Brainwave, Episode 25

This episode was originally broadcast on Oct. 6, 1959

This episode will be something about World War II.

It's something about a boat in WWII in the Pacific ocean, having just been attacked by Japanese Zeros. The ship itself has to make some repairs to its electrical system and will be basically drifting for six hours. There's also one guy that has been drunk three times in two weeks and gets thrown into the brig.

The ship's captain confronts the drunken man. His brother has been killed in the war and he was the one that convinced him to sign up in the first place.

The ship's captain is bleeding to death and the only person that might be able to save him is the guy in the brig who was a pharmacist's mate first class, so the surgeon of a different ship wants to talk to him.

The sailor who was causing trouble is going to have to be the one to operate on the ship's captain. He doesn't want to and he doesn't have much confidence in himself. He's also going to have to do that while the ship (and the others in the group) are under attack by Japanese planes.

The guy operates on the officer while he's receiving instructions from another ship's surgeon.

The radio link cuts out just when he gets to the most critical part of the operation. He sends the other guy out to try and find out what happened. After he leaves, the guy starts hearing the surgeon talking again.

The guy is told that the ship the surgeon was on received two direct hits, one of them on the radio room, killing everyone in it including the surgeon. In other words, the surgeon was actually already dead when the sailor thought he heard him guiding him through a very complicated operation, step-by-step.

The skeptics would have a field day with this one, attacking everything in sight. They would have said that the sailor had the times mixed up, was imagining the voice, etc. The fact is, though, that the Navy knew the exact time the other ship was bombed and the people were killed, and the fact, undeniable by anyone, was that the surgeon had died before the operation was completed.

Which leaves the guy doing the surgery. Either he heard the voice of the surgeon from somewhere, or he imagined the entire thing and somehow performed an operation that was guided in extreme detail, doing an operation that he was untrained for and unqualified for.

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