Even after the first bullet ripped through his flesh, Les Lehmann thought the masked intruders might be firing blanks.

It just didn’t hurt the way he imagined it might.

But as more lead sliced through him, the blood told a different story, slowly leaking out, it seemed, from everywhere.

Doctors would eventually count nine exit wounds.

Defending himself with only a baseball bat, the 64-year-old fought off two armed robbers at the resort he and his wife own in the Dominican Republic.

Then he lay in his blood assessing the damage.

“The first thought through my mind was, ‘You’re one lucky person.’ I can see holes all over me but there was no blood spurting out of them. Any one of those bullets could’ve opened up an artery or something. I was still breathing OK. I didn’t get one in the head. I thought, ‘Hell, you’re OK.’”

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The transplanted Winnipegger was shot 10 times — the 10th grazed his knee — just after a warm Caribbean midnight in January 2014.

Lehmann was not only protecting himself. Twenty-six people — 22 teenagers and four chaperones — had just checked in; a humanitarian group from Winnipeg there to help at an orphanage and local school.

Lehmann put his life on the line to save them and was later awarded the Star of Courage, Canada’s second highest civilian medal for bravery.

Lehmann, now 67 and almost fully recovered, doesn’t see his actions as heroic. All he did, he says, was react to a bad situation.

“I did something very stupid and irrational and the universe gave me a break,” he says. “As far as me sitting down and saying, ‘I’m a big hero’ —that’s sort of a joke really.

“If you were really thinking about it, you wouldn’t attack two guys who had guns with a baseball bat. It was just that …” he continues, pausing to find the right words.

“I was responsible for these young kids, a lot of them were 16-, 17-year-old girls and it was their first time away in a strange country and, oh my God, if one of these guys had happened to have hurt one, you know, or fired a gun and one of them accidentally gets killed, that would have been horrible. What happened to me doesn’t matter.”

But what happened was remarkable. At the beach-community complex on the north coast, Lehmann was awakened at about 1 a.m. by his barking dogs. He grabbed a machete and did a tour of his gated property. There were ominous signs. A ladder had been moved to one of the balconies and a screen had been cut.

But he could find no one and made his way back to his bungalow on the property. Suddenly two men appeared, towels hiding their faces, with pistols trained on him. Lehmann says he began banging the machete on a table and screaming, hoping to alert the neighbours, warn his guests and scare off the intruders.

One of the culprits fired three times; one bullet tore into Lehmann’s left arm. He felt nothing. After a few more whacks, the machete broke. Lehmann fled inside to his bedroom, the interlopers in pursuit.

There, the robbers stomped on and pistol-whipped the Canadian before leaving in the direction of the apartments where the teenaged girls were staying. Though battered, Lehmann grabbed a hammer and gave chase but turned back to pick up a baseball bat instead.

Then, in a grisly scene recorded by a security video camera, one of the interlopers can be seen kicking in the door and entering one of the apartments —by this point, the guests inside were hiding — while his partner popped in and out keeping watch.

Forty seconds later, the owner burst on to the scene swinging his bat and chopping down one of the crooks with blows to his head. That brought the other intruder out of the apartment. Lehmann took a swing at him and missed and fumbled for a pistol on the ground. The robber emptied his gun clip into the Canadian before he dragged his accomplice to the hole they’d cut in the property’s chain link fence.

A weakened Lehmann can be seen in the video using his shirt as a tourniquet to stem the bleeding from his arm before sprawling on the ground.

“So much for my blanks theory,” he jokes now.

Two bullets hit his right knee, another shattered the ulna bone and cut a nerve in his left arm, another passed through his scrotum, two others sliced across his chest but didn’t go deep. Not one bullet stayed in him.

“When you get shot from 10 feet away and you get hit 10 times and you basically don’t really get hurt that badly, it makes you wonder why,” he says. “There’s luck and then there’s something beyond luck.”

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None of the students were injured but they flew home later that day.

Lehmann says police told him they figured out who the smaller robber was and “looked after him.” In a country, where 700 people were killed by police between 2011 and 2013 (according to the Dominican Republic’s Prosecutor General’s Office) the transplanted Canuck can only guess what that means.

Lehmann to this day leads the same life he has for the last dozen years, managing the complex. He has healed. He walks with virtually no limp — he spent 10 weeks in a wheelchair — and the nerve in his arm has repaired enough that he can play the guitar again. He sometimes performs at one of the local bars using the stage name Lester Grant.

Lehmann says he and his wife would sell their property if they got a good price but they have no hard plans to move on. And leaving wouldn’t be on account of the heart-racing horror of three years ago.

“For whatever reason, it never did scare me,” he says of the incident. “But that chain link fence is no longer there. It’s now a 10-foot concrete wall.”

Brave, braver, bravest: Canada’s three decorations

Canada has three decorations for bravery available to civilians or emergency workers. They recognize people, living or dead, who risked their lives to save or protect another.

The decorations were created by the Queen in 1972 and are personally presented by the governor general in a ceremony at either Rideau Hall in Ottawa or La Citadelle in Quebec City.

“In you, I see proof of humanity and decency and courage in the world,” governor general David Johnston told recipients at one recent ceremony. “That is why I still get goosebumps each time I present these awards, every time I hear stories of bravery.”

Anyone can nominate a person to be considered for an award by the Canadian Decorations Advisory Committee. Potential recipients do not have to be Canadian but, if not, that person must have performed an act of bravery in the interest of Canada.

Cross of Valour

The highest honour for bravery available in this country outside the Canadian Armed Forces. It “recognizes acts of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme peril.”

The Cross of Valour has been awarded 20 times and recipients can use the letters C.V. after their name.

Star of Courage

The second highest award “recognizes acts of conspicuous courage in circumstances of peril.”

The Star of Courage has been granted 458 times. Recipients can use the letters S.C. after their name.

Medal of Bravery

The third highest honour, it “recognizes acts of bravery in hazardous circumstances.”

There have been 3,316 Medals of Bravery presented. Recipients can use the letters M.B. after their name.