In case you missed it last night, there was a story on 20/20 that just was too amazing not to at least mention here. The article below tells the story:
(navytimes.com) Spc. Channing Moss should be dead by all accounts. And those who saved his life did so knowing they might have died with him.
March 16, 2006. Southeastern Afghanistan. A fierce ambush and bloody firefight. It was over in a flash and Moss was left on the verge of death.
He was impaled through the abdomen with a rocket-propelled grenade, and an aluminum rod with one tail fin protruded from the left side of his torso.
His fellow soldiers worried: Could he blow up and take them with him? For all anyone knew, the answer was yes.
Still, over the course of the next couple of hours, his buddies, a helicopter crew and a medical team would risk their own lives to save his.
“Moss is an African-American and he’s gone to white. He’s in total shock from the loss of blood. But at the time, I really didn’t think about it. I knew [the RPG] was there but I thought, if we didn’t do it, if we didn’t get him out of there, he was going to die,†said flight medic Sgt. John Collier, 29, then a specialist.
“It was an extremely unusual set of events. He should have died three times that day,†said Maj. John Oh, 759th Forward Surgical Team general surgeon.
The 36-year-old’s surgical skill and command of his own nerves would be put to the ultimate test as, wearing helmet and body armor, he would operate to extract the ordnance from Moss’s booby-trapped body. One wrong move risked the lives of the patient, his own and those of the other members of the medical team.
He said the payoff was worth the gamble.
“For a soldier to be struck by an RPG and be flown and have surgery and survive it’s unheard of,†said Oh. “It was a pretty remarkable experience.†(please read the rest here)
Also, you can watch a video interview of Spc. Channing Moss here.
What really moved me about this story was how quickly soldiers were willing to place their lives on the line for a fellow soldier. In this particular case the soldier in need was Black, most of the other soldiers that broke protocol to save him (because protocol says that because he had a live round lodged in his body, he should have be left on the field) were White. And the main doctor that also chose to place his life along with the life of his fellow doctors was Asian. Everyone was faced with the choice to ‘rightfully’ look out for themselves because of protocol, but they all chose to stay. Perhaps the most moving part for me was when one of the soldiers who had the responsibility to actually remove this unexploded grenade from Spc. Moss actually took on the greatest risk by standing in the direct path of this round as he managed to pull it out and carry it outside the medical wing where he blew up the bomb in a safe location.
Stories like this is yet another reason why I love our military (sports is another good example). While we civilians have the luxury of sitting back and arguing over the mission, arguing over quotes/misquotes/miscalculations by Democrats or Republicans, these young men and women know how to put all of that aside in and work together.
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