lrb111 wrote:We have a fellow we do business with regularly, that was shot point blank through the heart. I cannot recall the caliber, but It was more than one bullet through the heart. It was about ten years ago.
fwiw, it didn't change his lousy attitude at all.
When I worked in the ER, I once helped to treat a guy (an armed robber, btw, who picked the wrong liquor store that night and had an unpleasant encounter with an ornery sales clerk) who had been shot right through the right ventricle with a 9mm. He was also hit in the upper right arm, which broke his humerus mid-shaft. He was awake, alert, and fairly oriented. Now, without surgical intervention, he would have eventually died of a pericardial tamponade, but he held on long enough to make it to an ER and have emergency surgery, and he survived his wounds.
BTW, my dad was also WIA, having been hit by a Japanese rifle round approximately in the solar plexus. The bullet hit one of his buttons, shattering the bullet jacket. The lead core stayed in his chest wall, dissecting between two ribs, and exited his back midway up, about 4-5 inches to the left of his spine. To the day he died, the bullet track was visible on x-ray because of the trail of fine particles brass button and copper jacket. As recently as a month before he died, I saw him pick a little piece of metal out of his skin which had traveled to the surface from his chest wall.
My dad described the sensation of being shot as like being "kicked by a mule" (his words). He was kneeling when he was hit, and he said he toppled over to his right rear. He said he was incapacitated for perhaps a couple of minutes because the wind had been completely and thoroughly knocked out of him by the bullet impact. He said that, as he began to recover from the impact, the wound began to burn terribly, and then after about a half hour or so, it went numb. (In fact, as he lay there waiting for a medic, he stuck both thumbs in the entrance and exit holes to stem the bleeding because that is what he had been trained to do.) In any case, after that initial few minutes, he was no longer completely incapacitated, and in fact, he shot that Japanese soldier with his .45 some 24 hours after he had been hit himself. It was a couple of hours after shooting that enemy soldier that he and the remaining 6 of the 10 total survivors (out of a rifle company) finally made it back to the relative "safety" of American lines. (Read up on "Cushman's Pocket.")
Another example of remaining relatively effective after being wounded:
The corpsman who helped my dad after he was hit, was hit himself by either a rifle or machine gun round low in the shoulder while working on him, breaking his (the corpsman's) arm. He picked himself up and went back to work on my dad, whereupon he was hit in the legs by machine gun fire. He picked himself back up and finished patching up my dad. Then he lay down next to my dad and said, "my turn... I'll tell you what to do." While my dad was trying to dress the corpsman's wounds, the poor guy took another round to the head and was killed instantly.
The point of all this is that, as WildBill said, a "combat" mindset will get you through an amazing amount of trauma, so long as your wounds are not instantly fatal, and even a direct hit to the heart may not be necessarily instantly fatal. Where I would disagree is that it may be possible that temporary incapacitation has nothing to do with the combat mindset, while the ability to recover from temporary incapacitation and regain a modicum of combat effectiveness has
everything to do with it. A combat mindset is exactly that - a mindset - and it is a matter of good training, and a little personal decision making. But some insults to the body's core are just so overpowering as to temporarily derail that mindset, no matter how bad you think you are, or how good your training. It is something that a warrior tries to prepare for, but all the preparation in the world simply isn't going to enough sometimes. So you push through and hang on until you can resume fighting.
Since a rifle or machine gun round can potentially have far more devastating effects on the human body than a pistol round, it is unrealistic to expect that our "puny" 1911s, etc., are going to knock anybody down. If that is the case, is my love affair with 1911s and my insistence on carrying one mere vanity? I don't
think so, but I'm starting to give some thought to carrying my USP .40 more often with its 12+1 capacity, or perhaps buying something else.
Hmmm.... What to buy? What to buy?....
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
