We Can Make It

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 

The cheerful day

At the beginning of my 8:00 a.m. class one Monday at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), I cheerfully asked my students how their weekend had been. One young man said that his weekend had not been very good. He’d had his wisdom teeth extracted.

The young man then proceeded to ask me why I always seemed to be so cheerful. His question reminded me of something I'd read somewhere before: “Every morning when you get up, you have a choice about how you want to approach life that day” I said to the young man. “I choose to be cheerful". “Let me give you an example,” I continued.  

The other sixty students in the class ceased their chatter and began to listen to our conversation. “In addition to teaching here, I also teach out at the community college in Henderson, about seventeen miles down the freeway from where I live.

One day a few weeks ago I drove those seventeen miles to Henderson. I exited the freeway and turned onto College Drive. I only had to drive another quarter-mile down the road to the college. But just then my car died. I tried to start it again, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. So I put my flashers on, grabbed my books and marched down the road to the college.

The cheerful day 

“As soon as I got there, I called AAA and asked them to send a tow truck. The secretary in the Provost's office asked me what had happened. ‘This is my lucky day,’ I replied, smiling. “‘Your car breaks down and today is your lucky day?’ She was puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

“I live seventeen miles from here I replied. ‘My car could have broken down anywhere along the freeway. It didn't. Instead, it broke down in the perfect place off the freeway, within walking distance of here. I'm still able to teach my class and I've been able to arrange for the tow truck to meet me after class.

If my car was meant to break down today, it couldn't have been arranged in a more convenient fashion. “The secretary's eyes opened wide and then she smiled. I smiled back and headed for class”. So I ended my story to the students in my economics class.

I scanned the sixty faces in the lecture hall. Despite the early hour, no one seemed to be asleep. Somehow, my story had touched them or maybe it wasn't the story at all. In fact, it had all started with a student's observation that I was cheerful. A wise man once said, “Who you are speaks louder to me than anything you can say.” I suppose it must be so.

Author: Lee Ryan Miller - story from his book "Teaching Amidst the Neon Palm Trees".