“On May 14, Joel Stubleski was with his unit in Eastern Afghanistan, the 3-509th out of Fort Richardson, Alaska. His unit was returning from a mission when they heard gunfire,” Lacie Grosvold reports for KTVA 11.
“During the commotion, he felt a strong pressure in his upper thigh. ‘It knocked me over.’ He said he didn’t feel pain right away. He didn’t see blood, so he continued to reload. He’d been hit,” Grosvold reports. “Once he knew what had happened, he took cover and waited. A fellow soldier put the tourniquet he kept in his pocket around his leg. Stubleski waited. While he waited, he thought, ‘Is this it? If it is, there’s nothing I can do — at least I went out doing what I was supposed to do.’ He was bleeding and, he said, he started feeling tired. ‘I kept telling myself, don’t close your eyes.'”
“After helicopters picked him up, medics inspected his injuries. They cut off his clothes and went through his pockets. There, they found his iPhone — with a bullet hole through it. ‘The medics would come up to me and say, ‘this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,”” Grosvold reports. “Stubleski wasn’t carrying it for calling or texting. He said he used it as a camera or for music. The doctors told him how lucky he was that the bullet didn’t hit the femoral artery. They said that the iPhone probably changed the trajectory of the bullet, making the wound shallower in his flesh.”
Read more in the full article here.
