[The bullet] tore a hole through his 10th Mountain Division patch and through a pack of cigarettes in his arm pocket, destroying all but one.
“So I pulled it out and had myself a cigarette.”
- SSG Brandon Camacho
That has got to be the coolest line evah, and I burst out laughing when I got to it. Here's part of the story, but make sure to read the whole thing.
‘The Bullet Magnet’ is back in the fight in Afghanistan
By Dianna Cahn, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Tuesday, August 4, 2009
LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan — Staff Sgt. Brandon Camacho was in a “pissing contest” with the enemy. He shot one guy, then another popped up.
He threw a grenade, but it bounced off the man and exploded in a ditch.
As the squad leader then zigzagged through a field, he felt someone tug at his shirt sleeve. Hours later, after the firefight, he’d discover that a bullet had whizzed right through it, narrowly missing his bicep. It tore a hole through his 10th Mountain Division patch and through a pack of cigarettes in his arm pocket, destroying all but one.
“So I pulled it out and had myself a cigarette,” Camacho says, holding the patch over his arm. Then he lifts the patch to expose a scar. It’s not from that bullet in April, but from another one a month later, earning the 22-year-old his fourth Purple Heart for wounds in a war he just won’t quit.
Struck by shrapnel during heavy mortar bombardment in Iraq in 2003, Camacho has since been grazed by one bullet, hit in the shoulder with a tracer round and finally, in June, shot in the arm. His men call him “The Bullet Magnet” and joke that since all his injuries have been on his left side, if they just stand to his right, they’ll be fine.
The most received by one person is eight, according to various sources, but receiving four remains a rare occurrence.
Read the rest of the story about his prior injuries, and about some of his buddies who didn't make it back.
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