AUBURN – When his phone rang at 3:30 a.m., Brian Johnson fought to wake up. It was his mother calling to tell him that his brother, Kevin, had been shot.

“I instantly woke up,” he said. “The adrenaline started pumping.” He was speechless.

“What do you say when somebody tells you that?” he said. He wondered about the severity of the wound. And for long hours, he worried that Kevin, a Green Beret who’d been surprised by a Baghdad sniper, might die.

He didn’t.

Kevin Johnson is recuperating in a Hawaii military hospital after a short stay at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. A bullet struck his shoulder. However, it missed arteries and there appeared to be no nerve damage, his brother said.

He is likely to make a full recovery from the blast, which wounded him on Mother’s Day, May 13.

“Kevin says the care is amazing,” Brian Johnson said.

Though Kevin has never lived in Maine, Brian moved to Auburn seven years ago from his hometown of Olympia, Wash. Their brother, Alan, and parents Les and Kay followed, settling in Mechanic Falls and Norway. Family members around Lewiston-Auburn are already planning for reunions.

The family remains close-knit, even spread around the world. In fact, it was the sudden breakdown of communication between Kevin and his wife, Katie, that first signaled a problem.

Every day during his stay in Iraq, he phoned her in Japan, where she lives with their two children, L.J., 3 months old, and Audrey, 2.

Kevin was three hours late for his daily call when he phoned her from a field hospital in Baghdad.

Doctors were treating his shoulder and drugging him with painkillers as he called.

The news overwhelmed Katie.

“She was just so out of it that she forgot to ask any questions,” Brian said. When she got off the phone, she hadn’t learned whether the wound was life-threatening.

“She didn’t really know where he was shot other than it was in the upper body somewhere,” he said.

She did learn that he was being flown to a hospital in Germany.

She immediately called her mother-in-law, Kay Johnson, who called Brian.

It was Mother’s Day.

“My mother wasn’t crying when she called, but she started crying right after she told me,” Brian said.

He couldn’t sleep after the call.

“I started pacing around,” he said. “You just feel so helpless.”

At about 1 p.m., another call came. Kevin would live.

That’s all that mattered.

“I thought, ‘OK. We can deal with this,'” Brian said.