6 Tales of Courage

By Tim Padgett, Alice Jackson/Biloxi, Cathy Booth Thomas/New Orleans, Tim McGirk/ Batagram, Alex Perry/ Thirukkovil, Simon Elegant, Zamira Loebis/Banda Aceh

DE'MONTE WILLIAMS NEW ORLEANS

The Kid in Charge

Valor often requires little more than the common sense of a 6-year-old. Three days after Katrina ravaged New Orleans, Catrina Williams, the mother of first-grader De'Monte, decided she had to get her family out of their flooded Uptown neighborhood. But when a small rescue helicopter finally touched down at their apartment complex, the pilot said he could take only a handful of children; he would come right back for the parents. Reluctant but seeing the floodwaters about to swallow their home, Williams tearfully put De'Monte, 6, and his 5-month-old brother Da'Roneal (on floor at left) aboard, along with two cousins and three neighbor children, all ranging in age from 14 months to 3 years. The chopper flew off--but it never returned for the parents.

"It was really loud," De'Monte says of his first helicopter ride, "and when I looked down, I saw all the houses under water. The little kids were crying a lot. But I didn't cry." Instead, when the tykes were dropped off near Causeway Boulevard, on the city's west side, and they became lost in the chaos there, De'Monte (pronounced De-mon-teh) kept a cool head and a brave heart. Clutching Da'Roneal, he had the toddlers (one was wearing only diapers) hold hands in a chain as they wandered to find a safe place. He kept them together and unharmed until rescuers discovered them and took them to a Baton Rouge, La., shelter. They assumed the kids were now orphans.

But once in Baton Rouge, De'Monte saved the day again. Thanks to good coaching by his mom, the boy gave shelter staff enough information--names, addresses, phone numbers, personal descriptions--that in a few days they and the Virginia-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were able to locate all the children's parents, whom rescuers had taken to San Antonio, Texas. The kids were whisked by a private Angel Flight plane to join them in San Antonio, where De'Monte and his family now live. "I was shocked, surprised and proud of my baby when I heard what he did," Williams, 27, says of De'Monte. "I tell him he's a superhero." And a humble one at that. "It feels good that people call me a hero," says De'Monte. "But I don't know why they do." He's attending elementary school in San Antonio, where he says he likes art, science and basketball. Perhaps someday, if we're lucky, he'll grow up to be an emergency-response official.

GAIL GIBSON NEW ORLEANS

Babes in Arms

As Katrina roared toward New Orleans, more than a million people fled the area, but 29 of the city's littlest, most sickly babies were left to ride out the storm in University Hospital. Many, born prematurely, were too weak to make the trip. Gail Gibson's job was to make sure they stayed alive--and Katrina posed an extraordinary challenge, isolating Gibson, her staff and their charges for five days. The incubators had stopped working, so the nurses had to carry the babies in their arms most of the time to keep them warm.

The horrors began the first day when the staff heard that the levees had been breached. "People got really scared and thought they were going to drown," says Gibson, 44, a nursing administrator. "The staff was getting calls from members of their families who were stuck in attics as the water was rising." Some wanted to leave any way possible--and take their tiny charges with them. Gibson went from group to group, telling them that they would get out "when it is safe." But she too was worrying--about her husband and two children, whom she had not heard from. With no electricity and the backup generators flooded, the staff got news from the hospital's lone ham radio. At one point, a helicopter rescue was planned, with a pickup point atop Tulane University Hospital, three blocks away. Nurses carrying babies boarded rowboats--respirating the sickest ones by "hand bagging," a method of forcing air into the lungs. But the helicopter was commandeered for another mission, and the nurses returned with their swaddled patients. "The staff was just emotionally drained. They're crying and upset as they came back," says Gibson. She walked the units to reassure them. "They needed to look in my face and see that it was going to be all right. I told them our No. 1 focus is our patients. We don't want to rush out of here and die in the process."

Gibson was near exhaustion, having had no sleep most of the week. Yet she took on more duties, overseeing nurses in other areas of the hospital. On what turned out to be their last night, the staff successfully delivered a 23-week-old preemie using lights and minimal equipment run by three portable generators. The next day, they were finally evacuated. All the babies are fine. "We don't feel like heroes," says Gibson. "We just wanted our babies to go home alive and be reunited with their parents." Mission accomplished.

RICHARD JONES BILOXI

Dive, He Said

The ceiling of Richard Jones' house in Biloxi, Miss., had just caved in, revealing that his roof had been torn away. That was the good news. Half a mile away on that afternoon of Aug. 29, as Hurricane Katrina sent up 30-ft. storm surges, Jones, 53, knew a flood was raging in from the Bay of Biloxi because the water was rising rapidly in the storm drain on his street. But what worried the high school history teacher more was the debris clogging a larger storm drain nearby, part of a network designed to draw off flooding from Biloxi's coastal areas. If the drains didn't function, Jones knew, then inland neighborhoods like his would be violently deluged.

That's when Jones' hobby turned into gallantry. Six years ago, Jones had taken up scuba diving. As the floodwaters arrived, he donned his swim trunks, scuba mask and snorkel and stepped outside into winds of more than 100 m.p.h., punctuated by the rumble of passing tornadoes. "I was more worried about flying debris than I was about what was beneath the water I was walking into," says Jones, who usually dives off placid sites like Key West, Fla., and Cozumel, Mexico. Still, the rising tide was "real dark, murky and stinky." He plunged in--at one point stepping perilously into a deep hole left by a water meter the hurricane had torn out--found the drain, dived and cleared it. The waters began to recede, and Jones' neighborhood was spared the disaster that destroyed hundreds of other Biloxi homes and took scores of lives.

Fearing just that, neighbor Sharon Parker had 13 family members huddled in her house. Then, says Parker, 47, "we saw Richard wearing his gear and heading for the water. The kids thought it was hilarious, but we all know that what he did saved our homes." Says Jones: "I just did what I thought needed to be done for my neighbors and my house, and I had the skill and equipment to do it." Jones' home suffered $30,000 in damage and has had to have its roof replaced. Parker says the bravery is typical of Jones, who after the storm called his brother in Florida to ask him to deliver ice, steaks and other supplies to the neighborhood. "During normal times, you could not ask for a better neighbor," she says. "But what he got out and did was beyond a good neighbor. We were all amazed and very, very thankful."

IHSANULLAH KHAN PAKISTAN

A Cabbie's Luck

Ihsanullah Khan is long-shot rescuer. A Pakistani immigrant, Khan drove a cab in Washington and pinned his dreams on winning the lottery. Khan always played the same numbers--2, 4, 6, 17, 25 and 31--because they had once appeared in a dream. Every week for 15 years, he bet religiously on the numbers and lost. Then in November 2001, when the jackpot rose to $55.2 million, Khan's lucky numbers finally came through. He pulled his taxi over to the curb, took a deep breath and thought of his mother, whose dying words to him were, "One day, son, you're going to be somebody--like a king."

Khan, now 47, didn't necessarily want to be a king. But with after-tax winnings of $32,499,939.24 in his pocket, he decided to return to his native town of Batagram in the Himalayas and run for nazim, or mayor. "I wanted to make changes," he says. "Bring back the good things I saw in America." Khan got his chance.

This year, on Oct. 8, three days after Khan took office as mayor, an earthquake of 7.6 magnitude on the Richter scale slammed into the Himalayas, killing more than 73,000 people in Pakistan. Batagram was one of the worst-hit towns. That morning, Khan had strolled up a dirt path to visit his mother's grave when the force of the quake hurled him to his knees. "I thought it was doomsday, that the earth would open and swallow me up," he says. "The houses on the ridge--they were exploding, one by one."

Khan groped his way down to the hospital. It was destroyed, hammered into countless pieces by the temblor. Meanwhile, thousands were converging in the street, carrying and dragging people with terrible injuries, searching for a hospital that had ceased to exist. Using about $200,000 of his own cash, Khan says, he bought all the medicine and bandages he could find, grabbed anyone who had first-aid training and set up a tent hospital to tend to the hordes of wounded staggering in. For the worst injured, he arranged a makeshift ambulance service to ferry them over the mountains to hospitals 26 miles away. He bought 150 tents for homeless families and allowed them to camp on his land, and he has established a fund to help villagers rebuild their demolished homes. From his tent office, he's fighting with Pakistan's bureaucracy to send in bulldozers and start clearing out the fallen buildings. Even while hustling fares in his taxi, Khan says, he was convinced that God had something special in mind for him: "I just didn't know what it was until the earthquake happened."

FATHER RANJEEVAN XAVIER SRI LANKA

Savior Priest

When the tsunami hit the eastern Sri Lankan town of Thirukkovil, just before 9 a.m. on Dec. 26 last year, Father Ranjeevan Xavier cut short morning Mass at St. Joseph's, told his congregation to head for higher ground, tucked his cassock into his sash and ran toward the sea a few hundred meters away. "Almost immediately I found the body of a woman lying on a fence," says Father Ranjeevan, 30. "Her long hair had tangled in the barbed wire and trapped her. We'd had floods before, but I'd never seen that. I picked up her body, carried it to dry land and went back." Thirukkovil was largely under water and littered with naked corpses: the force of the waves had torn clothes off the victims. Father Ranjeevan carried 70 people and 200 bodies out of the water that day. "Everyone was looking for their mother or their children," he says. "But as a priest with no family, it was easier for me. I could just keep pulling people out."

The surrounding district of Ampara was the worst hit in Sri Lanka. Of 38,000 dead, 10,000 were from Ampara, including a tenth of Thirukkovil's population of 6,000. Father Ranjeevan says he eventually buried 750 people--most in two mass graves on the beach--as bodies from elsewhere washed up on the tide. He ministered to the dead for a week, then started on recovery. He coordinated aid groups, distributed self-written pamphlets on the science of tsunamis, set up patrols to stop looters and opened a nursery, a students' dormitory, a nutrition center and a teacher-training facility. He even held a kite-flying contest to encourage children to return to the beach. "What didn't he do?" asks police inspector Thushara Sena, 32. "He pulled people out, buried the dead ones and fed the live ones. He was the man people went to for everything. Still is."

Father Ranjeevan believes the tsunami brought good too. Aid flooded a poor area, the waves broke down divisions built by religion and a 22-year civil war, and disaster brought people closer to their gods. "The church is packed," he says, beaming, "and I'm building a new one to the south. The youth are with me. To feel closer to the sacrament, people have been leaving personal things--glasses, handkerchiefs--on the altar." Father Ranjeevan is unimpressed by the notion that that might have more to do with him than with his god. He tells the story of how, on the evening after the tsunami, he came across a girl kneeling by her mother's body, laid out with hundreds of others in the corridor of the town hospital. "The girl suddenly shouted, 'My mother is alive! Come on, mother! Come on, mother!' And there was motion. She was alive." Amid the misery, he says, that day had its miracles.

ERWIN AND JACK INDONESIA

After the Cheers

Like many other Indonesians, Erwin has only one name. But he has been many things. He is unemployed, but before Dec. 26, 2004, he was a flower seller. Then the tsunami hit the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, and for a moment Erwin became a hero. Trapped with hundreds of people seeking higher ground, he stood on the city's humpback bridge. Below him were thundering waves. "I stood there, staring helplessly at black water that looked more like heavy mud," he recalls. "It was filled with corpses, cars, dead animals and rubble from destroyed houses." Then he heard a sound--"Papa ..."--and saw a girl of about 3 clinging to a wooden plank. "It was terrible," he says. "There were so many men on the bridge, but nobody made a move. I realized then that nobody was going to help, so I ran to the river bank and waded into the water."

Struggling through debris for nearly 15 minutes, he reached the girl but was exhausted. "I yelled to the men on the bridge to come down because I was getting tired, but again, no one moved." Except for Heru (Jack) Kurniawan, 27, who saw Erwin struggling to get back to the riverbank. "It was obvious that someone had to do something or both of them would drown," he says. Handing his cell phone to a friend, Jack waded in and, "trying to avoid the dead bodies," paddled over to Erwin and the girl. When he lifted her onto his shoulder, she screamed in pain, and the men realized her foot was caught in a fishing net. It seemed to take an eternity to untangle her.

Near collapse, Erwin and the little girl were taken to a military hospital. He never saw her again. Later, Erwin discovered that his youngest son, 5, had perished in the tsunami. "I'm still haunted by the loss of my boy," he says. Meanwhile, Jack has lost his job too and can no longer afford to own a cell phone. Erwin is studying English to improve his chances of getting a job with an aid agency, but he isn't optimistic. "I do realize that I have to move on. But moving on is hard when you're not sure what the future is." Alas, heroism is sometimes its only reward.