The Hero Next Door

ABC News chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz has spent more than three decades covering American wars, and in this narrative nonfiction work she profiles ten service members and military families from the post-9/11 generation. None have received national recognition. Raddatz argues that their stories of courage, resilience, and continued purpose deserve the same honor given to earlier generations of American warriors, and that learning their names can help bridge a widening gap between the military and the civilian public.

Raddatz opens with a 2010 visit to the American Cemetery at Normandy, France, where an elderly Korean War veteran questions whether a young man in civilian clothes knows how to fold an American flag. General Carter Ham intervenes to introduce the young man as Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, about to receive the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration, for extraordinary heroism in Afghanistan. Stunned, the veteran salutes. Raddatz draws the book's central lesson: There is no sure way to spot a hero, and true heroes rarely see themselves as such.

The first profile follows Navy Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer, who in 1998 served aboard a destroyer that launched cruise missiles at Osama bin Laden's training camps. On September 11, 2001, Shaeffer was working in the Pentagon's Navy Command Center when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building. Fire burned forty-seven percent of his body, and all of his cubicle mates died. Army Sergeant First Class Steve Workman ran toward the impact zone from one floor below, found Shaeffer smoldering outside the wreckage, and rode with him to the hospital, improvising oxygen when the ambulance supply ran out. After a recovery that included two cardiac arrests, Shaeffer left the Navy on medical retirement and joined the 9/11 Commission, then the CIA, where he became part of the small team tracking bin Laden. On May 1, 2011, he monitored the Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in real time. When code words confirmed bin Laden was dead, Shaeffer went home and called Workman.

Air Force Pararescueman Josh Webster, a member of an elite Air Force combat rescue unit and former Army Ranger from Long Beach, California, is profiled next. During Operation Strong Eagle, a US assault on Taliban positions in Afghanistan's Kunar Province, Webster's helicopter team ran multiple rescue missions in a single day. The most perilous involved Army Captain Kevin Mott Jr., who had been shot in the head and tumbled down a steep mountainside. Webster was lowered by hoist, found Mott caked in blood with his scalp partially detached, and improvised a harness to bring him up while rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) struck nearby. Mott recovered enough to redeploy to Afghanistan within six months. The two men finally met in person in 2016, when Mott, then studying at Stanford, greeted Webster with a hug.

Raddatz then turns to four soldiers from the same platoon at Fort Hood, Texas, who survived the April 4, 2004, ambush in Baghdad's Sadr City, a day known as Black Sunday. Ben Hayhurst, Eric Bourquin, Carl Wild, and Aaron Fowler were part of the First Cavalry Division and had been in Iraq only days when hundreds of insurgents attacked their convoy. The platoon took refuge on a rooftop, where they faced an advancing mob that used women and children as human shields. Eight US soldiers died that day and more than sixty were wounded. Fowler, who had joined a separate rescue convoy, was shot three times but kept fighting. All four eventually left the Army, struggling with post-traumatic stress, guilt, and purposelessness. They reconnected in 2012 and formed "the Brotherhood," an informal support network of near-daily communication, group therapy, and a willingness to travel to one another's side during crises. Their wives play a critical role, sometimes alerting the other men when their husbands are spiraling.

Army Lieutenant Mark Little lost both legs to an explosively formed penetrator, an armor-piercing roadside bomb that fires a molten metal slug, in Iraq in September 2007. After the blast, Little rolled out of his Humvee, fired his sidearm at the fleeing attackers, applied his own tourniquet, and ordered the convoy back to base rather than wait for a medical evacuation. At the combat support hospital in Baghdad, where Raddatz happened to be reporting, Little cracked jokes from his stretcher. Within two months he received prosthetic legs and went snowboarding, sending photos to his platoon in Iraq. He later married, earned a master's degree in forensic psychology, attended Harvard's Executive Education program, and cofounded Warrior 360, a nonprofit that provided rapid financial assistance to veterans in crisis.

Marine Raider Captain Derek Herrera, a member of the Marine Corps' elite special operations force, was shot in the spine during a firefight in Afghanistan's Helmand Province in June 2012, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. His fellow Raiders carried him to a helicopter under heavy fire, with five receiving the Bronze Star for valor. After rehabilitation, Herrera attended UCLA's business school and redirected his energy toward medical technology for people with spinal cord injuries. His first startup stalled due to regulatory missteps, but his second company, Bright Uro, developed a catheter-free bladder diagnostic system that received FDA approval in March 2025. He and his wife, Maura, had twin sons through in vitro fertilization in 2017.

Navy fighter pilot Charles Wickware fell in love with flying at age seven during a visit to an aircraft carrier. He flew combat missions over Afghanistan and against ISIS, the terrorist group also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, accumulating more than two thousand hours in the F/A-18 Super Hornet. He documented his missions with cameras, producing films he hoped would help civilians understand the military experience. On one mission, a live two-thousand-pound bomb became partially detached from his wing; Wickware diverted to Kuwait and landed so gently the bomb did not detonate.

Navy Lieutenant Commander Danielle Thiriot followed an unlikely path to the cockpit. She attended Harvard on a Navy ROTC scholarship and interned at Lehman Brothers before turning down a job offer to pursue flight training. During the campaign against ISIS, Thiriot flew combat missions over Iraq and Syria, dropping bombs in "danger close" scenarios near the Syrian city of Kobani, where friendly Kurdish fighters were just fifty meters from the target. In February 2019, she organized the Navy's first all-female flyover to honor Captain Rosemary Mariner, one of the Navy's first female tactical jet pilots, whose advocacy was instrumental in the 1993 repeal of laws barring women from combat aviation. Thiriot's career as a fighter pilot later ended when a cockpit pressurization failure caused a traumatic brain injury, but she recovered and entered commercial aviation.

The Arsiaga family of Midland, Texas, lost Army Specialist Robert Arsiaga in the Black Sunday ambush and, eleven years later, lost his younger brother Jeremy to suicide. Jeremy, a Marine who had deployed to Iraq, experienced survivor's guilt and had a mental health crisis during his deployment. His sister Angel and brother Gilbert made a pact to survive, and Angel became a public advocate for veteran mental health. Their mother, Sylvia, after years of withdrawal, re-engaged with her family.

Retired Army neurosurgeon Dr. Rocco Armonda pioneered aggressive craniectomy techniques—the removal of a section of skull to relieve brain swelling—in Iraq, expanding the procedure for the severe blast injuries of the Iraq war. His innovations saved hundreds of soldiers, including ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff, who was gravely wounded by an improvised explosive device in 2006. After retiring from the Army, Armonda volunteered at Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro, Ukraine, near the front lines of the Russian invasion, performing brain surgeries and shipping donated medical supplies.

The final chapter profiles two mothers: Debbie Schulz and Gail Ulerie, whose sons, Marines Steven Schulz and Shurvon Phillip, both suffered devastating brain injuries in Iraq's Anbar Province in 2005. Both women became full-time caregivers, fighting bureaucracies, refusing to place their sons in nursing homes, and dedicating their lives to their sons' recovery. Steven, now forty, still lives with his mother. Shurvon defied doctors' predictions by living eleven years after his injury before dying of an infection in 2016.

Raddatz closes by reuniting with Giunta at a 2025 Medal of Honor Society event. She argues that the post-9/11 generation of warriors and their families deserves the same honor given to World War II's "Greatest Generation" and urges Americans to build bridges between military and civilian communities. She ends with the mantra she has carried since she first began covering the Pentagon: Respect and Remember.