WWE used to hold its Tribute to the Troops event every year from 2003 to 2023, to entertain and honor members of the United States military on several bases. As one of the three men behind creating Tribute to the Troops, John “Bradshaw” Layfield recently looked back at an incident at one of the events, where he was nearly on the receiving end of enemy fire.
“We got shot at one time coming across Baghdad in a helicopter,” he said during an episode of “Something To Wrestle.” “I had fallen asleep and I’m in the helicopter, and a light goes off right by the freaking window! And I had thought that we’d been hit, but that was our flare deflecting what they were shooting [with]. I didn’t know it was our own stuff; I thought we had been hit, I thought we were going down! You know, waking up pretty afraid.”
“We got shot at a few times,” he recalled. “Look, I don’t want to over-state [that] something happened and then risk embellishing anything. We were taken care of by the greatest military in the world; those guys took incredibly good care of us.” JBL then added that they were once fired upon by a mortar while filming another segment on the ground. He and other WWE stars including Al Snow had to retreat into a bunker, which left JBL feeling admittedly fearful, though he never worried about his life.
“I don’t ever feel like we were in danger of getting killed,” JBL added. “I know it sounds bad – those were real mortars, those were real bullets, those were real guns that were being fired – we’re out there with the US military. They’re taking great care of us.”
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit “Something To Wrestle,” and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
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