Story Time Series: I Met A Former Vietnam Vet With a Quarter of His Head Missing, That Was Just the Beginning

For this installment in our Story Time Series, I decided to write about a very personal situation that could trigger some people. Regardless, it’s true and was a wild experience. This one goes back a while. I was trying to pin down my exact age when it happened, and I think I was somewhere around twenty-eight, twenty-nine, or maybe thirty. One of my best friends was working for a dentist at the time, and I went in to get my teeth cleaned. While I was in the chair we started talking, she was practically bursting to tell me about something that had just happened to her. She’d gone to see a man she called a psychic, but he wasn’t a psychic in the traditional sense. He was a Vietnam veteran.

His story is one of the most astounding things I’ve ever heard secondhand, before I even met him myself. He’d stepped on a landmine in Vietnam, and the injury took out part of his skull among other things. I mean that literally. When you meet him, your mouth almost drops open, because there is an exact right-angle wedge, a full ninety-degree section missing from the top of his head. His hair grew over it eventually, after many surgeries, but the divot is unmistakable. He also lost part of an arm, leg, most of his vision, along with massive tissue damage. It was not easy to look at him. It really took a moment to handle it.