Bob Butler lost his legs in a 1965 landmine 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 when he heard a woman’s screams coming from a nearby house. He began rolling his wheelchair toward the house but the dense shrubbery wouldn’t allow him access to the back door. So he got out of his chair and started to crawl through the dirt and bushes. “I had to get there, he said. It didn’t matter how much it hurt.” When Butler arrived at the pool there was a three-year-old girl named Stephanie Hanes lying at the bottom. She had been born without arms and had fallen in the water and couldn’t swim. Her mother, paralyzed with fear, stood there 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 was not breathing. Butler immediately went to work performing CPR to revive her while Stephanie’s mother telephoned the fire department. She was told that the paramedics were already out on another call. Helplessly she sobbed and hugged Butler’s shoulder.
As Butler continued the CPR, he calmly reassured her, “Don’t worry, he said. “I was her arms to get her out of the pool. It will be O.K. I am 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 O.K.
“The truth is I didn’t know”, he told her. “But when my legs were blown off in Vietnam, I was alone in a field. No one was there to help me except a little Vietnamese girl. As she struggled to drag me into her village, she whispered I broken English, ‘It OK. You can live. I be your legs. Together we make it.’ Her words brought hope to my soul and I wanted to do the same for Stephanie.”
There are simply those times when we cannot stand alone. There are those times when we need someone to be our legs, our arms, our friend.
Bob Butler, despite his tragic loss, heroically remained everything he could possibly be to the world. He save this little girl’s life and everyone who loved her. A very poignant reminder of the truism, “You save one life; you save the world.
When I was in college I wanted to make the Olympic Wrestling Team. While I was training for the Olympic Trials I was working as a personal trainer for an upscale fitness and racquet club in Atlanta. I put a lot of effort into wrestling that year but very little into my job and other areas of my life. Despite my efforts, I lost at the Olympic trials. The left me with a burning desire to discover one thing; what is the difference between the great and the near great?
I had the opportunity to later become the chiropractor for the Olympic team in 1996. I met a wrestler there who was the best in the world in his day and that I worshipped when I was a kid. I asked him, He told me what to this day is still the best answer I have ever heard. He said, “Whatever I do in my life I try to be the best. When I was cutting grass during the summer as a kid, I made sure I was the best grass cutter those people ever saw. When I worked in a restaurant to make money to train, I made sure I was the best employee they ever had. Whatever you do in your life, try to be the best at it.”
I’m glad Bob Butler decided to do his best, despite his very challenging condition. He had a really good excuse not to try, but he tried anyway. You do not fail when you fail to achieve. You fail when you fail to achieve your best. This type of failure is self-inflicted and success is self-bestowed. It reminds me of a poem known to have been a favorite of Martin Luther King –
“If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill,
Be a shrub in the valley-but be
The best little shrub by the side of the hill,
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.
If you can’t be a highway just be a trail
If you can’t be the sun be a star;
It isn’t by size that you win or you fail-
Be the best of whatever you are.”
Have fun saving the world
Dr. Ben
