Word: shrapnel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sweet Clarity. Blizzards of shrapnel tear words out of sentences. A thought is splintered with the crack of a sniper's rifle...
...from ambulance driving to join the Italian infantry, was so badly wounded in a burst of shellfire that he felt life slip from his body, "like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner," and then return. He emerged with 237 bits of shrapnel (by his own count), an aluminum kneecap, and two Italian decorations. It was at Fossalta that he picked up a fear of his own fear and the lifelong need to test his courage...
Davis was a brilliant descriptive reporter with a breezy, intimate flow of language and a sensual precision of phrase. Bullets whirred past him like "rustling silk," shrapnel made "the jarring sound of telephone wires when someone strikes the pole." Politically he was naive and jingoistic. Personally he was humane and brave. Some regarded him as an unconscionable prig-"a robust flower of American muscular Christianity . . . the artistic boy scout," William Rothenstein called...
...wallpaper salesman in Buffalo, Spahn was just ripening in the minors when he went into the Army in 1942. A combat engineer, Spahn won a battlefield commission and was wounded by shrapnel in the action to repair the Remagen bridge for the first troops to cross the Rhine. Spahn shrugs off both the wound ("It was only a scratch in the foot'') and the promotion ("I got it only because all our officers were killed...
...doctor friend who rushed him to the fourth floor, treated him for first-degree burns on his hands and face. The President's hair and eyebrows were singed, but otherwise he was unhurt. Henriquez, too, had first-degree burns. But Colonel Armas, his face completely smashed by flying shrapnel, died almost immediately upon arrival at a first-aid station. A bystander was killed by shrapnel from the explosion...