Aaron Thompson is lucky to be alive.

The Durant native and Navy Seabee had been stationed in Afghanistan for almost three months, when the FOB (Forward Operating Base) where he was working came under mortar fire from Taliban forces on Nov. 23.

“It was right around lunch time, and we were just sitting around,” Thompson said, “when we heard what sounded like a small explosion. It didn’t even sound big enough to be a mortar.”

The small explosion was enough to draw Thompson and a corpsman outside to check on it, to see if any fellow soldiers needed help.

“We ran about 100 meters toward the explosion and were about 50 meters from where everyone was at,” he said. “That’s when the second one hit.”

The second round hit less than 10 feet away from Thompson and two others next to him. The corpsman and one other soldier were down.

“The corpsman’s injury was really severe and I was kind of in a haze,” he recalled.

“I grabbed him and pulled him behind a concrete bunker and went to go find help. I didn’t even realize I was hit, I was just running on adrenaline, I guess.”

He made it about 100 yards, with mortars going off all around him, before a group of servicemen tackled him and told him he had been hit.

“I said ‘I’m not hit, my corpsman needs help,’ then I looked down, saw the blood and said, ‘ Oh [expletive deleted] I am hit,’” he said.

That was the first time that he got scared.

“It was really scary when they started ripping off my clothes to look for wounds,” Thompson said. “If you look down and you can practically see your ankle bone, and you can’t even feel that, you know that you have other wounds somewhere, up on your body.

“I was looking around, searching my body, scared to death that my fingers were going to disappear in some hole somewhere.”

But thankfully, Thompson suffered only minor wounds on his upper body, with some shrapnel bouncing off his ear, and a small piece going into his wrist.

“Us being so close to it was kind of what saved us,” Thompson said, “it kept the shrapnel from hitting us up high, it only caught me in the legs.”

Thompson was fortunate with one piece of shrapnel, however, which was deflected away from his body by his dog tags.

The next few days are a blur to the Seabee, as he was treated at two different military hospitals in Afghanistan, where they removed the shrapnel, and then transported to Germany, to be stitched up, and finally to Washington, D. C.

“They had me on so much morphine and Percocet® that I really don’t remember half of it,” he said. “They were flying me all over the place and moving me constantly, I just wanted to get somewhere where I could stay.”

Thompson arrived back in Durant on December 5, where he is spending the holidays with his wife Shelena and their daughter Angelina, before reporting back to his unit in San Diego after the first of the year.

There hasn’t been much in the way of rehab, other than being shown how to use his crutches and do some stretching, and Thompson was noticeably limping at the time of this interview.

“My right leg is actually broken and I’m not supposed to be walking on it, but it’s kind of hard to get around the house on the crutches,” he said.

Once he reports back in January, the decision will be made on whether he will be redeployed, stay in San Diego for more medical attention, or whether the Navy will discharge him and return Thompson home to Durant.

“Hopefully they’ll demote me and send me back home. Before I left I couldn’t even walk, but I’ve been working out and now I can put a little weight on it, so we’ll just have to see,” he said.

However, Thompson is fine with being redeployed if that is what the Navy decides to do, in spite of his close call in Afghanistan.

“Sure, I think about it. The guys over there would ask me ‘How did you survive that?’ When there’s mortar going off all around you and one hits a few feet away from you, usually there’s nothing left. God was on my side.”

“I don’t have a problem with going back. It’s really a beautiful country, if you can just get past people shooting at you,” he said.

“If it wasn’t for my wife and daughter, I would be over there non stop. I’d be deploying every single time.”