Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death. Once I was blown up in a Humvee in Afghanistan and avoided injury because the bomb went off under the engine block instead of the crew compartment—a difference of about ten feet. I was jacked with adrenaline for the next few hours and then went careening into a depression that lasted days. I became paranoid about almost everything: where I sat, where I walked, what I sat behind. It was the ten feet that got
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