Rescues
Surrounded By Taliban, But He Took Them On
by admin on Jan.27, 2010, under Combat, Rescues
This is the face of a truly brave man. I’m sure many, when faced with the challenges he faced, would not have been able to act with the level of bravery and skill that Staff Sgt. Lincoln Dockery did.
It all started on an ordinary day in eastern Afghanistan. Dockery’s platoon had been ordered to investigate a report on a possible IED planted in the area around the villages of Kandegal and Omar. Unfortunately, the road-clearing platoon discovered the explosive device the hard way – by landing on it. The vehicle-mounted mine detector leading the convoy set the device off, causing an explosion that knocked down the dismounted troops, Dockery included. At the same moment, more than 30 insurgents opened fire on the soldiers.
Dazed from the blast, and despite heavy fire, Dockery risked his life to awaken the driver, Pfc. Amador Magana, who had been knocked unconscious from the explosion. Once Magana was awake and firing at the enemy, Dockery decided he wasn’t satisfied with merely saving the life of his comrade.
Seeing his convoy in danger from the heavy fire, he, along with Spc. Corey Taylor, stormed the enemy position, which was a staggering 75 feet up the mountainside. Not to be daunted, the two rushed upward, then crawled along – the whole way throwing grenades at the insurgents. Shrapnel hit Dockery, but he didn’t let slow him down.
Eventually he and Taylor found themselves taking shelter under a rock incline, so close to the enemy that they could hear them talking. They remained holed up there while Dockery attempted to get 1st Lt. William Cromie, his platoon leader, on the radio.
Finally they reached Cromie on the radio, but no one below could spot their position. No one knew how to reach them.
And they were running out of ammunition.
Cromie made the risky decision to take on the mountain by himself. He grabbed extra ammo and reached the two men above. Between the three of them, they were able to force the insurgents into a retreat.
Dockery received a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his brave tactics against the enemy. Cromie also received a Silver Star for his actions.
I don’t know about you, but reading a story like this just gives me the shivers. Such bravery in the face of death and injury really humbles me.
Hero Marines Help Out With Car Crash
by admin on Oct.16, 2009, under Rescues
These people put their skills to the test and won back this man’s life. You don’t have to be on the battlefield to be a hero.
[J.A.] Magana [trooper with the N.C. Highway Patrol] said the driver was heading south on Lake Road around 7:30 a.m. when he lost control of the Nissan SUV, overcorrected, flipped and submerged wheels up into the ditch with about 3 to 4 feet of water.
The Marines following behind the crash stopped, jumped into the canal, pulled the man to safety and then breathed life into his lungs.
Staff Sgt. William Carlson, of Marine Attack Squadron 231 and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, was heading to rifle practice at Camp Lejeune with three other Marines, Cpl. Shari Hansen, Sgt. Eric Lyman, and Sgt. Caleb Bailey, all of VMA-231, when the crash happened.
“We stopped the car jumped into the ditch and tried to get the doors open,” Carlson said. “We couldn’t get the doors open on the driver’s side so we jumped over to the other side and got the back passenger door open.
“We got his seatbelt undone. He was tangled up in it. We cut him loose and pulled him out the back passenger door. We had to remove the headrest to get him past the seat. He was underwater for about three minutes.”
They then began working with three other Marines who arrived at the scene just after the crash to save the driver’s life.
“Once we got him out, he didn’t have a pulse and he wasn’t breathing,” Carlson said. “We started CPR. After about a minute of CPR, his pulse came back. He started breathing about 10 or 15 seconds after we stopped compressions when we got a pulse.”
One of those on the scene was a 31-year-old Marine corporal who didn’t want to give her name.
“One Marine took his pulse, another Marine checked for breathing, and I was on top doing chest compressions,” she said. “We continued to do that until he started spitting out water, and we put him on his side to get the water out. Read on…
Irena Sendler
by admin on Oct.14, 2009, under Historical Heroes, Non-Combatant Heroes, Rescues
This women was amazing! I’ve gotta say, this inspires me. Irena Sendler risked everything in order to save Jewish children from the horrors of the Ghetto, and the fear of facing the concentration camps. By the time she was caught, she had managed to smuggle 2,500 children out of the Ghetto and into Polish families who were willing to take them in and protect them.
Irena Sendler was born in 1910 in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. She was greatly influenced by her father who was one of the first Polish Socialists. As a doctor his patients were mostly poor Jews. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror. At the time, Irena was a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which operated the canteens in every district of the city. Previously, the canteens provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor and the destitute. Now, through Irena, the canteens also provided clothing, medicine and money for the Jews. They were registered under fictitious Christian names, and to prevent inspections, the Jewish families were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis.
But in 1942, the Nazis herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into a 16-block area that came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto was sealed and the Jewish families ended up behind its walls, only to await certain death. Irena Sendler was so appalled by the conditions that she joined Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, organized by the Polish underground resistance movement, as one of its first recruits and directed the efforts to rescue Jewish children.
To be able to enter the Ghetto legally, Irena managed to be issued a pass from Warsaws Epidemic Control Department and she visited the Ghetto daily, reestablished contacts and brought food, medicines and clothing. But 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease in the Ghetto, and she decided to help the Jewish children to get out. For Irena Sendler, a young mother herself, persuading parents to part with their children was in itself a horrendous task. Finding families willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk their life if the Nazis ever found out, was also not easy.
Irena Sendler, who wore a star armband as a sign of her solidarity to Jews, began smuggling children out in an ambulance. She recruited at least one person from each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department. With their help, she issued hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. Irena Sendler successfully smuggled almost 2,500 Jewish children to safety and gave them temporary new identities.
Some children were taken out in gunnysacks or body bags. Some were buried inside loads of goods. A mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Some kids were carried out in potato sacks, others were placed in coffins, some entered a church in the Ghetto which had two entrances. One entrance opened into the Ghetto, the other opened into the Aryan side of Warsaw. They entered the church as Jews and exited as Christians. “`Can you guarantee they will live?’” Irena later recalled the distraught parents asking. But she could only guarantee they would die if they stayed. “In my dreams,” she said, “I still hear the cries when they left their parents.”
Irena Sendler accomplished her incredible deeds with the active assistance of the church. “I sent most of the children to religious establishments,” she recalled. “I knew I could count on the Sisters.” Irena also had a remarkable record of cooperation when placing the youngsters: “No one ever refused to take a child from me,” she said. The children were given false identities and placed in homes, orphanages and convents. Irena Sendler carefully noted, in coded form, the childrens original names and their new identities. She kept the only record of their true identities in jars buried beneath an apple tree in a neighbor’s back yard, across the street from German barracks, hoping she could someday dig up the jars, locate the children and inform them of their past.
In all, the jars contained the names of 2,500 children …
But the Nazis became aware of Irena’s activities, and on October 20, 1943 she was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, who broke her feet and legs. She ended up in the Pawiak Prison, but no one could break her spirit. Though she was the only one who knew the names and addresses of the families sheltering the Jewish children, she withstood the torture, that crippled her for life, refusing to betray either her associates or any of the Jewish children in hiding. Sentenced to death, Irena was saved at the last minute when Zegota members bribed one of the Gestapo agents to halt the execution. She escaped from prison but for the rest of the war she was pursued by the Nazis.
After the war she dug up the jars and used the notes to track down the 2,500 children she placed with adoptive families and to reunite them with relatives scattered across Europe. But most lost their families during the Holocaust in Nazi death camps. The children had known her only by her code name Jolanta. But years later, after she was honored for her wartime work, her picture appeared in a newspaper. “A man, a painter, telephoned me,” said Sendler, “`I remember your face,’ he said. `It was you who took me out of the ghetto.’ I had many calls like that!”
Irena Sendler did not think of herself as a hero. She claimed no credit for her actions. “I could have done more,” she said. “This regret will follow me to my death.” She has been honored by international Jewish organizations – in 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Irena Sendler was awarded Poland’s highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle, in Warsaw Monday Nov. 10, 2003, and she was announced as the 2003 winner of the Jan Karski award for Valor and Courage. She has officially been designated a national hero in Poland and schools are named in her honor. Annual Irena Sendler days are celebrated throughout Europe and the United States.
In 2007, she was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. At a special session in Poland’s upper house of Parliament, President Lech Kaczynski announced the unanimous resolution to honor Irena Sendler for rescuing “the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology: the Jewish children.” He referred to her as a “great heroine who can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize. She deserves great respect from our whole nation.”
During the ceremony Elzbieta Ficowska, who was just six months old when she was saved by Irena Sendler, read out a letter on her behalf: “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory,” Irena Sendler said in the letter, “Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget.” (source)
SEAL Gave His Life In Iraq
by admin on Sep.23, 2009, under Combat, Rescues
March 2008
SAN DIEGO — A California-based SEAL who threw his body on a grenade to save his comrades in Iraq will posthumously receive the Medal of Honor, a Defense Department official has confirmed.
Master-at-Arms 2nd Class (SEAL) Michael A. Monsoor, of Garden Grove, Calif., was holed up on the roof of a Ramadi house with three other SEALs on Sept. 29, 2006, when an insurgent grenade landed nearby.
Monsoor, a 25-year old with SEAL Team 3, grabbed the grenade and clutched it to his chest. The blast killed him, but his actions, officials said at the time, saved the men on the rooftop.
Monsoor will be the second member of the Navy to receive the Medal of Honor since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, and the first sailor to receive it for combat in Iraq.
Michael Fumento, who’s written about Monsoor and combat operations in Ramadi, reported on his Internet blog over the weekend that Monsoor’s family would receive the posthumous award on the fallen SEAL’s behalf during a White House ceremony April 8. (source)
I can’t imagine what must go through a person’s head when they make such a life-shattering decision. What would it be like to know that your comrades’ lives are in your hands, and only you can save them – but at the expense of your own life? And to know, in those last few seconds as you hug that live explosive, that soon you will be discovering that last great mystery? For a person to make such a choice is truly the bravest and most selfless act a human being can perform.
Michael Monsoor gave no less than his greatest gift. Until that moment, he had lived helping his comrades. Monsoor had received the Silver Star in 2006 for risking his life to save a fellow SEAL who was injured during a firefight in Ramadi.
Navy Medic Shows Courage On The Battlefield
by admin on Sep.14, 2009, under Combat, Non-Combatant Heroes, Rescues
Photo taken moments after Kate Nesbitt saved a soldiers life
COURAGEOUS Kate Nesbitt takes a well-earned breather on the battlefield – her face covered with the blood of the soldier whose life she has just saved.
Navy medic Kate, 21, was snapped moments after a heroic rescue in Afghanistan which has earned her a Military Cross.
The brave blonde dashed 70 yards across a war zone to reach fallen Corporal John List, who was choking to death on his own blood.
An enemy bullet had ricocheted off Cpl List’s body armour into his mouth – smashing his jaw and tongue.
Despite heavy fire from Taliban machine guns, Kate worked for 45 minutes to save his life.
She stemmed the bleeding and then expertly performed a tricky procedure to open a second airway through the soldier’s nose.
Able Seaman Kate, from Plymouth, is the first Wren to receive the Military Cross. (source)
Medics truly are special people. They take their duty seriously, even to the point of risking bodily harm in order to perform it. They are someone who has dedicated themselves to the un-warlike ideals of healing, but who won’t hesitate to throw themselves into the violent fray when needed.
These field medics deserve all the praise and recognition that they can get. I’m glad that this brave woman received the Military Cross. She more than deserved it.
Royal Marine Tackles Suicide Bomber
by admin on Sep.11, 2009, under Combat, Rescues
Words can’t quite describe the awesomeness here. Sergeant Noel Connolly was serving in Afghanistan last November when he spotted a suspicious looking man on a motorbike. The motorcyclist looked lost, and that set Connolly on high alert.
[Connolly] said: ‘I was near the school when I caught a fleeting glimpse of a motorbike. I told all my lads to expect a bomber.
When the man came back for another pass, Connolly challenged him. He stopped the bike and made a move for the toggle switch installed on the bike. Did Connolly go for his gun? Oh no, guns aren’t for real men. Instead he Chuck Norris-style tackles the man sitting on 154 pounds of explosives, bodily removing him from the bike.
Connolly doesn’t think he’s done anything brave or heroic. But we’re all entitled to disagree with him, and this week he will be awarded the Military Cross in honor of his actions.
British Soldier Lost During Rescue
by admin on Sep.10, 2009, under Combat, Rescues
A journalist and his translator had been captured when they were covering the NATO airstrike that resulted in approximately 70 people killed. They were taken by Taliban members and were being held in northern Afghanistan. In the fray of the rescue, a soldier was killed along with the journalist’s translator, Sultan Munadi.
A British soldier serving with the special forces support group has been killed during a pre-dawn raid to free a British journalist being held by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, it was confirmed today.
The reporter’s interpreter also died in the operation.
Stephen Farrell, a New York Times journalist, and his translator, Sultan Munadi, were captured last Saturday as they reported on the aftermath of a Nato air strike in which at least 70 people were killed.
Early today, Farrell said he had been “extracted” after a helicopter carrying British and Afghan soldiers swooped on a compound near the northern city of Kunduz.
“We were all in a room, the Talibs all ran … it was obviously a raid,” the 46-year-old told his editors in New York.
The Kunduz governor’s office confirmed that the raid had been led by British special forces.
Military officials told the Guardian that the soldier who died was a member of the special forces support group.
The Ministry of Defence confirmed that a British soldier, believed to be a paratrooper, was killed during the operation. Two Afghan civilians were killed in the crossfire, the BBC reported.
“We regret to announce that a British soldier has been killed on operations in Afghanistan,” an MoD spokesman said.
The number of British troops killed in Afghanistan since the start of operations in 2001 now stands at 213, with 41 having died in July and August.
A spokesman for Gordon Brown said the prime minister had spoken to the UK’s leading military commander in Afghanistan, General Jim Dutton, “to thank the [rescue] team for the tremendous effort”.
In a statement, the prime minister paid tribute to the courage of the British soldier who was killed in the raid. “His family has been informed, and our immediate thoughts are with them. His bravery will not be forgotten,” said Brown.
Brown said Farrell was “now safe and well, receiving support from embassy staff and undergoing medical checks.” Read on…
Hero Rescued 669 Holocaust Children
by admin on Sep.09, 2009, under Rescues
Sometimes people will convince themselves that they can’t make a difference. They’ll decide they’re not influential enough, or rich enough, or tall enough to be able to go out and really change the world. But Sir Nicholas Winton, a London stockbroker, saw a chance to make a difference and went for it. And oh what a difference he made!
Back then Sir Nicholas Winton was an ordinary, fun-loving London stockbroker. But when he heard stories from friends in Prague of Jews losing their jobs and homes under Nazi occupation, Winton decided to do something.
Fearing that worse was to come, Winton decided to save as many Czech children as he could. He masterminded their incredible escape.
Winton raised money, begged the British government to grant visas, chartered the trains, forged papers, and found families in England to adopt the children.
Sir Nicholas Winton Is Now 100.
In 1939 Winton was there on the platform to greet the children. This morning, now 100-years-old, he was waiting on the platform once again, frail, but still standing and leaning on a cane. He shook hands with each survivor as they got off the train.
“The trouble 70 years ago was getting them together with the people who were going to look after them,” Winton said today. “I’ve got no responsibility this time.”
Just the grateful thanks of the 669 he saved and their descendants. There are, they say, 7,000 of them scattered all over the world.
Sir Nicholas Winton stands in front of the train that carried evacuees to Liverpool
Medic Puts Her Charges Above Herself
by admin on Sep.04, 2009, under Combat, Non-Combatant Heroes, Rescues
Despite her injuries, Lance Corporal Clarke stayed in the danger zone to help injured comrades
This story hit the internet yesterday via the Daily Mail.co.uk website. It never ceases to amaze me how these men and women can bravely put their well-being, or even their lives, on the line to help out a fellow soldier or an innocent civilian. In this story of heroism, Lance Corporal Sally Clarke put her team members before herself and was able to save seven fellow soldiers. Oh, and did I mention she had several pieces of shrapnel lodged in her shoulder and back the whole time?
Lance Corporal Sally Clarke, of 2 Rifles, ignored the searing pain caused by the shards embedded in her shoulder and back and set about treating the rest of her patrol.
The worst hit was Corporal Paul Mather who incredibly managed to radio instructions for jets circling above to open fire on Taliban insurgents despite bleeding heavily from wounds the size of his fist.
Corporal Mather, 28, and Lance Corporal Clarke, 22, from Cheltenham, were on patrol south of Sangin when insurgents fired rocket propelled grenades over a wall as soldiers dealt with an anti-tank mine.
Hot flying shrapnel sliced open Corporal Mather’s body, leaving gaping holes across his arms, legs and buttocks.
He said: ‘It hurt like hell, but once the explosions stopped and my hearing came back, I managed to climb through a ditch towards a group of soldiers treating other casualties.
‘I had a hole in my left bicep, so the medics applied a field dressing and tourniquet to stem the blood flow.’
Despite being entitled to get out as soon as she was hit Lance Corporal Clarke refused, insisting she would not leave the patrol without a medic.
She said: ‘I didn’t feel like my injuries were bad enough to go back to the hospital, particularly as I was the only medic on the ground at the time.
‘I couldn’t leave them on their own – I came out here to support the troops on the ground and give them medical care when they needed it the most.’
Canine Rescue
by admin on Aug.24, 2009, under Rescues
I don’t know the backstory to this photo, but it certainly is sweet. Even tough guys can have a soft spot.
