The Inspiration of a Bullet Between the Eyes

In the last posting, I promised that I'd tell you how my best friend, Dan, survived a bullet between the eyes in Vietnam and lived to serve as the model for "FraggerSparks," the hero of my three (so far) military science fiction novel series, The Misadventures of Fragger Sparks.

Here's how it happened: Dan (a medic) and his unit got into a firefight with the enemy. His commander asked him to get some smoke grenades to mark a landing zone for the helicopters. Dan scrambled on his hands and knees to get those grenades, and that's when the sniper caught him. The bullet angled down out of the trees, tore through his mouth, and lodged in his throat. Because of the steep angle, the round never hit Dan's brain!

However, it did knock him back up against a tree. Head wounds bleed like mad which caused a second problem. His concerned buddies kept trying to lie him down on the ground, but when they did that, the blood pooled in Dan's throat and choked him. He couldn't speak at the time, but, after several times, he convinced them to leave him sitting up. Soon after, he was medi-vacced out by helicopter.

As you might expect, there were serious injuries. They had to extract the bullet very carefully because it was lodged next to the carotid artery. Then, Dan lost his sense of taste and smell for a long time afterward, but it gradually came back as the taste buds repaired themselves.

Like Fragger Sparks, Dan had (and has) the remarkable ability to get in the damned situations (a bullet between the eyes!) and yet survive them! For a writer, he serves as quite an inspiration!

In the next blog, I'll tell you my philosophy behind the fictional approach to the Fragger Sparks series. See you then!

Steve