He’s learned a lot in his two deployments to Afghanistan. He witnessed abject poverty, with people living in mud huts. And he witnessed the fragility of life, with buddies dying from Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs.<\/p>\n
“The stress level is there,” he says about patrols. “You have to turn off your emotions when you’re out there.”<\/p>\n
That’s what he did when word crackled over the radio that a vehicle had flipped into the river. Blain sprinted to the scene, shedding gear as he ran. In the distance he saw the wheels of a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored fighting vehicle \u2014 or MRAP \u2014 sticking out of the water.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Read the whole story… It’s worth the few minutes it takes.\u00a0 And he jumped out of perfectly good aircraft!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mail it, he said. No, the Army said. We’re coming out. Midst all the fakes and … A Good Deed, Rewarded<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":467,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues","category-real-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/467"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}