Douglas 'Mike' Day was a career Navy SEAL, a senior chief with twenty-one years in uniform, on his fourth deployment when he took a four-man team into a house in Anbar province on 6 April 2007 looking for an al-Qaeda financier.
The room he entered had four insurgents in it. They opened fire at a distance of a couple of metres. Day was hit twenty-seven times — sixteen rounds stopped by his body armour, eleven in his body — and a grenade went off close enough to lift him off his feet. He lost his pistol, drew his backup, and killed all four men in the room.
Then he got up. He walked out of the house under his own power, past his own team, refused a stretcher and climbed into the medical helicopter on his feet. The doctors who received him did not believe the count until they X-rayed him.
He recovered, and retired in 2010. What he did with the years afterwards is the part he cared about: he worked with wounded veterans and with men and women carrying post-traumatic stress, talked openly about his own, and made the point over and over that surviving the room is the easy half.
He died of cancer in 2023, aged forty-eight, and asked that people remember the work and not the number.
Foto: Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
