Here’s the Unlikely Story of a Green Beret Turned NFL Prospect

Green Beret, Texas Longhorn football player, NFL’s most improbable prospect – had just finished fixing a sat-com radio in the rear of an M-ATV, light-armored, mine-resistant vehicle. Now he was scrambling to get back to the relative safety of its cabin.

This was July 2014. This was on a thin ribbon of road on the edge of Tagab, a small village in the Kapisa Province of Afghanistan . . .

Boyer was part of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group, which he linked up with as a sort-of summer job, leaving major college football where he was Texas’ starting long snapper for the field of battle, only to return to the States, and his team, on the eve of preseason camp.

On this day, on the side of that road in Tagab, there were a dozen Americans and 100 Afghan soldiers they’d helped train, running a sweep for Taliban through a collection of mud huts not far from the Pakistani border.

Boyer’s convoy of maybe 25 vehicles had come under gun and mortar fire as it approached a town. Chaos ruled the day. The group was left scanning for muzzle flashes in order to target and return fire. Providing cover for medics charging into dirt fields to aid the injured. Trying to gain perspective amid clouds of smoke, courtesy of something burning behind the village walls. This is what Boyer was long used to, battle hardened via years of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was 33 years old and long past panicking. (Read more about the green beret and his story HERE)

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