We are all like one-winged angels. It’s only when we help each other that we can fly.
- Luciano deCrescenzo
Bob Butler lost his legs in a 1965 land mine explosion in Vietnam. He returned home a war hero. Twenty years later, he proved once again that heroism comes from the heart.
Butler was working in his garage in a small town in Arizona on a hot summer day when he heard a woman’s screams coming from a nearby house. He rolled his wheel-chair toward the house, but the dense shrubbery wouldn’t allow him access to the back door. So the veteran got out of his chair and crawled through the dirt and bushes.
“I had to get there”, he says. “It didn’t matter how much it hurt”.
When Butler arrived at the house, he traced the screams to the pool, where a three-year-old girl was lying at the bottom. She had been born without arms and had fallen in the water and couldn’t swim. Her mother stood over her baby screaming frantically. Butler dove to the bottom of the pool and brought little Stephanie up to the deck. Her face was blue, she had no pulse and she was not breathing.
Butler immediately went to work, performing Cardio Pulmonary Recovery (CPR) to revive her while Stephanie’s mother telephoned the fire department. She was told that the paramedics were already out on a call. Helplessly, she sobbed and hugged Butler’s shoulder.
As Butler continued with his CPR, he calmly reassured Stephanie’s mother. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I was her arms to get out of the pool. It’ll be okay. I’m now her lungs. Together we can make it.”
Seconds later the little girl coughed, regained consciousness and began to cry. As they hugged and rejoiced together, the mother asked Butler how he knew it would be okay.
“When my legs were blown off in the war, I was all alone in a field”, he told her. “No one was there to help except a little Vietnamese girl. As she struggled to drag me into her village, she whispered in broken English, “It okay. You can live. I be your legs. Together we make it’.
“This was my chance,” he told Stephanie’s mom, ‘to return the favour’.
- Dan Clark