Bullet removed - after 70 years
Posted by Salraz in Bullet, Finally, Interesting, Odd
An 88-year-old Spanish Civil War veteran has had a bullet removed from his shoulder - after almost seven decades.
Faustino Olivera is recovering in hospital in Barbastro, in northern Spain, after doctors performed surgery to remove a painful lump from his left shoulder.
They were astonished when they extracted a bullet fired from a Mauser 98, reports the Daily Telegraph.
Mr Olivera remembers the moment he was shot during the Battle of the Ebro.
"We were holed up near a farmhouse when at 2pm on Nov 11, 1938, I took a shot," he recalled.
Conscripted to Gen Francisco Franco's Nationalist troops when he was 18, he was sent to the front where two months later he suffered the injury during an attack by Republicans.
"I was lying on my side in a pit formed by rocks where we had taken up a position to defend ourselves," he told Diario del AltoAragon, a newspaper.
He said that he had first felt a lump two years ago but had thought it was a cyst. It was not until it started growing and became painful that doctors decided to treat it.
