[Salamander]

"who still carries shrapnel in his thigh"

Oh fer cryin' out loud.
If he has to keep whining about it he should have it removed.

[oh...wait...then he'd have no "gravitas" a'tall, would he?]

Kerry should've seen what *real* shrapnel did to my grandaddy's arm in the South Pacific.
They just stitched together what he had left as best they could and sent him back out to fight.
[45 years later, he got *a* Purple Heart which he did *not* "request"]
He spent the rest of his life with virtually no meat on the underside of his arm and a hand that didn't work right anymore but he never once made an issue of it.
In fact, when I was little and asked about the funny-looking (:::::::::) stitch scars, he told me that "a centipede bit him".
I had a horror of those bugs, ever after that....:))

My dad drove an ordnance truck to the front lines in Korea yet he says all did in the war was feed Korean kids candy and he'll pull out the pictures to prove it.

Real "heroes" don't have to brag.

[MamaLucci]

Real "heroes" don't have to brag.

So true.

[MamaLucci]

PS:
A heartfelt thanks to your Dad and Grandfather for their service to our country.

[lainde]

--"who still carries shrapnel in his thigh"--

BTW is the microshrapnel enough to set off metal detectors? In my spare time, just to be ornery, I swear I'm going to research how much metal it takes to set one of them off.