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Chatting with Neighbor


mikie
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Our on my walk last night I stopped to chat with neighbor Jim. We got to talking about our aches and pains. He mentioned that a couple of months ago his right foot was bothering him so he saw his doctor about it. The Doctor found and removed a small sliver of metal.  Jim was drafted and sent to Vietnam in 1968. His very first day on patrol in the field, a helicopter hit a tree and exploded almost over him. He was showered with bits of metal and wounded in the right foot, shoulder and head. The sliver the doctor removed was one of the bits of metal that had been there all this time. Two other soldiers a few feet away, also on their first patrol, were killed. After rehab he went back into the field for a year but was never injured again. He had mentioned once before having been in Vietnam, but I hesitated to ask him questions. I'm glad he felt like talking about it and told him I'd happily listen anytime. You just never know what someone you pass on the sidewalk has lived through. 

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Great story Mikie.

 

Was just telling a friend tonight about my relative who was a WW2 Marine an wounded in the Pacific.Every time he got a new doctor at the V.A they asked what were the black spots on the x-rays..he would reply shrapnel..then they asked how long it had been there..He said since the war.They couldn't believe it wasn't removed. I recall my dad telling me stories of him going fishing with the cousins after the war and on the fishing trips his cousin would often have a piece of scrapnel  he would remove as it had surfaced and was a small lump like a infected hair then he would pinch it and out came the metal  shrapnel.

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This also reminded me of a neighbor who lived three houses down from me. I would see Frank out in his yard or he would walk by the house in the evening.Would say hello if I saw him. I knew he was a WW2 vet. Didn't realize til after he passed and read his obituary in the paper he had been trained in Radios in the Navy. He had  attached to the Marine Raiders on Guadalcanal as a radio operator and repairman … made sense as he had a small electrical business here for many years and worked on electric motors too.

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Decades ago, when I was a newspaper delivery boy there was this old Czech guy who mowed his lawn in the summer hobbling around on an artificial leg. Since he wasn't a customer, I never had occasion to talk to him - and it's not a topic one would broach in casual conversation anyway.

 

Time passed. Recently I learned from a former neighbor that he had been a Czech Air Force pilot in 1938 who skipped off to the UK after the Nazis rolled over the border (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovak_Air_Force#Crisis_and_occupation_1938–39 ).  He joined the RAF in 1939 and flew until D-Day, when AA fire hit his aircraft (probably a Spitfire).

 

He managed to get it back to the UK, but the landing gear was damaged (only one wheel came down). He landed his plane but it spun out, the crash destroying his leg.

 

After the war, he had the option to 1) return to Czechoslovakia (which was under the Communist cloud), 2) stay in the UK or 3) emigrate to the US.

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