I laughed, then gasped as the warden, who had pulled the first piece of metal from my shoulder, dug in with vigor in the back of my thigh.
“You seem to want to kill a lot of things,” I replied through gritted teeth.
“I would destroy entire civilizations to protect you.”
Okay, whoa. He was getting a little intense for my taste. “There’s no one to kill. It was a roadside IED in Iraq.”
He traced a three-inch line on my thigh with a finger and I shivered. “What is an IED, mate? I do not understand. Why did it attack you?”
I held my breath as the warden pulled the second piece of buckshot from my leg, then placed the tweezers back on the cart. Short of air, but relieved that the digging portion of today’s medical procedure was over, my answer was barely more than a whisper. “It’s called an
