Now, we also made note of the types of wounds which I mentioned to you before in this testimony on the chest which were going to be used by the doctors there to place chest tubes. They also made other wounds, one on the left arm, and a wound on the ankle of the President with the idea of administering intravenous blood and other fluids in hope of replacing the blood which the President had lost from his extensive wounds.
Those wounds showed no evidence of bruising or contusion or physical violence, which made us reach the conclusion that they were performed during the agonal moments of the late president, and when the circulation was, in essence, very seriously embarrassed, if not nonfunctional. So that these wounds, the wound of the chest and the wound of the arm and of the ankle were performed about the same time as the tracheotomy wound because only a very few moments of time elapsed when all this was going on.
So, therefore, we reached the conclusion that the damage to these muscles on the anterior neck just below this wound were received at approximately the same time that the wound here on the top of the pleural cavity was, while the President still lived and while his heart and lungs were operating in such a fashion to permit him to have a bruise in the vicinity, because that he did have in these strap muscles in the neck, but he didn't have in the areas of the other incisions that were made at Parkland Hospital. So we feel that, had this missile not made its path in that fashion, the wound made by Doctor Perry in the neck would not have been able to produce, wouldn't have been able to produce, these contusions of the musculature of the neck.
Mr. Dulles. Could I ask a question about the missile, I am a little bit—the bullet, I am a little bit—confused. It was found on the stretcher. Did the President's body remain on the stretcher while it was in the hospital?
Commander Humes. Of that point I have no knowledge. The only——
Mr. Dulles. Why would it—would this operating have anything to do with the bullet being on the stretcher unless the President's body remained on the stretcher after he was taken into the hospital; is that possible?
Commander Humes. It is quite possible, sir.
Mr. Dulles. Otherwise it seems to me the bullet would have to have been ejected from the body before he was taken or put on the bed in the hospital.
Commander Humes. Right, sir. I, of course, was not there. I don't know how he was handled in the hospital, in what conveyance. I do know he was on his back during the period of his stay in the hospital; Doctor Perry told me that.
Mr. Dulles. Yes; and wasn't turned over.