The doctors explain they can helicopter him to the main combat hospital in Baghdad for air transfer to the regional military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and more medical attention - if that’s what he wants. He will then return home to the United States within a day or two.

Or he can stay and rejoin his 1st Marine Division infantry unit in Fallujah when he’s feeling up to it. The choice is his. He will get a Purple Heart either way.

McCauley, who enlisted in the Marine Corps before graduating Kokomo’s Taylor High School in 2001, elects to remain in the war zone. Marines are trained to be tough, he says, and you do your job just as long as you are able to do it.

McCauley thus becomes one of the 10,600-plus American soldiers in Iraq who have suffered injuries and yet were able to return to combat since the U.S. invasion in March of 2003.

“I just got here,” he recalls saying. “I watched my friend get killed. I’m not going to go home. I’m out for blood.”

His next encounter with the wounds of war will not be so fortunate. But McCauley says the swift, expert medical treatment he received for the bullet through his thigh was an example of the military’s new techniques for treating battlefield injuries.

There’s nothing to do but lay in bed, listen to Blink 182 on my Walkman and eat canned sardines and oysters sent in CARE packages.

Sgt. Maj. David Cahill, a Vietnam War medic and now an official at the U.S. Army Medical Center and School at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, says the military is returning more wounded soldiers to combat and saving more lives because of improved medical knowledge and faster response.

There are, he said, three primary causes for death in the first 10 minutes of a battlefield injury: bleeding, obstructed airways and collapsed lungs. He said the military teaches trauma skills to first responders so they can treat these conditions rapidly and effectively.

Combat medical packs, for example, contain special tourniquets and emergency trauma bandages with elastic pressure tails to stop external bleeding. They also carry a dressing called QuickClot that instantly stops the flow of blood, and a 14-gauge needle to open a two-way flow of air to the lungs.

That’s in addition to morphine, oxygen, IV lines and high-tech digital instruments that measure heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and other telltale signs of life or death. Some medics even carry portable heart-lung machines to supply oxygen.

“Simple little things,” said Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, a medical doctor and the center’s commander. “But they address 90 percent of all the reasons people die in those first 10 minutes.”

Lifesaving statistics tell the story. Medical improvements have reduced to less than 10 percent the number of wounded American troops in Iraq who do not survive, according to the Pentagon.