Aug 08 , 2020

Meet the Navy SEAL who was shot 27 times and lived to tell the story

Navy SEAL Sr. Chief Mike Day had never been shot before, but that changed dramatically one night in April 2007.

In 2007, Mike Day was caught in a brutal firefight with three al-Qaeda insurgents after he was the first of his team to enter a room in a town near Fallujah, Iraq. The enemy fighters opened fire, hitting Day with 27 separate bullets. 11 of the shots were stopped by his body armor, but 16 penetrated his body and left him perilously wounded.

A grenade then exploded just 10 feet away from him, knocking him unconscious. According to Day, when he woke up roughly a minute later, he managed to kill two of the fighters with his pistol.

“Upon entering that doorway, they all just opened up on me. It felt like somebody was just beating me up with sledgehammers,” Day said.

“After I’d figured out I was getting shot I said, ‘God, get me home to my girls.’ That was my first prayer to God, real prayer. When the fighting finally stopped, he miraculously got up and walked himself to a medical helicopter.

“People hear about my story and they can’t believe it. I was there and I can’t believe it,” Day said. “I got shot 27 times – 16 in the body and 11 times in my body armor. ”

“I was shot in both legs, both arms, my left thumb was almost amputated, I was shot in the abdomen and had a colostomy bag for a year, my right scapula was shattered, I was shot twice in the buttocks, once in the scrotum and my body armor was hit multiple times which caused fractured ribs and contusions on my lungs.”

The Navy SEAL spent just 16 days in the hospital – during which time he lost 50lbs – before he was discharged and awarded the Purple Heart, the oldest military decoration still given to serving military members in the US.

During the following years, he was treated for PTSD by the Carrick Brain Centers, in Dallas.

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