The Citizen Service Before Self Honors Award
Every single one of the Medal of Honor recipients you’ve just read about was someone who managed to find the inner resources to do something extraordinary in the chaos and crisis of war when others’ lives were at stake.
But courage isn’t restricted to the battlefield, as these military heroes know. “Everyday” citizens do heroic things all the time, either in a moment of bravery or a lifetime of service, and such acts of courage and self-sacrifice are part of our identity as Americans. These are people you might meet in your daily life, with one difference: They stepped up when others were stepping away, and they did the right thing when it would have been safer for them to do nothing at all.
Honoring Soldiers and Citizens Together
In 2007, Congress issued a proclamation naming March 25 as National Medal of Honor Day. The medal recipients decided that these unacknowledged Americans should be honored as well. And so they established, through the Medal of Honor Foundation, the Above and Beyond Citizen Honors Award (later renamed the Citizen Service Before Self Honors Award). They solicited nominations from all across the country for individuals who had risked their own lives or shown lasting dedication to the well-being of their fellow citizens. Three recipients of the Citizen Honors Award were honored on March 25, 2008, the second National Medal of Honor Day. (The medal is shown here.)
Since then, the Citizens Honors awards ceremony has become an annual event, and many have been honored. Some—like the six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut who gave their lives to protect their students—have been recognized posthumously.
Other men and women recognized by the Citizen Service Before Self Honors Award survived their moments of heroism, among them several young people:
Seventeen-year-old Connor Stotts was swimming with friends near Oceanside, California, when a strong riptide swept them out to sea. Knowing that they might drown if he failed to act, Connor risked his own life to guide three of them to shore. Each time he got one of them to safety, he plunged back into the water to rescue another.
Jesse Shaffer III and his son, Jesse Shaffer IV, got into their boat during Hurricane Isaac when emergency vehicles couldn’t navigate the flooded streets of their hometown of Braithwaite, Louisiana. Father and son began rescuing people trapped by the rising waters. During the next few hours, the Shaffers saved 120 people, even though their own home was destroyed.
Fourteen-year-old Marcos Ugarte ran to the aid of a seven-year-old boy trapped in the second story of a neighbor’s burning house in Troutdale, Oregon. After Marcos’s father and another man were overcome with smoke before they could rescue the boy, Marcos climbed onto the roof of the house, broke a window, and ran through the flames to bring the child out alive.
Paul Bucha, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for gallantry in Vietnam, spoke for all of the medal recipients when he said that these “ordinary persons, who reached within themselves and challenged destiny as they understood it to be,” changed possibly tragic outcomes by their actions. Bucha believes that these citizens, like the men he fought with, “have the potential to change the world.”
As you read about how the men and women you are about to meet put others before themselves, think about the challenge posed by Jack Jacobs, another Medal of Honor recipient: “Someday you, too, may be called upon to do something extraordinary. Will you do it?”
CITIZEN HONOREE
Warnings and Bravery on 9/11
“He could not have lived with himself unless he was the last man out of the building and there was no one else to save.”
Rick Rescorla had predicted an attack against the World Trade Center long before 9/11. Despite being ill with cancer, he spent all the energy he had during his last years trying to convince the authorities that they had to do something. If only they had listened.
It’s not that Rick craved attention. He was modest, reluctant to talk about his accomplishments. Even close friends were sometimes surprised to learn how crowded the hours of his life had been. He had emigrated to America from England and had been a highly decorated army officer in Vietnam. He had been a lawyer, although he no longer practiced, and a college professor, although he no longer taught. And despite how serious he seemed, his wife, Susan, later said of him, “People didn’t realize that Rick was a song and dance man at heart.”
What his friends did know was that in his “second career” as director of security for Morgan Stanley, the largest financial firm in New York City’s World Trade Center, Rick had predicted a terrorist attack against that building years before September 11, 2001, and he believed that an attack against the Twin Towers would come from the air.
In Vietnam, Rick was known by the men in his platoon as “Hard Core” because of his bravery in battle.
Rick’s story began in the small English town of Hayle, Cornwall, where he was born in 1939. Rick fell in love with the United States as a boy while watching the U.S. 175th Infantry Regiment training for the 1944 D-Day invasion. He wanted someday to become a soldier and an American. He joined the British army after finishing high school and served in Cyprus and other hot spots. In 1960, he traveled to Africa, to present-day Zambia, in search of adventure and joined the Northern Rhodesia Police force.
As a result of his experiences as a soldier and soldier of fortune, Rick became a strong anti-Communist. In 1962 he returned to London, where he briefly worked in the metropolitan police force. The next year he emigrated to the United States, and although he wasn’t a citizen, he joined the Army to fight against what he saw as the advance of Communism in Vietnam.
A Silver Star
After completing Officer Candidate School, Rick became a lieutenant in charge of a platoon in the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment. His unit participated in the historic Battle of Ia Drang in 1965, the first time U.S. forces met the North Vietnamese army head on.
Rick, whose men had given him the nickname “Hard Core” because of his mental as well as his physical toughness, played a key role in the two-day battle. Almost a hundred years earlier, the 7th Cavalry, commanded by George Armstrong Custer, was destroyed at Little Bighorn by Sioux warriors. At the beginning of the fight at Ia Drang, it seemed that the U.S. force, outnumbered by the North Vietnamese ten to one, might have a similar fate.
As darkness fell the first night, when his men feared that the enemy would overrun their position, Rick walked among them, reassuring them and singing songs from his native Cornwall in his rich baritone voice. When one frightened soldier asked him if they would make it through the next few hours, Rick replied, in a comment that would be remembered by the men who served with him long after the battle was over, that not only would they survive the night, but “when the sun comes up, we are going to kick some ass.”
The Vietnamese forces suffered hundreds of casualties in the fight and were forced to withdraw. Although the Americans “won,” they suffered huge losses: 79 dead and another 121 wounded. Rick received a Silver Star for his actions in the fight.
In Charge of Security
Rick now felt more than ever that he wanted to be an American. In 1967, he returned to the United States and left the army. He got a law degree, taught law for a time at the University of South Carolina, and became a citizen. But he still had a taste for action, and in 1985 he took a job as head of security for the investment firm Dean Witter, headquartered in the World Trade Center in New York.
Rick was glad that Soviet Communism was headed toward collapse, but he believed that a new enemy was waiting in the wings—terrorism—and that the next war against America would be fought by small groups rather than large massed armies. “We’re not going to go toe-to-toe on some battleground in the future,” Rick told a television interviewer after taking his new job. “We’ll see a kind of action we’ve never seen before.”
More than a decade before the 9/11 attack, Rick invited Dan Hill, an old friend who had served with him in Vietnam and was now a security consultant, to come to New York to help him understand the ways in which the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers might be open to attack. After examining the huge, unguarded parking garage of the building, Dan told Rick that if someone wanted to kill a lot of people, he could easily drive a truck filled with explosives into this basement, park it next to one of the columns supporting the structure, and detonate it by remote control after leaving the area.
When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, Rick, head of security for the investment bank Morgan Stanley, used his bullhorn to direct his employees to get out of the building.
The First Terror Attack
Even though Rick passed Dan’s warnings on to New York City authorities and to his superiors at Dean Witter, no action was taken. But what Dan predicted was exactly what happened on February 26, 1993, when a small group of Islamic terrorists living in the United States and led by the so-called Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdul Rahman, detonated a massive truck bomb in the parking garage. The explosion didn’t cause the North Tower of the World Trade Center to collapse into the South Tower, as the terrorists had hoped. But six people died in the attack, and hundreds were injured.
Firefighters carry a victim’s remains from the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Even after this, Rick believed that the World Trade Center was still a terrorist target because of its symbolism as the largest structure in New York and one of the nerve centers of American capitalism. He and Dan believed that there would be another terrorist attack, but that it probably would come from the air rather than from the ground. The two men chartered a light plane and flew around the Twin Towers to figure out how an attack might be launched.
In 1997, Rick was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. While going through painful medical treatments to keep it under control, he continued to worry about the next terror strike. When Dean Witter was purchased by Morgan Stanley, he tried to convince its executives to move the headquarters from the World Trade Center. But the company had a long-term lease that would be expensive to break. Rick insisted that they at least install fireproof lights and smoke evacuators in the corridors. He had evacuation drills held every three months for the company’s 2,700 employees, including the highest-paid executives. Rick timed every drill with a stopwatch. Some of the employees complained, but as one of them said later on, “I could go down those stairs with my eyes closed.”
A rescue worker surveys the rubble from the collapse of the Twin Towers.
A Prediction Comes True
Rick was in his office on the forty-fourth floor in the South Tower at the World Trade Center at 8:46 on the morning of 9/11 when the first hijacked plane hit the North Tower. While everyone else was frantically trying to figure out what had happened, Rick knew at once that it was an attack. He ordered Morgan Stanley employees on the thirty floors above him to get out of the building immediately.
As they were streaming down the stairwells, the second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m., causing it to lurch wildly and knocking Rick and many other people down. He picked himself up and, speaking into a bullhorn, urged everyone to remain calm and not trample each other. “We’re good Americans,” he said soothingly. “Walk slowly.” He began to sing the Cornish songs he remembered from his youth, just as he had in the darkest moments of Vietnam.
Within a half hour, all but a handful of the twenty-seven hundred Morgan Stanley employees were out of the South Tower. As one executive left the building, he saw Rick going back up the staircase and told him to get out. Rick agreed that he would—but only after he made sure that none of the company’s employees were still stranded in the floors above.
The South Tower collapsed a few minutes later. Rick’s body was never found. Dan Hill, his friend of forty years, later said that Rick had died a soldier’s death, just as he would have wanted: “He could not have lived with himself unless he was the last man out of the building and there was no one else to save.”
In 2009, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society honored Rick with its Above and Beyond Citizen Honors Award. The words at the ceremony, spoken by Medal of Honor recipient Paul Bucha, summarized Rick’s life: “Inside all of us a hero lives. For some it will rise up and show itself through an extraordinary act of courage on the battlefields of their everyday lives.”
Rick’s children, Trevor and Kim, receive the Medal of Honor Society’s Above and Beyond Citizen Honors Award on Rick’s behalf from medal recipients Paul Bucha (left) and Robert Howard.
Some of the details of Rick Rescorla’s life come from his biography, Heart of a Soldier, by James B. Stewart (Simon & Schuster, 2002).
SURPRISE ATTACK: The Events of 9/11
On the morning of September 11, 2001, four U.S. airliners took off from airports in Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C., headed for the West Coast. They never made it. About thirty minutes into the air they were hijacked by Islamic terrorists, who killed all the crew members using knives and box cutters they smuggled on board. The terrorists then took control of the jets. There were four or five terrorists on board each airliner, and one on each with enough flight training to serve as pilot.
When American Airlines Flight 11 smashed into the North Tower of New York City’s World Trade Center, it first seemed that a terrible accident had taken place. But as a horrified nation watched on television, a second plane, United Flight 175, flew directly into the World Trade Center’s South Tower, and it was clear that the crashes were no accident. In the intense fires that followed, both towers collapsed, killing nearly three thousand people, including hundreds of New York City firemen, policemen, and other first responders. The unimaginable had happened: America had been attacked on its own soil.
The skyline of lower Manhattan in New York shows the Twin Towers before terrorists destroyed them on September 11, 2001, killing almost three thousand people.
Two More Plane Crashes
The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, suffered extensive damage in the 9/11 attacks, and 189 people were killed.
At about the same time, American Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, killing sixty-four people on board and 125 Defense Department employees and members of the U.S. military. A fourth airliner, United Flight 93, was headed toward the White House or the U.S. Capitol Building but never reached its target: Cell phone calls from the passengers to airline workers and loved ones sketched a picture of the passengers’ brave decision to fight back against the hijackers. One yelled, “Let’s roll!” as they started their counterattack, and it became our nation’s battle cry. As a result of the passengers’ efforts, United Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field, killing all forty-four on board, rather than into a government building in Washington.
Of the nineteen terrorist hijackers, fifteen were Saudis, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Egypt, and one was from Lebanon. They were all well educated, spoke English, and had spent time living in Western countries, including the United States.
Osama bin Laden, head of the terror organization al-Qaeda, admitted that he had sent these men to attack America mainly because of its support of Israel and the troops the United States maintained in Middle Eastern countries.
The mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks was Osama bin Laden, head of the terror group al-Qaeda. He was killed in Pakistan by a team of U.S. Navy SEALs in 2011.
CITIZEN HONOREE
A Teacher’s Lesson in Courage
“If you see something happening that isn’t right, you do something.”
On the snowy morning of March 14, 2006, physical education teacher Jencie Fagan was in the school gym putting up a volleyball net for her first-period class at the Edward L. Pine Middle School in Reno, Nevada. Jencie was one of the most popular members of the school’s faculty. She was known for her enthusiasm, her high expectations, and her willingness to become personally involved with her students—the sort of teacher who would assign her class to run laps around the school track, then jog with the kids in the back who were having trouble keeping up, urging them on to do their best.
With a teenage child of her own, Jencie understood the social and personal conflicts that students sometimes have to deal with. “Our kids here are middle school children with all the issues kids their age have,” she says. “But they have beautiful hearts.”
For Jencie that snowy morning, seeing the beauty of fourteen-year-old James Newman’s heart would take an enormous act of courage.
James was one of the loners at Edward L. Pine. School was a real struggle for him, and he had a dark feeling that no one—not his schoolmates or his parents—cared enough about him. His anger and confusion had come to a boil a few days earlier when he watched an online video of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, in which two deranged students murdered twelve of their classmates and a teacher and wounded twenty-four others. Perversely inspired by the actions of the Columbine students, James had put his parents’ .38 caliber pistol in his backpack before he left for school that morning, went into a bathroom to remove it when he arrived, and came out ready to shoot.
One of his friends who passed James in the hall pleaded with him to put the gun away. James told the boy to run for his life. Then he opened fire randomly, hitting one eighth-grade student in the arm and another in the leg.
Jencie, busy in the gym, heard three sharp sounds, as if someone had slammed some books down on the floor. Fearing something more serious, she sprinted to the cafeteria next door, which seemed to be where the noises were coming from. In the hallway, she saw panicked students running in all directions and staff members in the hallways yelling, “Code red! Code red!” She saw one teacher hurry into her office and lock the door behind her. Several students seemed frozen with fear; Jencie ordered them into her office.
For one young, frightened observer, Jencie’s appearance on the scene was anything but surprising. Kendra Hess, a student who was still hiding behind a pillar in the cafeteria, terrified that she’d be killed by the gunman, felt a ray of hope when she saw Jencie. “Yes!” she thought to herself. “If anybody here can save me, Mrs. Fagan will.”
Seeing James holding the gun, ready to fire again, Jencie walked up to him and began talking to him in a soft voice. She kept telling him that he was not a killer and that he would be all right. Worried that if some other student accidentally walked into the cafeteria, he’d turn and shoot, she stood in front of James so that he would have to look directly at her and so that the bullet would hit her if he did pull the trigger.
“You Never Quit”
Jencie felt sympathy for James even as she was determined to keep him from hurting anyone else. In dealing with troubled teens like him, she always remembered the difficulties she had experienced when she was their age. One of six kids brought up by a single mother in a small town in Alabama, she had sometimes felt disadvantaged in comparison to more “normal” families. But her mother, who worked long hours to keep the household going, wouldn’t tolerate self-pity. “When things got difficult, Mom didn’t give up,” Jencie remembers. “She just pushed harder. She taught us that you never quit.”
This determination not to run away from problems was what made Jencie come forward that morning when everyone else was trying to save themselves. Standing close to James and forcing him to make eye contact by looking directly at his face, she talked in a soothing tone, repeatedly asking him to set the pistol on the floor. He looked disoriented and hesitated for a long time, but finally he dropped the gun. Jencie immediately grabbed him and hugged him tightly, both to restrain and reassure him. “I’m here,” she whispered to him. “I’m not going anywhere.” She continued to hold him until the police arrived.
Edward L. Pine Middle School was put on lockdown for the rest of the day. The two wounded students were treated at a local hospital and released that afternoon. James was arrested. He was later tried as a minor and convicted of two counts of battery with a deadly weapon.
When she was asked why she had put herself in harm’s way, Jencie talked about her mother: “Mom raised us to think that if you see something happening that isn’t right, you do something. You don’t look for someone else to handle it. I’m a teacher, a mom, a human being. These are our children. There’s no way I’m having to call a parent after something has happened and tell them I didn’t protect their kid.”
Two years later, on March 25, 2008, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society presented Jencie Fagan with its Above and Beyond Citizen Honors Award in a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery attended by thirty-four Medal of Honor recipients. As former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell put the ribbon around her neck, one of these recipients, Paul Bucha, reminded the large audience that what Jencie had done on that awful day in Nevada showed that “every one of us has the capacity for courage and heroism.”
In recognition of teacher Jencie Fagan’s selfless bravery in risking her life to save her students, General Colin Powell presented her with the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s Above and Beyond Citizen Honors Award in 2008.
In a life-or-death situation, when the lives of a soldier’s comrades are on the line, nothing in the past matters as much as acting in the moment. Medal of Honor recipient Allen Lynch reflects on the insults and mistreatments he once suffered growing up, and how combat taught him what was most important in the end.
On Being Bullied and Learning Self-Respect
by Allen Lynch
We were pinned down and under intense enemy fire. One of our fighter jets flew over our heads so low that we could count the rivets on its wings. It released a bomb that I was sure would hit us. It exploded in a flash of fire and scorching heat about one hundred feet from us. We were still alive! We had just gone through several artillery barrages, being strafed and bombed; a piece of shrapnel even landed on my leg, and I had a bloody nose from the explosion. To make matters worse, the enemy was so close that we could hear them talking. I was afraid. But then I was used to being afraid.
I was bullied from grade school through high school. It started in the fourth grade. Three boys transferred into my school, and for the next four years they bullied me mercilessly. They did the usual things that kids still do today—tripping me as I walked down the hall, knocking my books from my hand, even urinating in my gym shoes. They called me at home and told me what was going to happen to me the next day. I was beaten up several times. Strangely, fighting back never entered my mind. All I had to do was get a couple of good licks in each time and I could have ended it, but I was overcome with paralyzing fear. I felt less than worthless. I withdrew into myself and trusted no one. Things deteriorated both at school and at home. My parents were disappointed in me because of my poor grades and lack of friends. They wanted me to enjoy school, but all I desperately wanted was to be left alone.
When his company was ambushed in a firefight in Vietnam in December 1967 and forced to withdraw, Allen Lynch stayed with his comrades and then carried each of the wounded men through heavy fire to safety.
Our family moved in 1960 after I graduated from junior high school. I was moving away from the bullies and going to a school where no one knew me. What I didn’t know was that no matter where you go, there you are. Change must come from within.
Things started well. I actually began making friends. But the first time I was confronted, the boy I thought I left behind reappeared. Bullies are in every school, and this one was no different. I was the new kid, and the rules of the playground dictated that I be challenged. One day at lunchtime, I sat at the wrong table and a kid told me to move. I thought, This is my chance; this time I won’t back down. I stood up, and all the old fears flooded over me. I felt totally defeated. I stopped going to school events. My grades suffered; I failed math and had to go to summer school twice. The bullying was less threatening than before, but my old fears of rejection and lack of self-esteem were as strong as ever. More than anything, it was my self-doubt that hindered me. That isn’t to say I didn’t have friends; I did. But my friends were outsiders like me. The girls I dated were few and far between. I even had a few fights and didn’t do too badly, but I just didn’t fit in.
In 1964, I graduated from high school. But being a poor student, lacking confidence and a sense of purpose, I had limited choices. I was sure I would be drafted eventually, so I enlisted in the Army. Our drill sergeant taught us to be soldiers: to meet tough standards, to rely on each other, and to work together as a team—our lives would depend on it. As we succeeded in becoming soldiers, I became more confident in my abilities. I learned to run and chant cadence as we marched, to shoot and hit the target (I qualified as expert). I learned to work with others to achieve goals; the Army calls it “accomplish the mission.” I learned the four lifesaving steps: Stop the bleeding, protect the wound, clear the airway, and treat for shock. Knowing these would help me to save lives in December 1967. My confidence was growing, but I still had a very long way to go.
During high school, rather than go to study hall I often went to the library. When my homework was done, I read history; I think I read every history book in the library. After I was in basic training for four weeks, I was asked if I wanted to go to Officer Candidate School. If I could make it through the six months of training, I’d become an officer. I thought that finally I could do something to make my parents proud of me. But I again found that no matter where you go, there you are. I had grown and gained confidence, but not enough. I took the long hours and constant pressure by our tactical officers personally. After four weeks, I dropped out. I had failed again! But the Army taught me something: I failed, but I learned that I could endure long hours of hard physical and mental work. I learned to study like I never did before. And I learned I could fail but didn’t have to give up.
I was soon transferred to Germany. A year later I volunteered for Vietnam. I served in combat with the D Company, 1/12 Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division. By December 1967, I had been in combat for six months. I’d been in firefights, rocketed and mortared, gone on ambushes, and served in observation posts. I was part of something bigger than myself and felt I was part of the team. We relied on each other, and we trusted each other with our lives. During those six months, I lost my best friend to friendly fire. I saw the dead on both sides; I can still see them. The dead soldiers I helped to load onto helicopters still haunt me. But in all the hardship of combat, I started to find myself.
On December 15, we were on a mission to relieve one of our companies that had been ambushed the day before. As we moved to help them we, too, were ambushed. It seemed like everyone started firing at the same time. It was a nightmare of noise with machine guns, rifle fire, hand grenades exploding, and men yelling all around. I followed my lieutenant as he ran to the front to assess the situation. I was his radioman; it was my job to stay with him so we could inform headquarters about what was happening.
The enemy fire was intense, and there were wounded who needed help. I had to act; there was no time for fear. I asked the lieutenant if I could drop my radio and go out to get the men who were down. I saw a trench and started moving them there. I don’t remember how I did it. I was too busy. All I know was that my training and the core values taught to me by my parents, family, and military leaders kicked in. In the end, I had gotten the wounded to a safer place. I remembered my lifesaving steps as I cared for their wounds. Those steps had become such a part of me that I didn’t have to even think about them; I just did them.
As Allen Lynch learned in Vietnam, American soldiers care for their wounded even in the heat of battle under enemy fire. No one is left behind.
As we lay pinned down in the trench fighting for our lives, my only thoughts were that I couldn’t let down the men who counted on me to get them out. I was afraid, but not for myself. Once, as our company was trying to rescue us, they told me to leave the men; we’d get them later. But I couldn’t do it; they were my responsibility, and we don’t leave our wounded.
After the fighter jet dropped napalm and another jet strafed close to our position, there was dead silence. It was now or never. I checked the surrounding area for the enemy and started looking for a safer location. Then I carried the wounded one by one from our position to friendly lines.
I didn’t realize it then, but from that day on I stopped being afraid of what others thought of me. I no longer cared if they liked me or not. For the first time in my life, I was my own person, no longer needing or seeking the approval of others. I still had to grow, for we never lose the need to grow, to change, to become better people, but I was on my way.
When I received the Medal of Honor, I had no idea how much it was going to change my life. The medal stands for the best of America—selfless service, courage, and sacrifice. The Army taught me duty, honor, and service. The medal put me in a position to continue serving, which I do by sharing my story with disadvantaged kids, parents, and teachers. Through the Allen J. Lynch Medal of Honor Veterans Foundation, we help veterans of all eras who need assistance.
Most of all, I learned never to lose faith in God. If we allow it, every negative circumstance in life can be used as an occasion to grow and to help other people. When I acted, it was the result of all those who influenced me throughout my life—my parents, grandparents, family, drill sergeant, and, in a sense, even those who bullied me. In the end, I am the sum total of all my life experiences, the good ones and the bad ones. All of them made me who I am today.
CITIZEN HONOREE
Healing the World, One Patient at a Time
“You do what your heart tells you to do.”
A volunteer with a relief organization called Doctors Without Borders, Dr. Jordy Cox went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2008 to save lives, but on his first day at work there in the middle of a vicious civil war, he thought he might lose his own.
Previously Jordy had worked as a trauma surgeon in Africa’s Ivory Coast during its first civil war. There, treating people whose arms had been hacked off by machetes, he thought he would never again witness such horrifying violence. But that bloodshed couldn’t compare to what he saw in Congo, where both sides tortured and killed prisoners and civilians.
The situation was so dangerous on the day Jordy arrived in Rutshuru, a town in the eastern part of Congo, that the United Nations peacekeeping force evacuated the entire medical staff of the hospital. He and another surgeon with Doctors Without Borders volunteered to stay behind and treat the injured by themselves.
Dozens of people maimed by the battle raging in the streets outside the hospital streamed into the operating room during Jordy’s first days at work. Most were civilians caught in the crossfire of the warring forces. But one was an officer in the Congolese army, carried into the hospital with a gunshot wound in the chest. Jordy immediately operated, removing a bullet lodged dangerously close to the man’s heart. A few hours later, as the officer was in recovery and Jordy was working on other patients, a rebel commander walked in, two men carrying machine guns on either side of him. He demanded to know where the Congolese officer was. When Jordy refused to tell him, the rebel pulled out a pistol and said, “If you don’t take me to see him, I will put this gun in your mouth and kill you.” Somehow, Jordy talked the rebel out of killing either him or the wounded officer. Then he went back to the operating table.
For the next month, Jordy didn’t leave the hospital. “There was fighting raging in the streets right around us,” he recalls. “Tanks were firing and bombs falling literally right outside.” He did one operation after another on people mutilated by the war. “You sleep when you can,” he recalls of his daily routine. “You eat when you can. You just deal.”
Citizen of the World
Before going to Congo, Jordy was a surgeon at the Maricopa Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona. But it was on his trips to the underdeveloped world that Jordy felt most needed. “If I’m going to be given the choice between an assignment that doesn’t have danger and one that does,” he says, “I’m going to sign up for the dangerous one.”
One especially dangerous assignment he volunteered for was in Pakistan, a place where the sudden violence of the suicide bomber is the norm. “I remember the sound of the explosion,” Jordy says of one suicide bombing that took place near where he was treating patients. “There is an evil that goes along with that noise.”
Jordy has wanted to work in such remote and threatening places not only because of sympathy for the victims of conflict there—people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get emergency medical treatment—but also because he has always felt that he was a citizen of the world. He was born in 1972 near Barcelona to an English father and Swiss mother. He grew up speaking English, Spanish, and French. When he was a boy he wanted to be a movie stuntman. Later he wanted to be a veterinarian. And finally he decided that he would become a doctor.
But a normal practice as a general practitioner wasn’t what Jordy had in mind. Instead, he wanted to help people who had experienced extreme injuries, and after finishing medical school in Spain, he came to the United States for advanced training in trauma surgery. He heard that Doctors Without Borders was looking for what it called “conflict surgeons” to work in areas troubled by civil unrest and natural disaster, and immediately signed up. His wife, Heidi, a pediatric surgeon who once was in the U.S. Air Force, also volunteers for Doctors Without Borders and has provided medical treatment in Nigeria and other global hot spots.
A 7.2-magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010. Dr. Jordy Cox was on a plane to the capital, Port-au-Prince, the next afternoon. Over the next ten days, he worked with a surgical team in a makeshift operating room in a tent because all the hospitals in the city had been destroyed.
Haiti
Jordy has close ties to his patients in the United States, but he is always on the alert for the next international disaster. He had just gotten home from work in Arizona on the evening of January 12, 2010, when he heard on a Phoenix radio station that a massive earthquake had hit Haiti. “I knew right away they’d be needing help,” he remembers. A call came from Doctors Without Borders a couple of hours later. The next morning Jordy spoke with the three surgeons he worked with. All of them had children and couldn’t leave to go to Haiti, but they told Jordy they would fill in for him during his trip as their way of also helping the disaster victims.
Jordy was on a plane to Haiti early that afternoon. But he was not prepared for what he saw when he arrived in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. In the civil wars he had seen in the Ivory Coast and Congo, buildings were often riddled by bullets but still standing. In Port-au-Prince the earthquake had leveled them all. Injured people were lying in the streets; search-and-rescue teams in bright orange vests were pulling bodies out of the rubble; the smell of death was in the air. One of the city’s main hospitals had been destroyed. Jordy and the other surgeons established a new “operating room” in a parking lot by hanging sheets around a raised wooden platform.
Many of the patients’ arms and legs had been mangled by falling concrete when the powerful quake first struck. Jordy spent his first days amputating limbs to save lives. He and the rest of the team did approximately forty major operations a day. In each of the cases he worked on, he felt the personal tragedy. “One of the reasons you become a surgeon and put yourself in this type of environment is because you care,” he says. But in addition to feeling pity for the victims of the disaster, he was also aware of their quiet bravery. One case that he would never forget involved two young girls, three and seven years old, and a woman with them. Each of the girls had to have a leg amputated. The woman had suffered some bone fractures but was otherwise all right and more worried about the children than herself. “I assumed that she was their mother,” Jordy recalls. “But it turned out that she had never met them until the earthquake hit and had been taking care of them since.”
In the first ten days after the disaster, the surgical team Jordy was part of saw more than a thousand badly injured patients. They lost only eleven.
I Was Just Doing My Job
On March 25, 2010, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society awarded Dr. Jordy Cox its Citizen Service Before Self Honors Award (formerly known as the Above and Beyond Citizen Honors Award) in a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Afterward, Jordy talked to some of the Medal of Honor recipients. “They all had done things for their country they never thought they could do, amazing things,” he says. “But when I talked to them about it, they all said to me, ‘I was just doing my job.’ In a way, that’s what I think about myself. I was just doing my job. You do what your heart tells you. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
On March 25, 2010, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society awarded Jordy its Citizen Service Before Self Honors Award for his work with Doctors Without Borders all over the world.
Doctors Without Borders is the American branch of the French organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which was started in 1971 when a small group of French doctors came to the aid of the Igbo people of Biafra, a part of southeastern Nigeria. Biafra was suffering brutal attacks by the Nigerian army in revenge for its attempts to declare independence. The International Red Cross didn’t step in, saying the war was an “internal matter” for Nigeria to handle. So the doctors formed Médecins Sans Frontières and vowed to address the medical needs of people in crisis situations despite the politics of their countries.
Today Médecins Sans Frontières sends some 28,000 volunteers—doctors, nurses, communicable-disease specialists, and water and sanitation engineers—to more than sixty countries around the world. Its mission is to respond rapidly to medical emergencies caused by civil wars, epidemics of diseases such as AIDS and the Ebola virus, and natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and floods, and also to make sure that the world knows that these tragedies are taking place.
Dedication and Sacrifice
MSF volunteers have been killed by land mines, armed attacks, and the diseases they were trying to combat. They have been kidnapped. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when upward of one million people were slaughtered in tribal conflicts, more than a hundred local MFS volunteers lost their lives.
But the organization continues to grow. MSF provides doctors for powerless people desperate for medical care and speaks out about health crises even when governments sometimes deny they are happening. In 1997, Médecins Sans Frontières received the Nobel Peace Prize. In accepting the award, the organization’s president, Dr. James Orbinski, said, “We are not sure that words can save lives, but we are sure that silence can kill.”
A lieutenant remembers the moment in combat when several of his comrades were down, and he had a choice to make. “I didn’t want to have to look back years later,” he writes, “and realize that I could have done the right thing but didn’t.”
by Jack Jacobs
In March 1968, I was an army infantry lieutenant and, along with three other Americans, an adviser to a South Vietnamese infantry battalion. We accompanied them on every military operation. We lived together, ate together, and fought together, and we felt that we were as much a part of the Vietnamese army as we were part of the U.S. Army.
Being in Vietnam in 1968 meant that we were in combat every single day for months on end. On March 9, my noncommissioned officer (NCO), Staff Sergeant Ray Ramirez, and I were with the lead company of the battalion when we were ambushed in the open by about 250 enemy soldiers. Many of our troops were killed immediately, and many more, including Ramirez and myself, were hurt in the initial seconds of the battle.
I was wounded in the head, blood gushing from it alarmingly. Because there was a small piece of shrapnel stuck in my eye, I couldn’t see anything out of it. I was focused on only one thing: the tiny world of my fellow warriors with whom I spent all of my time. It didn’t matter that they were Vietnamese and I was an American. They were my comrades. I could hear bullets and shrapnel whizzing around continuously, hitting the ground, smacking sickeningly into my friends just a few feet away.
U.S. Army lieutenant Jack Jacobs enjoys a lighthearted moment on the American base in Vietnam in 1967.
Even the bravest people are scared in combat, but being badly hurt makes you even more afraid. At first there’s a feeling of helplessness as you see your friends killed and wounded. But soon—and most people with combat experience will tell you the same thing—you are calmed by the understanding that you and your comrades are related: brothers, really, through service and sacrifice. It’s true that we fight for our country, but when the chips are down, we really fight for each other.
In the midst of all this chaos, I thought of the teaching of a first-century Hebrew scholar named Hillel. Almost two thousand years ago he asked these questions: If not you, who? And if not now, when?
In 1968 Jack Jacobs, with a Vietnamese soldier, was serving as an adviser to a battalion of the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam.
What that meant to me at that moment was that somebody had to act or all of my friends would be killed. And if I didn’t do it, who could? I decided that even though I was hurt, I was the only person who was capable of action, and I wasn’t going to let the chance pass by. I didn’t want to have to look back years later and realize that I could have done the right thing but didn’t.
Despite the pain in my head and all the blood, I dragged about two dozen of my friends, who were out in the open being hit with rifle and machine-gun fire, to a safer area nearby that had a few trees to stop some of the bullets. After that, I collapsed from loss of blood and was evacuated to a field hospital. In the end, the lives of one U.S. adviser and thirteen allied soldiers were saved, and I am grateful that I did my best for them.
Today, we live in a very complex world, and most people are motivated to act only for themselves. But think about this: None of us would be here if it weren’t for the selfless sacrifice of the people who came before us—Washington’s troops, who braved the awful winter at Valley Forge and then defeated the British to give to us the United States of America; the heroes who defeated the Axis during the Second World War and brought a generation of peace to the world; the brave men and women who, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, volunteered to fight terrorism and who are still serving today.
But heroism isn’t confined to the battlefield. There are Americans performing acts of valor every day, when they volunteer to help their fellow citizens, when they stand up to unfairness, when they battle bullies. In my experience, physical courage is relatively easy, but it’s moral courage that is real heroism. When a natural disaster occurs, it’s easy to ignore it, but the person with genuine courage tries to help out. When a thoughtless person makes fun of someone who can’t defend himself or herself, it takes courage to set the record straight. When we encounter lies, cheating, and stealing, all of which make our communities poorer, it takes courage to report it. Choosing to do the right thing will change your life and those of your friends for the better and forever.
And this is the lesson I learned in combat, when the world was collapsing around me, when I thought I wouldn’t survive to see the next sunrise: There is no limit to what we can accomplish if we take care of each other. The next time you have the choice to do something only for yourself, or to do something for your community instead, keep in mind something Benjamin Franklin once said: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” In other words, we’re all in this together.
Jack saved thirteen members of his unit after it was ambushed on March 9, 1968. In addition to the Medal of Honor, Jack received two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts.
