking pus. The wound on the back looks like a chunk of flesh was torn out with a spoon.
Brennan pulls on gloves and begins a methodical examination, sketching a rough outline of Klaus’s torso and numbering each wound.
When he asks how Klaus got them, the boy answers slowly, carefully choosing English words.
“Different times. Different places.”
Three Wars in One Body
The story comes out in fragments, just like the metal inside him.
The first three wounds came from an artillery shell in France, August 1944. Klaus was sixteen.
The next four came from a grenade in Belgium, December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.
The last two—from machine-gun fire near the Elbe River in April 1945, three days before capture.
Brennan stares at him.
“You were wounded three times,” he says, “and sent back to fight each time?”
Klaus nods.
“There were no hospitals,” he says. “No doctors. Only bandages. Orders.”
The X-Ray
Brennan orders imaging immediately.
Twenty minutes later, he stands in front of the lightbox with a nurse beside him, staring at the films.
Nine pieces of metal.
Embedded throughout Klaus’s body. Against ribs. Near organs. Pressing into muscle. Still there after months.
But it is not the number that shocks him.
It is the variety.
Different sizes. Different shapes. Different angles of entry.
Artillery shrapnel.
Grenade fragments.
A bullet fragment forming an abscess that is poisoning the boy’s blood.
This is not one unlucky incident.
This is a pattern.
A Child Soldier
Brennan does the math.
Klaus is eighteen now.
That means he was sixteen when he took the first shrapnel.
A child.
Used, wounded, patched up just enough to stand, and sent back into combat. Again. And again.
This violates every standard of military conduct. Every convention. Every claim of honor.
Brennan calls the camp commander.
“This isn’t just medical,” he says. “This is evidence.”
The Decision
Colonel James Harrington listens as Brennan lays out the facts. The spreading infection. The embedded metal. The timeline.
“Can you save him?” Harrington asks.
Brennan is honest.
If they do nothing, Klaus will likely be dead within a week. Sepsis is already setting in.
Surgery offers maybe a fifty percent chance.
Harrington doesn’t hesitate.
“Do it,” he says. “Document everything.”
If Klaus survives, his case will go into the growing archive of war crimes documentation.
“If I Die, Write to My Family”
When Brennan explains the surgery—multiple incisions, general anesthesia, high risk—Klaus listens calmly.
Then he asks one question.
“If I die… will you write to my family?”
He does not know if they are alive. His town was bombed. His father stopped writing months ago.
“But if you find them,” he says, “tell them I did not die fighting. Tell them I died in a hospital. With a doctor.”
Brennan promises.
Five Hours on the Table
The surgery begins the next morning.
The first incision releases a smell that fills the room—dead tissue, weeks old. Brennan cuts away gray and black muscle, nearly half a pound of it, before reaching the source: a bullet fragment lodged against a rib, surrounded by pus.
One by one, the wounds are opened. Shrapnel removed. Infection scraped out. Tissue cleaned and closed.
Five hours later, all nine fragments sit in a metal tray.
Klaus has lost nearly a pint of blood.
No one knows if he will wake up.
Survival
The first night is critical. Fever spikes. Heart rate drops.
Twice Brennan is called to the bedside.
Then, on the second night, the fever breaks.
On the third morning, Klaus opens his eyes.
He lives.
After the Body, the Mind
Physically, Klaus improves. The wounds heal cleanly. The infection is gone.
Psychologically, he does not sleep.
Nightmares wake him gasping. He stares at the ceiling, silent.
A psychiatrist evaluates him and writes the diagnosis that the era barely understands: battle fatigue. What later generations will call PTSD.
Guilt. Dissociation. Depression.
And yet—decency remains.
He thanks the nurses. Asks about other patients. Apologizes for being trouble.
The psychiatrist notes it carefully.
A Larger Pattern
In his final report, Brennan zooms out.
By 1945, Germany was conscripting boys as young as fourteen. Tens of thousands died. Tens of thousands more were wounded—many repeatedly.
Hospitals collapsed. Doctors were drafted. Wounded soldiers who could walk were sent back to fight.
Klaus survived not because the system worked—but because his body endured what it never should have been asked to endure.
Epilogue: What His Story Means
Klaus Hoffmann will eventually recover. He will be transferred, rehabilitated, and—one day—repatriated.
He will never fully heal.
But his story leaves behind something important.
War does not just destroy cities.
It consumes the young first.
And sometimes, the greatest act of justice is not punishment—but care.
In a quiet hospital room in Mississippi, an American doctor chose to treat an enemy not as a uniform, but as a human being.
And because of that choice, a boy who should have died at sixteen was given the chance to live past eighteen.
Not as a soldier.
But as a survivor.
