Wednesday, November 10, 2010

In Honor of Veteran's Day HNT

Today, Thursday is Veterans Day in the USA. It's the day we honor all military veterans. I am one of them and here's one of my stories. The rest can be found on my other blog, http://my-vietnam-stories.blogspot.com/.

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This week’s HNT picture is of one of my many scars. I know I am supposed to give you a little humorous story about it, but that’s really isn't possible in this case.

As some of you know, I was wounded in Vietnam. I was an infantryman and my primarily responsibility was to hump ammunition for the M-60 machine gunner. Not a great job because I carried about 75 pounds of M-60 ammo in addition to my normal load of ammo for my M-16, hand grenades, canteens of water, C-rations, etc.

The night I was wounded, my squad of ten grunts was on our way to set up a night ambush. Every night a squad from our company was sent out to do this. To make a long story short, a bad guy set off a homemade claymore mine on our way to the ambush site. It was quite effective, because it wounded 7 out of the 10 of us. I was in the middle of the group, so I bared the brunt and received 35 multiple fragment wounds, literally from head to toe.

It took something like 600 stitches to close all my wounds. I spent almost 3 months in multiple military hospitals recovering and have numerous scars all over my body. Hey, but the bright side was it got me out of Vietnam after only 1 month and two days? In addition, almost none of the scars show when I’m clothed and I didn’t die. See there is a bright side to this story.

Well, today I am going to show you one of the least disgusting of my scars. This one I call “Bug”. I know it’s weird that I’ve named some of my scars, but live with it.


Since you may not have been able to make out Bug in the first picture so I have outlined it in this one.


As a side note, where did all those freckles come from? I swear, I didn't have that many before I took this picture. I think I'd better get my glasses checked.

2 comments:

13messages said...

Thank you for your service. And thanks for introducing us to Bug. :)

Osbasso said...

I do love your stories!
Thanks for service!