“It was like being hit by a train. ... I remember what I was doing. I remember being hit, then I was face down in the mud on top of the building. I really wasn’t terribly concerned because I could hear bullets whipping above me, but I still had the presence of mind not to stand up. I thought, ‘Well, I don’t have any brain damage, at least at this point. ... My lieutenant pulled me to the edge of the roof so they could take a look at me. ... I got a little upset when they were pulling my Kevlar off. I said, ‘Hey, if that’s holding my brain together, I’m going to be upset if you take it off.’” USMC Sergeant Paul Boothroyd, 22, a signals intelligence operator with 2nd Radio Battalion attached to the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, was on a rooftop providing over-watch for a local security patrol in Sangin, Helmand province, Afghanistan when he got shot by the first bullet of his first engagement of his first deployment. It was a 7.62x54mm Dragunov sniper round which penetrated his Kevlar helmet. The corpsman found the bullet under his skin behind his right ear. That's Boothroyd above, fifteen minutes after being shot, waiting for the medevac chopper. He walked to it himself. “It was a one-in-a-million shot that the sniper was even able to hit me and a one-in-a-million chance that the bullet didn’t destroy my brain. It wasn’t my time.” His buddies nicknamed him Headshot. Twelve days later surgeons at the National Naval Medical Center Bethesda, MD removed the bullet, below. He got a Purple Heart and is headed home after a month for a couple more weeks of recovery. “It’s one of those things where I feel like I’ve been given an unearned vacation. In the surgical ward, I was only one of two gunshot wounds. Everyone else, they’re all guys who have lost legs to [improvised explosive devices]. I look at those guys, and I think, ‘Do I really deserve a Purple Heart compared to these guys?’" Yeah, Sergeant Boothroyd, if you get shot in the head you deserve a Purple Heart. And a beer. And a steak dinner. And a freaking parade down Main Street of Hometown, USA with the band blaring and flags waving and people cheering and pretty girls kissing you. Thank goodness for improved helmets. Back in WWII, helmets could stop subsonic artillery fragments but not supersonic rifle bullets. Here below is a GI helmet worn by Marine Captain Walter Stauffer McIlhenny and the samurai sword that dented it. McIlhenny was assaulting a Japanese position in Guadalcanal in 1942, startling a Japanese officer who struck him in the head with his katana still in its scabbard. As he lost consciousness, McIlhenny fired off a shot that killed the Japanese. He woke up later on a stretcher with the katana next to him. Helmet and sword can be seen at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. After the war, McIlhenny beame a general in the reserves and went back into the family Tabasco business. General McIlhenny issued "The Charlie Ration Cookbook" wrapped around a camouflaged two ounce bottle of the tasty sauce with recipes for "Combat Canapés" and "*** of Chicken under Bullets." It was McIlhenny who promoted the inclusion of Tabasco sauce in MREs in the 1980s and published "The Unofficial MRE Cookbook," given free to hungry US troops. If not for a good strong helmet, there would be no Tabasco sauce in your MRE. Captain John Finke of F Company 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division wore this helmet during the battle for Troina, Sicily on August 3, 1943 when he was shot through the helmet. Wounded, he stayed with his men all day, until the late afternoon when he finally was medically evacuated. He got the Distinguished Service Cross. It's pretty clear that even a grazing rifle shot could cut through the old M1 helmet. The helmet that sticks in my mind the most is one I saw in Italy. A big bus load of we American tourists were returning to Rome from a day at Pompeii when we stopped for dinner at a big empty joint with Monte Cassino looming in the distance. When I left for the men's room I passed through an alcove full of debris scavenged from the battlefields around there. There was a big slab or curled and twisted steel two fingers thick, probably the casing of one of the bombs dropped on the monastery on top of Monte Casino. There was a glass-fronted case full of German helmets. Down on the bottom shelf was a GI helmet, just like the M1 above, with neat round bullet hole through the front. That helmet haunts me like a ghost.
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Posted
Apr 05 2011, 02:30 PM
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BLACKFIVE