Here's the lede of the Albany Times Union story:
John Pryor would call home every morning. On Christmas, no call came.
His wife checked CNN. Dr. Pryor was deployed as a combat surgeon in Iraq, and the network was reporting a casualty in Mosul.
"She naturally assumed that my brother was treating this casualty," said Pryor's younger brother, Richard, of Delmar. "It turned out he was the casualty."
His brother told the paper that Pryor has just returned from Midnight Mass when he was killed.
This is an Albany-area story because Pryor grew up around here, and early on in his too-short life (he died at 42), he got into helping save lives.
The longtime member of Boy Scout Troop 30 began caring for the sick and injured at an early age. He got his CPR certification at 14 and joined the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Ambulance Corps at 17.
One of his Clifton Park friends at the time told the Times Union that Pryor would rather "ride the ambulance" than hang out with his buddies in Saratoga Springs.
Pryor joined the Reserve three years ago, and volunteered to go to Iraq. This was his second tour.
Pryor signed up despite family resistance:
His family was against it, especially the second time he left for Iraq, a deployment that came after his wife had survived and recovered from a brutal car accident that left her near death.
"She didn't want him to go," said (brother and fellow emergency physician) Richard Pryor. "I didn't want him to go. Nobody in our family wanted him to go. The risks weren't worth it. He was driven by some sort of duty and honor and need to help other people that we didn't understand."
That sense of duty led Pryor to drive from Philadelphia to New York City on 9/11.
When the first tower fell, he threw surgical supplies in the car and sped to New York. He got through the Holland Tunnel by flashing his hospital badge.
He found himself at St. Vincent's doing nothing, his brother said, so he hitched a ride on an ambulance and got to the pile.
Pryor presciently wrote his obituary before leaving for Iraq for the last time. It's not online yet, but some of it is in the Times Union story:
Pryor described how as a citizen and surgeon he "felt very strongly about his duty to serve, especially during wartime.
"His decision was not supported by those close to him, and it was emotionally very challenging to balance his dedication to his duty and hurting those he loved. He hopes and prays for forgiveness from his family and colleagues."
Pryor also wrote about his work, including an op-ed titled "The War in West Philadephia" printed in the Washington Post on Aug. 5, 2007.
Of course, read the whole thing, in memory of a real American hero.
Here's a taste to inspire you to learn more about Dr. John Pryor:
The wounds and nationalities of the patients are different, but the feelings of helplessness, despair and loss are the same. In Iraq, soldiers die for freedom, for honor, for their country and for their buddies. Here in Philadelphia, they die without honor, without purpose, for no country, for no one.
More young men are killed each day on the streets of America than on the worst days of carnage and loss in Iraq. There is a war at home raging every day, filling our trauma centers with so many wounded children that it sometimes makes Baghdad seem like a quiet city in Iowa.
Unlike the Iraq conflict, this war is not on the front pages of The Post or on CNN. You have heard of the Washington area sniper shootings and the massacre at Virginia Tech. I am sure you have not heard about the "Lex Street massacre," in which 10 people ages 15 to 56 were lined up and shot, execution-style, in the winter of 2000. Seven were killed, three critically injured.
You haven't heard about this tragedy because it happened to inner-city poor people in a crack house in Philadelphia. Imagine, for a moment, if this had occurred in a suburban shopping mall or if a Marine unit in Iraq had been involved. There would be shock, outrage, 24-hour news coverage, Senate hearings and a new color of ribbon to wear. That double standard, that triage of compassion and empathy, is why the war on the streets continues unabated.
Dr. John Pryor was one of us, obviously.
Every death in Iraq is a tragedy, give the war's criminal provenance.
But this one, of a physician selflessly dedicated to saving lives, is more tragic than most.
Pryor was, in the world of emergency surgery, one of the best and the brightest, as director of the University of Pennsylvania's trauma program.
Some unknowable number of people suffering serious trauma will presumably die in the next few decades because the excellent-in-every-way Dr. John Pryor was killed in Iraq.
On Christmas Day, 2008. |
