Veterans carry grim reminders of war in Iraq

Dont ever run for a seat in Govt boys, or Georgie and his swift boat liars all goons, will be there to crucify your service to your country. Any Loss of limbs doesn't matter your service was never good enough for george.

By Christian DavenportWASHINGTON POSTWASHINGTON

- Brian Radke was celebrating his 31st birthday at Walter Reed Army Medical Center when he chomped into a grilled cheese sandwich and bit something that was neither grilled nor cheese.
It was sharp, round and hard as a BB, and it had dislodged from his throat.

"Shrapnel," the Army specialist told his wife, after he'd spit it into his palm.

"There's my birthday present," Nova Radke remembered him saying.

When Americans are injured or killed in Iraq, official accounts often blame roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

But many times it's the searing hot, sharp-edged shards of metal and debris known as shrapnel that actually cause the wounds.

Walter Reed is full of soldiers whose bodies are riddled with shrapnel.

Many carry around the fragments doctors have left inside them to work their way out over time.

Removing embedded shrapnel, doctors say, can do more harm than good.
And the body can "tolerate it fairly well," said Col. Russell Martin, the general surgeon consultant to the Army surgeon general.

With IEDs a leading cause of injury, the war is producing a generation of veterans who not only have prostheses for limbs but also whose skin seems as bumpy as Braille and looks as if someone dotted it with black marker.

Some carry so much metal that they set off detectors at airports.

Magnetic resonance imaging machines must be avoided because the magnetic force will yank the metal right out of them.

Shrapnel wounds have been part of combat for more than 200 years, since Henry Shrapnel, a British artillery officer, designed a canister that sent metal balls flying during the Napoleonic wars.

"It has probably become the single best man-killer, barring a nuclear weapon," said Dale Smith, chairman of the Department of Medical History at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

Shrapnel often comes in metallic scraps that get scattered at terrifying velocity in an explosion. But during a blast, anything can become a dangerous projectile.

Martin has pulled out bits of rock, glass, wood -- and once, even a part of a circuit board that he presumed came from the cell phone used to detonate the bomb.

He saves much of the shrapnel he removes from patients because, he said, it's helpful for them to see "the actual fragment of metal that caused the scar."

But shrapnel has also become a highly sought-after souvenir of the Iraq war.

"Usually when I offer it to them, they're all over it," Martin said.

As for the pieces he leaves behind, it can take weeks or years for them to surface.

Sometimes, they never come out.
• • •
The first piece of shrapnel that Army Spc. Bryan Anderson saw was in a charred Humvee that had just been rocked by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

It was a vicious-looking scrap of twisted metal, six inches long and one inch thick, with so many razor-sharp edges it couldn't be picked up without a glove.

He just stared at it in horror, he said, wondering what something like that could do to the human body.

That's when he realized how dangerous the war was. "This (expletive) is serious," he remembered thinking.

His fellow soldiers had the same reaction and placed the piece of shrapnel inside an Army command center "so people could see what we were up against," he said.

A few months later, a bomb hit Anderson's Humvee.

Shrapnel sliced through the vehicle and into his body. He lost his legs and his left arm and became the war's fourth triple amputee treated at Walter Reed, according to a hospital spokesman.

Anderson, 24, of Chicago, who is learning to walk on prosthetic legs, estimates he has about 100 fragments of shrapnel inside him. Many are visible under the skin.

The pieces in Radke's face resemble hard pimples. "That's what the ones in my face feel like," he said. "Once you can feel it, you want it out of there."

They itch, he said, and he spends so much time clawing at his peppered arm and face that his wife tells him constantly to stop.

Several pieces have come out, which didn't really hurt, he said. But there was a fair amount of blood and the troubling fact that the last person to hold the piece of metal was likely the insurgent responsible for his injuries.
• • •
For Army Capt. Jason Scott and the soldiers under his command, shrapnel was more than a deadly force; it became a grisly souvenir.

Thirty-five IEDs exploded on the supply route Scott's unit patrolled, and the soldiers commemorated each one they survived by collecting shrapnel from the crater.

Scott kept 15 pieces, each labeled with the date and location of the explosion, in a box next to his bed.

They came in varying shapes and sizes, but all were spiked with sharp edges.

His collection was "kind of a macho thing, to some extent," said Scott, 28, of Chicago. "If you survive an IED blast, it's something you don't forget."

Then, in October, Scott saw a flash, like a kid's sparkler, out of the corner of his right eye. He knew immediately what it was.

Shrapnel tore through the Humvee door, severed his right arm, shattered his left and ripped gouges in his face and body. He was blinded in his right eye.

At Walter Reed, doctors showed him an X-ray. He could identify his pelvis and thigh bone right away.

But what were those little dots floating across the picture, he asked. Shrapnel, the technician said.

Amazed, Scott started counting, but there were too many.

He doesn't know what happened to his collection of shrapnel. He hopes it was shipped back to the States with the rest of his stuff because he has a piece the doctors saved that he would like to add to the collection.

It's no bigger than a nickel, but it ripped through his left arm. He keeps the fragment by his bed at the hospital and occasionally looks at it in wonder, he said: "How could something so small cause so much damage?"

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