Three members of the 25th Infantry Division were awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism on Luzon in 1945.
The stitches from Carl Wunder’s encounter with a World War II bullet should heal up pretty quickly.
Not the entry wound: That was in 1945, when a bullet from a Japanese machine gun shattered his upper right arm.
This is more like an exit wound, after a doctor removed two bullet fragments Tuesday morning.
Three members of the 25th Infantry Division were awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism on Luzon in 1945.
The bits of metal had been there for 67 years before finally working their way toward the skin. That’s when they began to irritate Wunder — particularly the bigger fragment.
“After it got to the surface, it would hurt when I touched it,” the Vancouver veteran said Tuesday afternoon.
Brian Wunder knew his father had been wounded during combat in the Philippines: A Purple Heart medal is in a display case along with his dad’s Bronze Star, the “Tropic Lightning” badge of the Army’s 25th Infantry Division and GI dog tags still smeared with putty. (Soldiers stuck the metal tags together so they wouldn’t rattle, Brian said.)
But Brian didn’t know the wound was an ongoing story until a recent conversation with his mother, Marguerite.
“They had come back from the VA, and she said they had postponed (Carl’s) procedure,” Brian said. “I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“She said it was his arm, he was wounded in the war, and a piece of a slug was still in there,” Brian continued.
“I said, ‘What?'”
So Carl showed him.
“It was right under the skin and it was driving him nuts,” Brian said.
There are no statistics on this sort of WWII follow-up procedure, but it seems to be pretty rare.
“This is a rather uncommon occurrence, with just two cases of this sort in recent memory at Portland VA Medical Center,” said spokesman Daniel Herrigstad — and one of those cases was Wunder.
