Colin "Balloon Foot" Powell
In addition to puncture wounds, soldiers had to worry about infection, because the Viet Cong dipped stakes in poison or human/animal excrement . . . something Colin Powell found out the hard way. During his first tour, Powell and five other soldiers were tramping through the jungle when the young captain stumbled into a punji pit. The stick was so sharp it went straight through his boot and out the other side of his foot. Making matters worse, the stake was completely covered in buffalo dung.
At first, Powell didn’t realize how much trouble he was in and decided to shrug off the pain. Thirty minutes later, he could barely walk. Using a stick as a crutch, he hobbled his way to a nearby Special Forces camp where medics discovered his foot had swollen up and turned a sickly purple. Powell was then transferred to division headquarters where a doctor looked at the hole and came up with the simplest solution possible. The doctor took a rag, put it on a stick, and shoved it in and out of Powell’s wound, cleaning out all the filth. With the help of antibiotics, Captain Powell was back on both feet in a matter of no time, and in addition to a cool war story, the punji stick incident earned him a weird nickname. When Powell was appointed Secretary of State in 2001, President Bush dubbed him “Balloon Foot.”
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