All Comments on 'Combat Wounds'

I enjoyed reading your story. Thank you.

Thanks for the read.

49greg, congratulations for your imagineering of such a grim snapshot of history. I am looking forward to reading your other submissions.

It's been a year and half and I just read it through again. I'm embarrassed at the mistakes I made. Among other things, plus typos, I was supposed to make it clear that George and the older nurse were about the same age, I was going to put it in just as the end with a comment from the nurse that this one was her age, not an eighteen year old like so many of the others.

When I wrote this I had a half done outline for when George and the nurse get together after the war. I never got far with that one, but did this as a pre-quel. Haven't done anything with the outline since.

Too bad it was not continued. Must be tough to have this much potential and so little time to develop it. Keep writing!

You have the unique ability to create complete images with sound and olfactory effects with so few words. Your words were like a thousand picturs; it was like being there. Thanks for the story.

DHL

How did he know the Feldwebel he killed was named Mueller?

Normally the enemy is just that, the enemy.

I just re-read the comments today and I wanted to answer the question about how he knew the enemy's name. As I mentioned in my earlier Author's Note, I had planned on this being a prequel to another story that never got written. In that story one of his buddies gives him the personal effects of the man he killed, including pictures of and letters from a girlfriend/wife. It's there he finds his name etc. (I know that in real life the intel people would have all that stuff.

In the original synopsis of the continuation our guy ends up in the occupation forces after the war and meets the wife of the guy he killed. I never decided what would come of that.

Later I scrapped that idea and worked on a completely different story with our guy that takes place years later during the depression in the states. I may actually get that finished at some point within the next ten years, It'll be a romance.

The idea for Combat Wounds came gradually and when I started on it I had most of it in my head already. I had a grandfather in WW1 and got a few tidbits of his experiences second hand from an uncle, his son, who was a ww2 vet. The maggots put on wounds to eat dead flesh was one of those experiences of my granddad.

The hospital scenes were a pastiche of experiences from a couple of operations I've had and pure imagination spurred on by old films and TV.

Sorry I didn’t get to this earlier. I am impressed that you, unlike others, knew of the weapons that you described. Usually much innaccuracy on that subject.