PERFECTLY WOUNDED

A Navy SEAL recounts a career of service and recovery from terrible wounds.

In 2007, Day was involved in an operation designed to track down and neutralize a terrorist cell in Iraq’s Anbar Province. He entered a room where four guns were trained on him, receiving 27 wounds—and still managed to kill all four shooters. Some of his memoir is by-the-numbers—it’s no surprise to learn that SEALs undergo training that would send most people packing—and some of the narrative is a touch overwritten—as when he writes of that critical moment: “It was surreal, like something out of a movie: time slowed almost to a stop and everything happened in super slow motion, almost as if I were watching the scene unfold frame by frame.” Each of Day’s 27 wounds was, in the words of the doctors who treated him, “perfect”—that is, each entered and exited from his body without hitting a vein, artery, or vital organ, making treatment possible. “Not one of the bullets, or the combination of them all, was enough to kill me,” he writes. Still, Day, who entered the service bearing the psychic wounds of an abusive childhood, suffered PTSD in the aftermath. Separated from the service, he spent time casting about for something to do before settling on a course of care for his fellow veterans and trauma sufferers, working both as a motivational speaker and a guide through the organization he founded called the Warrior Tribe, which provides “resiliency programming” for those who have undergone similar terrors to his. The author’s account of his recovery is inspiring indeed, a matter of tough love, persistence, and an ethic borrowed in part from Mr. Rogers: “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet….”

Readers interested in care programs for returning veterans will find Day’s account invaluable.