The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaynFMDdNsk

Read that poem in college.

Then when I was hospitalized after my surgery they put me in rehab. The first man, already there, had been medically discharged from the Marines after a Japanese soldier stich ed a line of bullets across his chest with a machine gun. That man was 95.

A couple of days later another old man came in, also 95, who was mostly deaf...because he was a ball turret gunner in WWII. over aeuope. Hearing protection wasn't a thing back then.