Sixty-six-year-old Larry Yepez is a Marine and a Vietnam veteran. “I got shot through this wrist, and I got hit here in the foot, and I got some shrapnel metal here in the back,” the Purple Heart recipient told CBS 47. Last Thursday, at 4am,, Yepez walked out his front door – and straight into a grizzly bear. “I saw him, and I yelled, ‘Hey get out of here.’ And he continued to come towards me.’ The bear then jumped on him and knocked him down…. ‘He had his mouth here, and that’s when . . .
he ripped here, and he got me here on the neck too. He ripped towards my neck and then again the belly,” Yepez said while showing the injuries to his wrist, face, neck and abdomen.”
Yepez credits his training for surviving the attack.
“The Marines tell you to remove the word ‘can’t’ from your vocabulary. Don’t you ever say that word again–can’t. And then they say–take the pain.”
Just as gun gurus and commentators constantly tell TTAG’s Armed Intelligentsia, the most important tool an armed self-defender must bring to a fight is the will to survive – no matter what. Even if you’re shot, stabbed, bludgeoned or generally beat on, don’t give up. Oh, and home carry people. Home carry.
As the old saying goes, sometimes the bear chases you. Sometimes you chase the bear. But never let the bear steal your fighting spirit. Lose that and it’s over before it begins. That is all.