On furlough from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center this summer, 21-year-old Nick Staback lounges on his parents’ back porch in Scranton, Pa., taking potshots at sparrows with a replica sniper rifle. The long plastic gun fires pellets that mostly just scare the birds away.
It’s been a tough year for Staback since his last foot patrol in Afghanistan.
“We [were] just channeling down a beaten trail, of course, you just don’t know what’s on it,” he says. “We had the mine sweepers out front and everything like that.”
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