ROSEBURG, Ore. — Chris Mintz finished his six-minute deployment broken yet unbowed. He had been shot five times and was bleeding out, thousands of miles from the nearest battlefield.
Being wounded was a real possibility when Mintz enlisted as an Army infantryman, but taking fire in rural Oregon wasn’t quite what he pictured.
He joined in 2004, between two vicious battles in Fallujah while an insurgency simmered in Afghanistan. He could have gone into water purification or finance or any number of jobs. But choosing combat arms in wartime takes a certain kind of soldier with a certain something to prove that cannot be done at home.
For Mintz, home was Randleman, N.C., a small town by small town standards. It took more than a century to grow to 4,000 people — mirroring the stagnant opportunity for the town’s younger population, who could work at the mill or at a fast-food chain where high school classmates stand in the parking lot and smoke weed, devising ways to leave town as soon as possible. Mintz’s escape hatch was the Army, his “birth to the world” as he calls it, because Randleman was not a place where you find out who you are going to be.
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http://www.stripes.com/news/the-fall-and-rise-of-chris-mintz-former-infantry-soldier-a-reluctant-hero-after-oregon-massacre-1.431038?utm_source=Stars+and+Stripes+Emails&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines&utm_medium=email
