Injured War Journalist Says Humor Helped Him Recover

In September of 2010, Carmen Gentile was a journalist embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, reporting from Kunar Province. As he pointed his video camera at two young local men on the side of the road, a guy popped out of a stone hut 50 yards away and pointed an RPG at him. And fired.

Carmen got hit in the right side of the face, and a company lieutenant got hit in the arm by the rocket’s ricochet. Miraculously, both were still alive. As medics loaded Carmen into a helicopter, one assured him that he still had his baby blues. “I thought that was really nice of him, for a rough and tumble guy.”

Now, nearly three years later, he’s back on the job, “because I think it’s important that people understand these stories and see what men and women everywhere are going through. I knew it was dangerous, but I think it’s worth it.”

He says that what got him through the ordeal wasn’t just guts or a sense of purpose, but his sense of humor. "It's the lighter side of getting shot in the face is how I tell the story," Carmen says of his Kindle single, Kissed by the Taliban.

He chuckles as he tells Ali about the sheer dumb luck of what happened that day. “I love that you’re laughing,” Ali told him.

“I have to!” he replied.

Carmen shares the video he was filming at the time of the attack, and tells Ali about his treatment and recovery process in today’s episode of Daily Shot.