Dan Crenshaw remembers the moment the IED hit him. On June 15, 2012, Mr. Crenshaw—then a Navy SEAL, now a Republican member of Congress from Texas—was on a mission in Afghanistan. After flying into Helmand province before daylight, he and his team were clearing an abandoned compound when his interpreter stepped on an improvised explosive device two feet away from him.
Mr. Crenshaw felt something sharp in his abdomen and heard ringing in his ears. Then everything went dark. He lay in pain for 45 minutes waiting for a helicopter, then stood up and headed for its whirring nearby. He woke up a few days later in a hospital in Germany with one eye missing and one he couldn’t see out of.
After a series of risky surgeries, Mr. Crenshaw, now 36, finally regained limited sight in his left eye. He completed two more tours in Bahrain and South Korea, though not in combat. His book “Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage” is scheduled to be published Tuesday—part memoir, part instruction manual about his ability to weather hardships in life and in battle and his advice on how others can do the same. The book is also a critique of what he calls “outrage culture,” or what he sees as an alarmist tendency by some media outlets and much of social media to provoke unhelpful and overblown emotional responses.
Excerpt by Permission of The Wall Street Journal.
© Dow Jones, Inc. 2020
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