I had a neat cob job handlebar lashup on my bike once. Thirty years later, I still have the ugly scar on my leg, running from just below my sack to above my knee. Stem snapped, I went over the front with the jagged metal ripping my thigh open. I think it was somewhere in the ballpark of 4-500 stitches to close it all up.
__________________
This is Africa, 1943. War spits out its violence overhead and the sandy graveyard swallows it up. Her name is King Nine, B-25, medium bomber, Twelfth Air Force. On a hot, still morning she took off from Tunisia to bomb the southern tip of Italy. An errant piece of flak tore a hole in a wing tank and, like a wounded bird, this is where she landed, not to return on this day, or any other day.