Terrorists shot me 27 times and left me for dead...it was the best thing that ever happened to me!
MIKE DAY should be dead. He should have died when 27 bullets fired by Iraqi terrorists at close range slammed into him.
He should have died when their grenade exploded beside him. He should have died when he flat-lined three times on the way to hospital.
Maimed and psychologically scarred, plunged into depression, he should have died when he contemplated suicide.
Day, 49, is a walking miracle, having transformed his life, and now serving as an inspirational speaker helping others.
“Being wounded was one of the best things that ever happened” says Mike, whose book, , Perfectly Wounded, tells his story. “It allowed me to confront front my inner demons, to transform form my pain into helping others.” ”
Sixteen bullets hit both h arms, both legs, buttocks, shoulder, stomach, scrotum, intestines, bladder and rectum. Another 11 smashed into his body armour. Grenade fragments hit head and body.
Yet bullets and shrapnel miraculously missed major arteries and organs.
“One bullet entered my y knee and tore up my leg, eg, exiting my hip without hitting tting the femoral artery,” he says. s. “A doctor told me I was perfectly ectly wounded.”
Blond, blue-eyed, 6ft 2in Day was a US Navy Seal – the military’s best of the best – when on a combat mission in Iraq in 2007.
“It was routine, seeking an Al-qaeda terrorist cell that had shot down four Medevac helicopters killing everyone,” he says. “We were clearing an Al-qaeda safe house. I entered a small room and saw four terrorists just as they opened fire with AK-47S, 9mm and 762s. It was like being hit with a sledgehammer.
“In that instant I said a prayer, ‘God, please get me home to my girls’ – my mind flashed to my wife and two daughters. They shot my rifle from my hands, and must have shot me in the legs because my feet started to go.”
The hail of bullets killed a fellow Seal and an Iraqi scout, wounding several others.
“I wasn’t afraid of dying,” says Day. “I was just angry. As I fell I pulled my pistol and put five or six shots into the first terrorist. I shot the second just as he pulled the pin from a grenade. He dropped to the floor and blew up.
“The blast knocked me out and the surviving two terrorists slid a gun under my body armour and put two bullets in my back, shattering my right scapula, and two shots in my buttocks. They left me for dead.”
But Day wasn’t ready to die. “When I came to, they were firing at my team. I’d never been so angry. I started firing and they turned on me again. Time slowed to a crawl. I could see every bullet leaving my gun, slowmotion like a movie, surreal.”
Day reloaded twice, leaving both men dead beside him.
“It was difficult to breathe, but I walked around securing the scene, checked that two detainees were cuffed, found six women and children in the next room and called my team back. It was only when I saw their faces I knew I’d been messed up.”
Day stumbled to a chopper that took him to hospital for surgery. Next day he was on a flight to Germany, during which his heart stopped three times.
He lost almost 4st in two weeks and had to relearn how to walk, yet five months later was helping wounded warriors.
But Day’s battles had only just begun. “I went from being James Bond to being a social worker, and I hated being a burden,” he says from his home in Virginia Beach, Florida. The injuries also brought back psychological trauma he suffered as a child.
“I w was abused and beaten by my fa father,” he says. “I watched him b break my mother’s arm. I was 12 when I fought back, hit hitting him with a baseball ba bat. I credit my father for t training me to overcome fear at a very young age. ”
Helping soldiers with physical and mental injuries fed Day’s own depression and PTSD. He started training Seals to parac chute, joining the Navy fr free-fall team – until he had to land on his reserve chute. D Day started teaching Seals urban combat. “Lessons learned from experience,” he laughs. “Protocols “Proto change, but, truth is, you ca can do everything right and still suffer a catastrophe.”
He still has 16 bullet holes, many inked with tattooed bulletholes for dramatic impact. He has necklaces displaying two of the bullets that surgeons dug out.
Though bullet-riddled, he feels like a new man.“i’ve abandoned every bias, belief and dogma that has blocked my self-awareness and joy,” he says, adding cheerily: “There’s shrapnel in my backside which looks like it’s migrating to the surface”.
Perfectly Wounded (Twelve, £25)