RAMADI, Iraq - The 21-year-old gunner was standing atop the turret of a Humvee called Frankenstein's Monster when the bomb exploded on the ground beside him, sending a wave of sizzling shrapnel and ball-bearings toward his head.
Knocked down inside his vehicle by the blast, Spc. Richard Sugai regained consciousness minutes later and realized he was lucky to be alive. His savior: a glass cocoon of 2-inch thick bulletproof windshields he had welded around the top of his turret three days earlier.
Troops mockingly call the modification "Pope Glass" because it brings to mind the ballistic-proof glass box the late Pope John Paul II traveled in after being wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt....
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