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It’s been a difficult year for California. Deadly wildfires devastated communities up and down the state. And yet another mass shooting punctured a place that felt like a refuge. My colleague Jennifer Medina wrote about a young man who survived the shootings in Las Vegas and the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks and is now preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.

I’ll let her tell you more about meeting the young man, Brendan Kelly:

Before the shooting last month, Thousand Oaks was perhaps best known for its reputation as one of the safest cities in America. So I was hardly surprised when Brendan Kelly described his childhood as idyllic.

But now, at 22, Mr. Kelly has experienced more mass violence than anyone should face in a lifetime. First, he was in Las Vegas last year, when 58 people were killed at a country music festival. As he recovered, he spent countless nights at Borderline. Just as things were really feeling back to normal for him, a gunman entered Borderline and killed 12 people there.

He seems to approach danger — and even death — in the most matter-of-fact way. To memorialize two of his closest friends who were killed last month, he tattooed their names on his back, along with something a friend told him as they left Las Vegas: “In this game of life, no one makes it out alive.”