Scalise had crawled into shallow right field but found himself immobilized from the shock. “Your body starts going numb. And this is one thing, you know, your system does take care of you,” he says. “The pain I should have been feeling was not there, because you know, your body is just protecting you from that pain. And so that’s why it was more numbness.”

But he was still conscious. As he lay in the grass, bleeding and praying, he listened to the bullets—perhaps 100 of them, he estimates—piercing the summer morning air. “I started hearing the counterfire—a different caliber bullet. So I knew my security detail was engaged. And so I prayed for them to be successful,” he says. “It seemed like forever. And I mean, it was a lot of gunfire. You could tell it was just a brutal fight. I didn’t know that both of them got hit, but I knew they were fighting it out, and I knew that ultimately they would be successful. I just had a confidence in them.”