Bong Hits 4 the Wounded:
Chances are extremely great that you will never encounter an improvised explosive device. Not for your entire life. Chances are you won't truly understand what it's like to feel the concussive blow of the homemade bomb. That is a good thing, of course, of course. But you should know. You should know what it's like. It's part of our responsibility to know.

You see, the thing about whatever shrapnel is released by the IED, whether it's the materials of the bomb or perhaps nails and shit packed in with it, is that it's hot. It is, after all, metal that just was instantly rocketed in your direction by fire. So remember that one of the sensations is of a piece or, more likely, pieces of metal searing your flesh. Remember what it felt like when you touched that pan on the stove that one time? Now imagine that hitting your face or legs and piercing into you.

Then, there's the cutting of the wounds. Look at your arm. Pick a spot on it: your wrist, your forearm, your elbow. Now imagine that spot shredded. Not necessarily cut off. But shredded, like a carrot after a bit of grating, skin and muscle and veins jutting out, dangling, spitting blood, like an electric circuit looking for a completed connection. Maybe move that to your gut, your genitals, your neck, your face. Essentially, small buzzsaws went into you, slicing and buffeting around. It's probably still in there, cutting more with each convulsion your body involuntary makes, burning still.

Now add to that temperatures over 100 degrees and possibly 40 pounds of clothes and gear on you heating you further. In a cramped space, if you were in a Humvee and weren't thrown from the vehicle.

That's one way to be wounded or killed by one weapon in Iraq. As one nurse from Kansas wrote, "It's amazing to see the amount of physical damage a body can survive." She worked at the hospital in Camp Anaconda, where they did 50-100 surgeries a day in three operating rooms. The frontline medics just try to hold off the bleeding out.

We just get to do it metaphorically.

Back in a bit with a few words on Bush's few words.