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“Jesus Vidana was still alive, but dying, in the middle of an FRSS just outside Baghdad when a team of heroic doctors and nurses descended on him. Quickly, a breathing tube was placed in him, and he was given back some of the precious blood that was now soaking the sand where he had been shot.

As a neurosurgeon, I was asked to step back from my journalist’s role to look at his gunshot wound to the head. Shortly thereafter, I was removing a bullet from his brain. Within an hour, Jesus had been treated, operated on and was recovering just outside the operating room.

In all the years I have worked in hospitals, I have never seen resources mobilized so quickly and health care workers move with such purpose. And, remember, it was a tent in the middle of the desert by the dark of night in the most dangerous place on Earth.

I wouldn’t be telling you this story if Jesus hadn’t survived and done well.

He is a handsome young man who is considering a career in physical therapy and still trying to reconcile his brush with death. I visited him last year in Southern California and his mother slowly walked over to me and took my hands and said simply, “Thank you.”

I still remember looking over at my producer Stephanie Smith and watching her begin to cry, which of course made me cry as well. This story, though, is more than a story about one Marine who lived, when so many thought he would die. It is about the remarkable technology and brilliant thinking that has brought the wounded of this war to doctors and nurses faster than ever before. This is a story about brave men and women who risk their lives every day so they might save others.”

I don’t know that it makes no sense at all. He’s a doctor, a neurosurgeon. The main job of the surgeon general is to communicate with the American people on health-related matters. Why would a doctor who is accustomed to communicating (through TV, print media) be an illogical pick? It’s not as if he’s just someone who plays a doctor on TV. He actually is a doctor.