What really happens when you get shot

STAFF SERGEANT NICK Lavery wasn’t only the most physically imposing Green Beret on our team, he was the most physically imposing soldier any of us had ever seen. He was 6’5″, approaching 280 pounds, and cut like a linebacker—the position at which he excelled, not coincidentally, as a college football player at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He was a weapons specialist, and an expert in hand-to-hand combatives. If Army scientists and tattoo artists had highjacked a Darpa lab to create the ultimate soldier, they would have created Nick. But that wouldn’t prevent a single gunshot to the leg from nearly killing him.

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