I looked down at my wrist and could briefly see the bone through a deep gash before the wound filled with blood.

I put my hand over it to apply pressure. One part of me was fixated on moving my fingers and checking the motion in my wrist, while the rest was worried about the possibility of a follow-up attack.

Another Iraqi soldier came up to me through the dust and smoke. He pulled off one of the tourniquets I keep on my body armor and started trying to apply it to my arm. I waved him off — there was no sign of an arterial bleed.

I made my way back to the MRAP, where one of the journalists from ITN helped me apply a compression bandage. I was loaded into the flatbed of a Humvee with Iraqi soldiers who had also been wounded, and we were driven back behind their lines.

I’d been incredibly lucky, and the wound looked worse than it was. There was no shrapnel lodged inside, no ligaments or tendons torn, and an X-ray at the hospital in Erbil later that night showed no signs of broken bones.

It was hard not to think about what could have happened, though. Even a slightly worse alternative would have changed everything: If the shrapnel had hit just an inch to the left, I could have lost my right hand, or the use of it.