Compassionate Courage

"That bus was a ball of black smoke and I was standing there, screaming, and screaming, and I don't know how long it was, but I lost a brother years ago and, true to God, I looked up and I said, 'Please, don't let it end this way.' And, sure enough, somehow, some way, Sgt. Jacob Perkins arrived on that scene."
" I didn't know where he came from. I didn't see him show up. All I know is he got there and thought nothing of throwing his truck in park and running onto a burning bus. It was an inferno, an absolute inferno, and he got my husband out."
Sandy Blair, London, Ontario

Sun Media photo

Staff Sgt. Jacob Perkins of the 89th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, U.S. Army, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan was driving home to Missouri when he came across a highway scene of horror. A tractor-trailer had crashed into a tour bus carrying 50 people on the New York State Thruway in Waterloo, New York, in July 2011. He came to a speedy stop and bounded out of his vehicle, over to the conflagration.

William Blair was trapped on the bus, more or less stuck to his seat. When the tractor trailer loaded with ball bearings rammed the back of the bus, Sandy Blair managed to get herself out of the bus, certain that her husband Willie and daughter Michelle were right behind her. In short order, Michelle was there, standing beside her mother. But husband and father Willie was nowhere to be seen and the bus was ablaze.

Willie had said to his daughter, she'd better get a move on, and not to worry, he was right behind her. In fact, he knew quite well he wouldn't be right behind her, he was there and there he would stay, in the fiery remains of the overnight tour bus they were taking for a first-time family trip to New York City. He had sustained serious a back injury and had a mean gash in a leg; pinned there, incapable of moving, blood gushing from his wounds.

Sgt. Perkins, en route to visit with his mother in Mountain Grove, Mo., entered the burning, smoke-filled bus to pull William Blair out of the bus to safety, and then he returned to the bus, creeping through it on hands and knees hoping, if anyone else was trapped, he would be able to feel them and take action, since he couldn't see anything because of the choking smoke.

YouTube/LizSpirit777   A burning bus on Highway I-90 in New York on July 22, 2011, where U.S. Sergeant Jacob Perkins helped evacuate several Canadian passengers and then went back inside the burning vehicle to search for other possible victims.

 

Lady Luck just couldn't make up her mind that night. She decided along with Dame Fortune to throw misfortune at people hurtling down a highway in a tractor trailer and a passenger bus. The driver of the truck died, none of the people aboard the bus did however, though twenty of them were taken to hospital. Willie Blair was evacuated from the scene by helicopter. His daughter had tied a tourniquet on his leg while they waited for rescue.

But they were left standing at the side of the road, with no means by which they could do anything; no identification, no money, just confusion and fear, and the driving need to be with their husband and father. And again Sgt. Perkins came to the rescue, offering to drive the two women to hospital in his pickup truck to reunite them with William Blair; a selfless act of compassionate decency that explained all the medals he had earned in service.

William Blair

And Staff Sgt. Jacob Perkins will be among forty others to be recognized for valour and humanity when on Thursday they are to be presented at the official residence of Canada's Governor General, the Right Honourable David Johnston, Queen Elizabeth II's representative in Canada, at a ceremony to award them with a Medal of Bravery in recognition of their courageous response to unusual and dangerous events.