Your Faces of Death

Note to self: Bubbler is not good with vehicles or sharp objects.

You know, I'm realizing from this thread how damn boring my life has been. None of these things have come even remotely close to happening to me. I feel like you guys are a Devon Sawa sighting away from being Final Destinationed out of here.

 

Summer of 1983, I was 15 and working for my best friend's father who did maintenance at a huge county park. It was time to brush hog some big fields and I was driving an open cab small tractor that was county property. I knew the problem with the tractor had been a leaky fuel line. I was working on motorcycles at the time, so I figured it was a simple fix. Hell, I could replace a fuel line at that point. Anybody with a screwdriver can.

It wasn't until I had the tractor up to 35 mph going from the shop to the field that I smelled the diesel and saw it spraying out. Seems the mechanic didn't tighten down the clamp enough, so under pressure it began spewing diesel all over the engine block.

I jumped on the brake. Tractors don't brake well. They tend to flip over when you do it, thanks to the triangle design of the wheel alignment. So I backed off and got it stopped. When I did, the diesel hit something hot enough to light it on fire. I jumped onto the seat, started to jump right and then chose to go left.

When I landed, I ran about 50 yards before I realized by left leg was on fire. I stopped, dropped and rolled and stood up with a leg that looked like burned fried chicken. Some golfers on the course nearby ran over. Another took the cart to the pro shop to call 911 (pre-cell phone days). Within 30 minutes, I was in ICU with 3rd degree burns on my left leg. Two skin graphs later, I still have scars on the inside of my left thigh and calf where they were pressed against my right leg during the stop, drop and roll.

But that wasn't the close call. When I chose to jump left, intend of right, I saved my life. One of the golfers told the cops the tractor exploded right after I landed on the ground. It blew to the right. With only some of it coming left (a piece hit me in the arm, which resulted in another scar). I went back to the site a few weeks later and found shrapnel embedded in a couple of oak trees about 20 yards to the right of where I stopped the tractor. I go right, I probably die.

(Then there was the time I was stabbed by a homeless guy, but that's not that big of a deal.)

 

I hate telling this story because I look back at it and can't believe just how stupid and irresponsible I was. It was the day after my 19th birthday and we went to a party and I got bombed. Somehow, I thought it would be a good idea to go with a friend, who was equally bombed, to his college to visit his old buddies, 2 hours away.

Right from the outset, I kind of knew it was a bad idea, and for whatever reason (at this point, I couldn't walk a straight line and probably struggled to walk at all) I decided to put on my seatbelt. At the time, I never wore a seatbelt, and it's likely the last thing you think of when you've had 16 beers.

We didn't make it to his college, actually never cross town lines before we hit a tree going about 40. The impact to the front of the truck was lined up right at the passenger seat. I know I'd be dead had I not put that belt on. He didn't have his belt on and was thrown against me on the other side of the truck cabin. All I suffered was a few cracked ribs from the impact of the belt.

Police came, arrested him and took me into protective custody because I was 19. That was the first and last time I ever entered the police station in my town (or any town). It was a lesson learned, that I can tell you unequivocally.

 

Great story.

Did you ever ask the guys what they shot on the hole?

 

This one doesn't involve me, but my daughter who was three years old at the time.

She wanted to go bowling because they'd been mini-bowling at day care that week. So we took her the following weekend. As an important aside, she was still at the stage where she hated to leave my wife's side even for a millisecond.

So when my wife steps up to the lane and starts her motion, my daughter leaps out the chair beside me and starts running towards her, not realizing my wife was about to swing the ball backwards. I saw what was about to happen and screamed my daughter's name as loud as I've screamed in my life. She stopped probably about an inch short of the ball's path. I can't imagine what would have happened had she kept going. Still haunts me.

 

Tubing down the Verde River in college we see a big tube overturn, then a lady is screaming that she has lost her child - in the middle of the river.

This was an area where the water was about 4-6 feet deep and not moving that swiftly, but moving still. We all get off our tubes and go under. About four of us IIRC. I get nothing on my first couple attempts, then my buddy, who was a lifeguard at the time, rips up this baby by its diaper out of the water and he is so mad. So mad.

We all just get the hell out of there because we know what is coming, he had been bitching about kids without lifejackets earlier in the day.

He makes sure the kid is fine with some Red Cross moves to get the water out of the kids lungs, and then he hears the kid crying and knows everything is going to be fine. Then we hear him dress the woman down, in a very vulgar way, about her proficiency as a parent. Phrases like "you stupid bitch, kid should be dead and lucky I was fucking here" were thrown around a lot. And none of her hillbilly friends said a word.

After those five unreal minutes we continued down the river.

It was a crazy afternoon.

 

Not about me directly, but ...

My dad was in the 44th infantry division in WWII, European Theatre. Near the end of the war his platoon was sent out on what was supposed to be a low-risk patrol. Just before they left, a rear-echelon clerk or something expressed an interest to go on the patrol, as he hadn't seen any combat duty. He took my father's place. Patrol unexpectedly came under fire, guy who took my father's place was killed.

I later found out the 44th had one of the highest casualty rates of any division in the European Theatre, about 80-90 percent or so. Since my dad was in-country from Dec. 1944 through the end of the war, I'm lucky to be here.

A friend of mine's father is from a small town in Wisconsin. Near the end of the war, he and several other soldiers were walking someplace when a jeep drove by. Lo and behold, a friend of his from that tiny Wisconsin town was on that jeep, and asked them if they wanted a ride. For whatever reason, they declined. About 10 minutes later, they walked past the wreckage of that jeep, which had hit a mine or been hit by an artillery shell, can't remember which, and the bodies of the jeep's passengers.

 

I don't even want to think what this thread would be like on a veteran's message board.

 

Three that I can think of:

1. When I was about 7 or 8, we were driving from my grandparents back home after Christmas. It was about a 12-hour drive on I-75. The car hit a patch of ice and started spinning. Went across the median into oncoming traffic (on I-75) before finally smacking against a guard rail. We were driving late at night, so there wasn't much traffic, otherwise we likely get hit by the oncoming traffic. And somehow the guard rail held us. Had it not, there was a nice drop that would not have been fun to experience.

2. About 10 years ago, was eating lunch by myself in my apartment when a piece of chicken got stuck on my throat. Tried to wash it down with some tea, swallowed and realized the tea was all in my mouth. Realized at that point I couldn't breathe. Amazingly, my first thought was to get the tea out of my mouth, so I went to the bathroom to spit it up in the toilet. Fortunately, I gagged and enough of the chicken came back up that I was able to breathe.

3. Last summer at a party with a GF. She was drunk and wouldn't let me drive her home. So she started walking - wearing dark clothes in the pitch dark. I drove alongside her trying to get her in the car. No dice. Finally parked in a parking lot and got out and walked along with her while trying to talk sense into her. Saw a car coming up behind us, so I pulled her out of the road a bit just as the car's side-view mirror clipped us. Another few inches out in the road, and it would have been nasty for us.

 

Freshman year of college at USC. I had gone with a group of friends to go see a show at one of the 18+ clubs on the Strip (probably The Roxy) and had returned to our dorm at about 2 a.m. My buddy and I decided to go across the street to the 32 Market in the University Village shopping center to get some snacks and a soda. As we are standing on the edge of campus getting ready to cross the street to the market, we look up to hear shouting from two cars at the intersection. One car is stopped at a red light. Another car is stopped at the green light. No other cars are on the street.

Suddenly, we hear three "pops" coming from the direction of the cars. In between the second and third "pop", I hear a really tight "whizzzz" sound go past me at about ear level, no more than a foot away from my head. There was about a three-foot tall mound directly behind us, so my friend and I haul ass to climb over it and duck behind it like it's a WWI trench. It had been raining, so the mound was muddy and a slipped and basically slid down it as the cars peeled off.

We were on the ground in silence for a few seconds as the cars drove off. This was punctuated by me letting loose with an angry "oh, fuck!" which my friend thought meant that I had been shot. In fact, I was just pissed off that my new jeans were covered in mud from when I slid down the mound. We laughed about that, thought about it for a few seconds and rationalized that since a) they weren't shooting for us and b) they certainly weren't coming back to the exact same spot, we might as well go get our late-night snacks.

Which we did. And then we went back to the dorms and, as soon as the shock and adrenaline wore off, promptly freaked the fuck out. For the record, a bullet whizzing past your head kind of sounds like a kazoo, but higher pitched and more likely to kill you. I didn't tell my family until after I graduated (I came from a small town in Central California and was actually supposed to be a senior in HS that year - I skipped my last year of HS - and I was pretty convinced that if they found out what had happened, I would be on the next bus back to the Valley.)

 

When I was a kid I was lucky I avoided blowing a guy's head off with a shotgun.

I was in Boy Scouts growing up, and one campout a year we went to a lake with a nearby gun range to shoot clay pigeons and .22s. I was in middle school, and it was my first time handling a weapon of any kind. Spent most of the day shooting and missing with a nifty single-shot, hinge action .20 gauge.

One of the leaders says I can try his semi-auto .12 gauge. I express concern, but he says it's fine. He's got it set up to only accept 3 rounds at a time. I can barely point the gun down range. I say pull, squeeze the trigger, and it feels like I'm kicked by a mule.

The second time it knocks me down. The leader is staning to my right, just behind me. My hand stays on the trigger as I go down. The third round goes off with the barrel inches in front of the guys face. It all happened so fast. One second I'm on my feet, the next on my ass, and he's white as a ghost. It takes me a few seconds to realize what happened. I start bawling and apologizing at the same time. He says it's his fault, etc.

Every time I think about that, I can see that moment in sloooooooooow motion.

 

You People Got Nothing

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