I have a brother and two sisters, Nick, Margie and Judi. In some ways they’re perfectly normal, some might say ordinary. By that, I mean they’re not in the public eye, not widely known, and they’ve led what seem to be commonplace, non-spectacular lives.
Though Nick did have a singing career early on, with a couple of sizable chart records, his heart wasn’t really in it, and he married a beautiful girl named Trish. They had four remarkable kids, and he just retired as a sociology professor. Margie is a recently retired registered nurse, having helped bring countless babies into this world and raised two outstanding kids of her own. Judi and her husband, Joe, have run a maintenance business for many years; she also works in a bank, and she and Joe created and raised a boy and a girl we all think are terrific.
Very good, a lot more to each story of course, but nothing to write about, right?
Wrong.
Somebody has just written a news story about one of Judi’s kids, her son Chris. Seems he’s being seen as a hero, and I’d like to share the recent story from AirTran’s Altitudes with you:
AirTran Airways captain saves student’s life
Capt. Chris Allen was only thinking about getting home on April 7, 2006, while traveling down Interstate 24, halfway between Chattanooga and Murfreesboro, where he lives. The AirTran Airways pilot of four years had just spent the past three days at recurrent training at the Pilot Training Center in Atlanta.
As Chris passed mile marker 146, he looked up and saw a Nissan Pathfinder slide across the interstate.
“It slid back and forth a few times from left to right and flipped three times,” Chris said. “It bounced twice on the road, and on the third flip it went over the guardrail into a 12 to 15-foot ravine. It landed upside down.”
Chris later discovered that the vehicle consisted of five students from the University of Georgia.
“It was a dramatic deal,” he said. “I pulled over, and I and another guy ran down to the wreck.”
Three of the students had climbed out of the truck. They were all wearing their seatbelts. Anne Taylor, a freshman who was seated in the front passenger side of the vehicle, was seriously injured. Chris found her lying on her right side, holding her left leg, and her shin bone was broken. Her fibula was also broken, and her left foot was severed right in front of the instep where the foot arches down toward the toes. Her right foot was broken in a couple of places and she had torn ligaments in her right knee.
Chris knew he had to think fast.
“When I saw her, I remembered I had an Army medical kit in my car, and I ran back down to her,” Chris said. “She needed bandaging. She was mostly calm and very sweet. She was awesome. The first thing you have to do is make sure she can breathe, and she was talking to me. She was bleeding quite a bit, so I picked up her foot.”
That is when Chris discovered that Anne’s foot had been severed.
“I got her foot bandaged up and got the bleeding to stop,” Chris said. “By the time I started to splint her leg, the ambulance came. Several other people had stopped. It took five of us to take her up the hill.”
Since the accident, Chris has maintained consistent contact with Anne and her family, and he has visited Anne at the hospital. As of last week, Anne underwent her ninth surgery in which her lower left leg was amputated. Anne’s family members credit Chris for saving Anne’s life.
Chris is a remarkable man, and there were a lot of things that happened to put him in that place and that time with those skills,” said Ron Taylor, Anne’s father.
Chris has a different philosophy: Anne saved his life.
“Just a few miles down the road, the tornadoes came through,” Chris said. “If this had not happened and I had not stopped, chances are that both of us would have ended up in those tornadoes. I would have been right in the middle of that, so it worked out well for both of us. We were both meant to be there at the same time.”
Now, you should know that my nephew Chris doesn’t consider himself a hero. Heroes seldom do. Remember the young man who jumped into the icy, swirling waters close to the Washington, D.C., airport after the airliner went down near the 14th Street Bridge, and pulled a couple of passengers to safety at the eminent risk of his own life? Lenny Skutnik protested: “I’m no hero. These people were about to drown and somebody had to do something – so I just did what I could.”
That’s what heroes do.
Later, in his State of the Union address, President Reagan recognized the young man up in the balcony, and all the assembled legislators gave him a rousing, enthusiastic and deserved salute. He was a hero, and still is.
I’ll bet, like Chris, he grew up in a good, “ordinary” family doing largely unspectacular things. He might never have been known to any of us if he hadn’t “happened” along just when he did, at the scene of the horrific, unexpected tragedy.
But because of his upbringing, the things his parents taught him and the moral sense that he is his “brother’s keeper,” Lenny – like Chris – couldn’t just do nothing. He couldn’t just stand there watching people struggle in the freezing water and go under, not while he might do something, anything, to help. So he jumped in.
And so Chris ran back and got the medical kit, stopped the bleeding and saved the brave young girl’s life. He could do something, so he did.
For years, every chance I’ve gotten I’ve publicly said something like “My brother and two sisters are heroes to me. Their lives are quieter than mine, but they commit themselves every day to helping others, shouldering their own responsibilities, raising their families amidst terrific challenges, paying their bills and taxes, taking active roles in their churches and community life around them, and often reaching out to help others meet their own life obstacles. They’re not looking for awards or recognition, and they recognize that only God is keeping score. That’s good enough for them – and that makes them heroes to me.”
But every once in a while, one of my family – and likely one or more of yours – will “happen” along in a special, dramatic and crisis type of moment, and do something way “out of the ordinary” that will earn some wider recognition. There are thousands of young Americans, like Chris, serving in our military, not because they were drafted or conscripted, but because they sensed a need and responded. They’re from families like yours and mine, brought up to care about our country and everybody in it. And they are all home grown heroes.
Related special offer:
“The Book of Heroes: Great Men and Women in American History”
