Word: shrapnel
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Down the gangplank of a hospital ship at a West Coast port came hard little Marine Corporal Barney Ross, back from Guadalcanal with a few shrapnel wounds, back to Kaye, the showgirl he married shortly before he went off to war. Off the gangplank, he got down on his hands & knees, kissed the ground. "This I vowed to do if ever I saw American soil again," he explained gravely; "sometimes out there we're not so sure. . . ." Clutching a native-made cane decorated with "real Jap teeth," he told about his blistering nightlong battle in a shell hole (TIME...
...picked up from a life raft, had several shrapnel wounds. When the hospital discharged him he "just wanted to get away from everything." But after a month, during which he was scared stiff whenever he rode on a public conveyance, he shipped on a 29-day coastwise trip. One night "I was in bed and it was the first [alarm] I heard since I was torpedoed, and I practically froze in my bed. I didn't want to get out. I was musclebound, you might say, for several seconds." After that trip, he was sent to the Long Island...
...raid some people become indecently ravenous, others, like herself, irrationally sleepy. She saw a woman's panic soothed by the mere act of counting her pay. She learned how, five minutes after planes have vanished and firing has ceased, the boomerang threat of anti-aircraft shrapnel comes hissing down like rain out of new sunlight.* She saw, for the first time, the "refugee look"-faces looking so stunned that they suggested that the brain's gyroscope had been removed...
...well-heeled, a thin slice of bread each. At noon they had cabbage soup. At night they had it again. All they could normally buy was cabbage, which was raised in every vacant lot; and horse meat. Once they got a "terribly skinny" pigeon, his wing broken by shrapnel. The children ate it "with shouts of joy." Rulka chewed the bones...
...threw about 300 lead punches. Out of ammunition, the men in the crater crouched and prayed. At dawn the prize fighter jumped out under cover of a cloud of smoke and, "half crawling and half walking," helped get the wounded to the rear. His purse: shell shock, malaria, minor shrapnel wounds, a corporal's rank, recommendation for a distinguished service award. His only complaint: "No referee to break the clinches...