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GI recovering after bullet rips through helmet

Nov-22-2005 » Filed Under: 172nd SBCT

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By MIKE STARK, Gazette

The phone rang at 2:45 a.m. Julie Mathiason caught it before the second ring.

By then, she and her husband, Kim, had become accustomed to calls at all hours from their son, Army Sgt. Mackay Mathiason, a Stryker Brigade commander in Iraq.

But instead of Mackay on the other end, a lieutenant spoke up. He introduced himself and then got to the point in a conversation that Julie said is burned in her memory.

"Mackay just wanted to let you know he was OK."

"OK. What happened?"

"Well, he's been shot."

A sniper in Mosul had hit him. The bullet pierced his Kevlar helmet at the hairline in the middle of his forehead. From there, it tore across the front of his head, never penetrating his skull, and then ripped a second hole in the helmet near his right ear as it exited.

Had the bullet inside his helmet taken a more conventional path, that phone call on Oct. 29 would have brought word that Mathiason would never see his son, Noah, born less than two weeks earlier.

Instead, Mathiason, 24, is recovering nicely at a medical facility in Virginia. After spending eight days with him in a Washington, D.C., hospital, his parents are back in Billings, sure that someone was watching over their son. [...]


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