Lately I have also started to understand that scars on my body are not what I remember.
There is the scar on my hand that I used to think was from scraping it on concrete one night when I was drunk and could not drive so I had to go through a bad neighborhood while walking to my apartment 7 miles away from the bar I had been at. I have started thinking that the reality is that I was tortured as a POW and the scar is from someone using a power drill on my hand.
The scar on my right wrist isn't the burn I recieved from someone dropping hot apple pie on it when I was a kid in a day care center, rather...I'm not really sure what it is. I have been thinking it is a shrapnel wound from anti-aircraft artillery. When I think of this I think of two scenes from two movies. One is that scene in "Memphis Belle" where the tomato soup container explodes and they wonder who was hit. The other is the scene in "Air America" where they talk about the "golden BB." I have been thinking lately that Mel Gibson is my older brother. And actually a third movie is from "Mission To Mars" where that one guy has a meteroid go through his hand and I wondered if it is common in space for meteroids to look like ball bearings.
The big scar on my lower left leg is not the bug bite I remember. Rather it is a bullet wound that would seem to have remarkably missed by a fraction of an inch from shattering the bone. Just above that is a diagonal scar that looks like a knife scar. As soon as I thought of that, I remember a memory of someone injured where my mother worked and that the skin had been sliced down the bone of her shin and I remember thinking of how that must have hurt. I think that was actually a deflection mechanism to get me to forget that it was actually my shin that happened to and it was actually from me or someone else using a knife to cut out the bullet.
There are several other scars that I think are bullet wounds and other injuries. I started thinking that a missile exploded near my aircraft one time, shattering the canopy and my helmet and I' not sure why I didn't crash as I must have had at least a concussion. I think another time I was shot in the back with a shotgun but I was wearing a bullet proof vest. I have been wondering too if I was hit in the chest one time when wearing a vest.
I don't know if it will be harder to relive those experiences again than it was to first experience them.
