He kind of took off going down the street and he kept looking back over his shoulder with

his hands and his ears, you know, like an explosion was going to go off and it was going

to hurt his ear drums or something.

He got maybe 50 yards away or 80 and yelled and yelled and tried to get him to stop and

he did it and I think at that point I was kind of like, all right, like he's not getting

the hint.

I tried to be nice.

I just stood up and took a couple shots at him, nothing happened.

He just kept on running.

My initial thought was like, holy shit that I just miss this guy from, you know, not

that far away right in front of my whole platoon.

And so I think I got like more maybe just irritated or mad and so I took a couple steps

forward and got on a knee and then I took a couple more shots and that finally brought

him down.

Christopher Basket was 19 years old when he arrived in Iraq.

He'd enlisted in the Navy with his sights set on underwater demolition, but a little

more than a year later he was a corpsman doing his best to fit in with the more seasoned

Marines to whom he'd been attached.

The thing is, when you enlist and accept your trajectory, there isn't much more you can

do than go with it.

As a Navy corpsman, Chris hadn't expected to be doing much fighting, but he quickly learned

that combat was a school all of its own.

...