A soldier recounts being wounded in combat and waiting for a medevac helicopter. Lying in the dirt, he noticed his medic's stressed eyes despite reassuring words, and confronted the real possibility of not surviving. That moment of mortality reshaped how he sees everything.
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So what was the single greatest lesson you taken away from the trauma that, that transformed in your, in your life so much?
You know, it's interesting because when you're faced with death and you think you're going to die, or you actually are dying, and I, I thought I was, I didn't think I was going to make it out of there. I asked my medic, I said, you know, hey, how am I? And he said, oh man, you're good, don't worry about it. He sounded good, but I could tell in his eyes he wasn't being entirely truthful. He was doing the right thing, he was trying to, to comfort me and, you know, be, be good to me. But I could tell in his eyes that, you know, he was under a lot of stress. And he did his job flawlessly, um, under pressure in combat. But in that, in that moment after, I remember sitting there, I'm sitting there in the dirt waiting on the medevac helicopter. I don't know if I'm going to make it out of this country alive.