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Fighting Forest Fires

6 July 2012 - As a staff sergeant in the Marines, Branden Gray received two Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Baghdad, a 7-year-old boy he thought wanted a Snickers candy bar stabbed him in the back. During a raid in Afghanistan, a piece of shrapnel from an improvised bomb severed an artery in his right leg.

"I was in a medically induced coma for a while,” Gray said. “I woke up one day thinking I was in still in Afghanistan, but I heard German voices. I was in a hospital in Germany.” He later was moved stateside to a hospital in Dallas.

After recuperating and fulfilling his four-year contract, Gray, 25, worked on earning his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Columbia College. But he yearned for a job with the pace he was accustomed to in the special forces of the Marine Corps.

So he joined an elite U.S. Forest Service firefighting crew called the Laguna Hot Shots based in Descanso, Calif., near San Diego. The Hot Shots are friendly rivals of the Smoke Jumpers in fighting wildfires — “the best of the best,” said Gray. read more>>>