Print edition: 
If you celebrate the Fourth of July today, there are two things you should do: Enjoy it. And please pause at some moment, while raising a beer or raising a flag in the morning, and think well of Beau Chastain and people like him.
Most of you don't know Chastain.
He's a young-looking 31, with a crooked grin, a sticky-up hank of brown hair, and one crutch for each hand.
He lives here, and he's based at McConnell Air Force Base for now. But he's been out of town a lot lately.
Think about him because he's part of why we celebrate today in a country relatively safe in an unsafe world.
Think well because what he brought home the other day from his fourth deployment in the wars is a tired mind and a through-and-through gunshot wound in his upper left thigh.
He brought that hole home to wife Amanda, his childhood sweetheart, and to Emma and Ethan, 11 and 5, who have not seen him much.
In years.
* * *
Most of us serve our country, more or less. We vote. We pay taxes.
Law officers, firefighters, or those who give to charity — they serve it, too.
But Staff Sgt. Chastain has done more.
He's not a flag-waver, and as he says, with that crooked grin, he doesn't even like to be around people that much.
He loves his country. But he enlisted because he had a wife and baby, and needed a job.
So in 2003, five years after he graduated from high school in Little Rock, he joined the Air Force. And volunteered to dismantle roadside bombs.
Sometimes we serve by serving family first.
* * *
Here's what Chastain has endured for us in eight years:
* Four combat tours, (three in Iraq, the last one in Afghanistan) as an explosive ordnance specialist, either dismantling bombs or disposing of unexploded shells.
* During those four deployments, he dismantled around 200 roadside bombs, those IEDs that blow up American soldiers passing by.
* Sometimes his job was to go to some blood-spattered place, after a suicide bomber had blown up people, and sort through the body parts and find out what kind of bomb was used, how it was triggered, and which parts belonged to victims and which parts to the bomber. Sometimes he dodged rifle fire to get to the blast site.
* A dozen gunfights.
* One gunshot wound, inflicted by an insurgent firing an AK-47. He fought in four gunfights on that same day, June 9, and got hit in the last one.
The 7.62 millimeter rifle bullet expanded when it went through his leg. It tore out a hunk of Chastain's thigh, but he had to lie bleeding in a ditch during the rest of the 25-minute fight because the guys around him were shooting a lot of bullets. With the noise, it was a while before they noticed Chastain and another guy had been hit in the legs.
They carried him in a litter across 300 meters of Afghan topography before they found a spot safe enough for a helicopter to land.
"A lot of people think of the Air Force as some sort of nice thing, Starbucks and Internet cafes on the bases," Chastain said. "But there's a bunch of us, less than a thousand in the Air Force, who do what I do."
He and his comrades go on two-week missions, sleeping without tents, using trees as bathrooms, carrying rifles and 70-pound packs.
And they fight.
On June 9 he walked along, following a trigger wire, trying to find the hidden bomb the wire was attached to.
Insurgents sprang the ambush from two sides.
* * *
"They say that with physical therapy, I'll be good to go again in about three months," he said. "So yeah, I might go back. And if they send me back, that's all right with me."
Has he been scared?
Many times.
Has he had enough of this?
"To tell the truth, I'm really tired of it. But this is what I signed up for."
Does he want out?
"I don't know. I've still got a year and a half on this enlistment."
He said he might go all the way to 20 years and retirement, which is 12 years from now.
But then he grinned. Maybe he'll come home and look for work.
"Something a lot less dangerous, and a lot less interesting.
"Maybe some job at McDonald's, where all I have to do is make sure the fries cook right."
He said this in the same flat, calm voice he used to describe what it's like to get shot or disable roadside bombs.
"Seriously, I don't want another interesting job."
He said he dismantles bombs not because he likes fear. It was because the only other openings the Air Force had in 2003 were in air traffic control. He knew that sitting in a dark room watching blips on a screen would bore him. So he chose bombs.
There's a national debate about whether to leave the wars. He pays no attention.
"I don't care.
"I don't watch the news. Ever. I don't care what any of those people say. I don't care what anybody decides. Stay. Or pull out. I don't care.
"The grand scheme doesn't affect me at all."
He said this with a hole in his leg and a bloodstream filled with Vicodin.
