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The Annoyed Man wrote:I have not ever been shot, but my dad was shot on Iwo Jima, and I once asked him what it felt like. He was hit in the solar plexus by a 6.5mm Japanese Arisaka rifle bullet. Instead of going straight through him, the bullet was deflected to the left by the heavy brass button on his jacket (it was cold at night on Iwo Jima) and went into his ribcage. It dissected through the muscle tissue between two ribs, all the way around, and exited out his mid back, about an inch or so to the left of his spine. The impact shattered both the button and the bullet's copper jacketing. The lead core is what exited his back, and the wound path was liberally sprinkled with bits of copper and brass. For the rest of his life, little bits of metal would work their way to the surface. He would occasionally develop a little pimple on his front, back, or left side, and a little piece of metal would pop out of it. He died in late 1990 of pancreatic cancer, but even when he was sick and dying, the wound track was visible on his chest x-rays because of the white scar tissue sprinkled with tiny pieces of metal and the last time one of those little pieces came out was a month or so before he died.

He said that the initial blow to his solar plexus was tremendous, and it felt like he had been kicked by a mule right in the gut. It knocked the wind completely out of him. He was upright on his knees when he was hit, and the impact bowled him over onto his back. He said that it took a minute to get his breath back, and then a terrible burning sensation set in. He compared it to the feeling of having a red-hot poker thrust through him and then twisted around. He said that the severe pain only lasted maybe 15 minutes or so (the battle was so fierce where he was wounded, that he said he didn't have a good perception of time passing), and then tissue shock set in and the wound went numb. He said he then stuck his thumbs in the entrance and exit wounds, as he had been taught in training, to staunch the blood loss until a corpsman could get to him.

The corpsman arrived shortly afterward. He was kneeling over my father while working to patch him up, and he (the corpsman) was hit in the shoulder and fell or was bowled over. He picked himself back up and went back to work on my dad, and he was struck a second time by a machine gun bullet in the thigh, breaking his femur. He propped himself back up and finished, then he laid down next to my dad and said, "My turn, I'll tell you what to do." While my dad was trying to apply a dressing to the corpsman's leg, the corpsman was struck a third time in the head and was killed.

Dad was evacuated from Iwo between about 36 and 48 hours after he had been hit, and flown on a C47 to Guam. He had received some initial surgical care in an improvised field hospital in a crater shortly before being evacuated, but the intent was just to stabilize him, stop the bleeding, and get some antibiotics on board. He didn't get real surgical intervention until he was carried off the plane on Guam and operated on in the hospital there.

The tissue damage to my dad's rib cage contributed to a back problem he had, and it plagued him from time to time for the rest of his life.

I don't want to ever got shot by any kind of bullet, but if I had to choose, I'd pick getting shot by a pistol over getting shot by a rifle any day.