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Our deployments got cancelled because of Hurricane Katrina, but during the early part of the war when I was in clinicals, we were getting patients en route from Ramstein to MTFs in Texas. I remember being 19 and looking down at the paperwork from my first patient that had been wounded in the AOR... That's when I "grew up". He was a soldier shot in the back with 7.62x39mm, he had taken off his armor to get into a tight space while repairing a humvee damaged in the field. The bullet remained intact after striking one of his ribs proximal to his spine, and had shattered the bone fragments into his left lung. The bullet stopped there, but flipped into a vertical position. They had removed the lower two lobes of that lung in emergency surgery. My X-Ray demonstrated no change in the bullet position on the trip over, or any worsening of the remaining lobe, the bullet was still dangerously close to his spine and would need delicate neurosurgery. Thank God he was doped up to his eyeballs and sedated. And then I looked at his DOB: he was 3 or 4 months younger than me...
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