Every Friday at the end of the day, we held a Command Retreat formation in our unit. We would review some of the weeks activities, cover some things that would be coming up the next week, and wrap it up with a safety briefing for the weekend. On one particular Friday, a Community Clean-up Day, we had the Retreat formation at noon and I wrapped it up with a solid safety briefing focusing on clean up activities: wear hard shoes when mowing and trimming, use ladders safely, use two-man lift for heavy trash cans, etc. I released the troops and went home to participate in the clean up effort.

The work was already well underway around our building when I arrived. I quickly changed out of BDUs into casual dress...jeans, T-shirt, sneakers...and joined in. At one point, one of the teenagers who lived in the building was having trouble with a gas-powered weed-eater. I helped him get it running right and showed him how to use it correctly. In the process of my demonstration I ran it underneath the branches of a shrub that grew beside the sidewalk. The weed-eater snagged something under the brush and jerked back and smacked me on the ankle. My first thought was my safety briefing. Here I was trimming with a power weeder... in my sneakers. I probably cut my foot off and the whole company would know about it. But there didn't appear to be much damage, just a little spot of blood, so I handed the weed machine to the kid and went off and did something less dangerous. Over the rest of the weekend my ankle had a sort of tight feeling and it was sore, but I figured it would bruise up and that was it.

Monday morning. PT. As the exercises progressed, the ankle became more and more of a problem. When we started running, a stabbing pain developed and I decided to have the medics look at it. By the time I got to the clinic, the ankle was swollen and really painful. The medic examined my ankle, couldn't see any cause so he sent me to X-ray. They discovered that there was something in there, behind the tendon above the anklebone. I was sent to the hospital at Bad Cannstadt, to minor surgery. The surgeon looked at my X-ray, looked at my ankle, then told me that they could get it out without too much drama. They put me on a table and swabbed the ankle, numbed it up, and made a little slice beside the tendon and fished around behind it and pulled out an inch-long piece of wire. I don't know, fence wire? Chicken wire? What was it doing under the shrub? I don't know. But they showed it to me on a bloody piece of guaze. I asked the doc if I could keep it. I told him I wanted to show it to my Sergeant Major to prove I had a good reason for dropping out of PT. The medic who was assisting in the OR told me he had a three inch nail he had taken out of an earlier Post Clean-Up victim, I could take that if I wanted. Sergeant Major wouldn't argue with that.

I took him up on it. Sergeant Major wasn't impressed. The only comment I got from any of the other First Sergeants was from my buddy, Bob. He looked at the nail and said, "Wuss." But the worst part was standing in front of the company formation with my ankle wrapped in a monster bandage and everyone of the troops in front of me knew how I got it.