CHICAGO _ The emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital was packed with flu patients when Caleb Stevens hobbled through the doors on crutches one evening in January, his leg pulsing with pain from a week-old gunshot wound.
The clerk at the intake desk was unfazed when Stevens said he had been wounded in Syria. She took his passport and told him to join the rest of the people in the waiting room.
So he sat with his mom for 20 minutes, his right leg wrapped in a cast, a splint and bloody bandages. He was still wearing a red-and-white Christmas sock someone pulled over his foot when he was rushed to a Baghdad hospital for surgery.
As he looked around the ER, Stevens, 23, said he thought some of the other patients "seemed more at risk than I was."
A week before and 6,200 miles away, Stevens was on the roof of a house in the small town of Abu Hamam near the Euphrates River, he said, battling Islamic State as a volunteer fighter with a Kurdish militia group. The Chicago Tribune confirmed much of Stevens' unusual account through travel documents, medical records, emails and interviews with others who said they fought with him. The militia did not respond to inquiries.
On the day he was shot, Stevens was running to retrieve a rifle, he said. A sniper's bullet tore into his calf. "There was blood spurting out. I definitely knew I had been shot but a part of me refused to believe that."
He underwent several surgeries at military hospitals in Syria and Iraq before arriving at O'Hare International Airport, records show. As doctors at Northwestern examined the jagged wound, word made its way to Chicago police that Stevens was somehow connected to Islamic State. The next morning, three officers walked into his room, he recalled. Four more waited in the hall.
"They kind of barged in the hospital room," Stevens said during a recent interview with his mother in their Michigan home. "One of them began aggressively and suspiciously asking questions. They asked me the same questions over and over and over.
"That was kind of my welcome back to the U.S.," he said. "'We think you're a terrorist.' I'm like, 'No, no, no, no, no. I was fighting the terrorists.'"
According to a Chicago police report, Stevens told the officers he was shot "in an exchange of gunfire with unknown offenders" while conducting a "military style offensive with YPG militia." The report says the FBI was notified, but the federal agency did not respond to Tribune inquiries about the incident.
A handful of Americans have joined People's Protection Units, also known as YPG, and other Syrian militia groups allied with the United States in recent years, according to experts and the federal government. Most of those who sign up are young adults, idealists and those with a military background who sympathize, and perhaps romanticize, the groups' stated fight against Islamic State and oppression in Syria, Turkey and Iraq.
Stevens had spent two years at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when he started getting restless to join the conflict. "I didn't want to do two more years of college and job hunting to do something to improve the world," he said. "This felt like something intense and meaningful and something I could jump right into."
