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When luck’s on your side

The exactness of the story I relate here is the best I could glean from the relatives involved who were familiar with it. I did not press them to elaborate beyond their own honest recollections of the incident here related. To me the whole story is incredulous enough, even if a comma or period is somehow displaced in my retelling of the affair.

I’m not going to give names, simply because one ought to be judicious about sprinkling someone’s name in the paper without their permission, out of a simple respect for their privacy. I first heard this story from a close relative of the victim, who I knew. Years later, in fact most recently, I was talking to another close relative of said victim, and I asked him about it. He confirmed the story, which I have no reason to doubt, but of course the story itself stretches one’s imagination. As I indicated I will not reveal the sources of my tale.

It seems that during World War II this GI was going to service one of the outfits 50-caliber machine guns. As he prepared his chore the gun inadvertently went off, firing a 50-caliber slug directly into the chest of one of his companions, who, as it happened, was standing in a very precarious position. As they say, carelessness costs lives. In this case the 50-caliber slug entered the chest of the victim, and not to be hindered by so delicate a target, continued in its determined flight out of the back of our subject and well on its way to wherever its destiny would have it. As they say, when your time is up, it’s up, and when its not, it’s not. The close relative of the victim telling me the story, said it was a 50-caliber machine gun, which is used commonly in the infantry. Another stated that he didn’t know about the gun size but it did go right through him.

For your information I can tell you that most rifles and machine guns used in the infantry, at least in those days, were 30-caliber. That would indicate a bullet of about one-third of an inch in diameter. A 50-caliber slug would be more likely about one-half inch in diameter, much more than would typically be used against personnel. They did have their place in the infantry, but you don’t have to make that big a hole in a man to kill him. I recall firing a 50-caliber machine gun during my basic training in the army. We were firing at some 55-gallon steel drums that were perhaps 200 or 300 yards away. When we struck them they went end over end like the tin cans in the movies when the cowboys shot at them. They were certainly a lot of fire power.

In any case just to make a long story short, our victim lived to a ripe old age, well into his ’90s, with no apparent difficulties from his World War II wound. As they tell me, he was a very unusual gentleman, giving his best to every one.

The odds of our friend surviving this accident were nearly nothing, yet he did. I am dumbfounded, and once again in a perplexity of the rules and regulations of this world. I can only wonder at the way we as a people sometimes escape, and at other times are victimized by the fates that befall us. Sometimes the smallest of mistakes can turn into tragedies, and at another time the most stupid bit of careless, tragedy loaded actions can result in nothing.

It would certainly seem to the casual observer that there are forces at work in this life that are beyond our understanding. May God bless America.

Richard Westlund is a Collins resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com

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