Kevin Flike ’06, who was critically wounded while deployed to Afghanistan, will speak Veterans Day, Monday, Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. in Memorial Chapel.
The talk is free and open to the public.
After graduating from Union, Flike enlisted in the U.S. Army and became a member of the Special Forces. While on combat patrol during his second tour of Afghanistan in September 2011, a sniper shot the Green Beret in the stomach.
He sustained a fractured hip, lost 20 percent of his colon and suffered a damaged femoral nerve, resulting in permanent disability.
“For 55 minutes, I thought that each passing minute could be my last,” he wrote on his blog, woundedbywar.com. “In an instant everything changed, a promising life full of hope and optimism seemed like it would come to an end at a mere 27 years old. I thought that I would never see my wife, parents, brothers or friends again.
“Then I realized that I would never have a family of my own and would never be able to right the wrongs of my past. Fifty-five minutes was the amount of time that elapsed between getting shot and being on the operating table at a field hospital in NW Afghanistan. It was a transformative 55 minutes that has stayed with me since that fateful day.”
A Stillwater, N.Y., native and football standout at Troy’s LaSalle Institute, he graduated Union with a political science major and minors in East Asian Studies and Mandarin Chinese. He was two-time captain of the Union football team and president of Theta Delta Chi fraternity.
Flike is now pursuing an MBA at MIT-Sloan School of Management.
He and his wife, Kimberlee (Bulger ’06), recently welcomed their first child.