Just for a moment this morning, between sips of coffee, before the dog wheedles a walk, let's poke through all the headlines about wars and shootouts and such, and tell you what it's like to be hit by a bullet.
We talk all the time about wars and conflicts and surges and police actions and international incursions and shootings and gunfire, but those are all just words for bullets hitting people, so this morning let's hear from a guy who got hit by a bullet.
My friend Donald is now a dignified silver-haired retired museum curator and former assistant principal who broke up race riots and had other interesting adventures like that during his career. In 1944 he was a skinny teenager fighting the Japanese all through the Pacific, mostly in New Guinea and the Philippines. He helped blow up Fort Drum in Manila Bay and was on Bataan, among other very difficult places to be.
Donald has many stories of hard and dark days and nights skippering his little two-man Army Boat Battalion landing craft — finding dead Japanese boy soldiers floating in the water, having a sniper shoot a huge coffee can under his arm ('boy, were we mad losing that coffee'), heading off on a raid and discovering the battalion drunk had drained the alcohol from every compass. But he told me a story the other day that says something simple and awful and powerful, and it was so blunt and direct about bullets that I think you should hear it too.
I was hit once by a bullet, he says, and when you get hit by a bullet you never ever forget what it feels like. It feels like you got hit with the biggest rock there ever was. We were going along in the boat and we went around a beach where there was a battle, and a slug hit me in the armpit and knocked me right over. The bullet was almost spent, it had travelled pretty far, but still it went into me a couple inches and it knocked me over like I was punched by Joe Louis. My buddy in the boat pulled the bullet out and poured sulfa in and the sulfa hurt worse than the bullet. Guys said later I should have put in for a Purple Heart but that'd be wrong. Listen, you hear a lot of talk about