"I was shot through the stomach, lower left abdomen, and the bullet damaged my colon and spleen before exploding out through my back. Ouch!," McHugh wrote in an e-mail to friends this week.
"We were in the middle of a big fight, so I think it was 10 or 15 minutes before the soldiers managed to get a dressing on me and get me into a Humvee, at which point we drove out of there, all guns blazing," he wrote. "I remained conscious the whole time, and once back at the base, maybe 20 minutes over the worst roads in the world, I was evacuated by helicopter to a hospital, where I was operated on."