“Some men die by shrapnel, and some go down in flames, but most men perish inch by inch, playing at little games”. My personal feeling is that those who go down by shrapnel go down in a lot of pain. And those who survive have to sometimes live with a piece of metal embedded somewhere in the body. It shows up in X-rays, will set of airport metal detectors and is always a guaranteed conversation starter anywhere.
The word shrapnel has come to encompass a lot more than what it was intended to when it was a anti-personnel artillery shell invented by Henry Shrapnel. Today with so many explosive devices available, there is no end to the type of material you place in the bomb to fly around as deadly shrapnel. Pieces of metal, shards of glass, nails, screws, ball bearings, basically anything. Imagine hearing an explosion 50 feet away, still instinctively ducking under the table, thanking God for still being in one piece and then feeling a warm trickle down your foot; it’s your blood and you have shrapnel in your left calf.
It gets worse if the metal is rusted or the materiel has been dipped in poison. This means if the shrapnel doesn’t get you, peritonitis will. Unless of course the doctors do the needful against blood poisoning.
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