[TheRealVille]

This is the guy holding the tourniquet in the picture of the guy with his legs blown off.

[Image: https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-p...1761_n.jpg]
His name is Carlos Arredondo. He is an immigrant citizen of the U.S. who lost his son in Iraq and is now a peace activist and speaker,Carlos Arredondo is holding a tourniquet on a man who had his legs removed by the blast. There used to be leg around what he is holding, but now this true American is literally keeping him alive with his bare hands. He lost Both of his sons. Alexander died while doing a tour in Iraq, and Brian committed suicide in 2011 after falling into depression and becoming a heavy drug user, But when everyone ran away from the bombs, he ran in and helped as many people as he could, he did not want other parents to feel what it was like to lose a child. This man is a true HERO!


http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nati...story.html

BOSTON — Carlos Arredondo ran across Boylston Street, jumped the security fence and landed on a sidewalk smeared in blood. In front of him, two women lay motionless. Another woman walked around in black-powder smoke, looking down at the fallen bodies.

“Oh, my God,” he said she repeated, dazed. “Oh, my God.”

From the archive


A father transformed by anguish
Read David Finkel's 2005 profile of Carlos Arredondo, whose reaction to the death of his son became one of the iconic images of the Iraq war. (AP Photo)
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Running to help when others ran away

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Carlos Arredondo was one of those who ran into the smoke to help treat and evacuate blast victims.
FBI investigating Boston attack as an ‘act of terrorism,’ Obama says

Arredondo had been a Boston Marathon spectator, carrying a camera and a small American flag. He dropped the flag. He took four pictures — focusing on a young man crumpled on the sidewalk. The man had a blank expression, and a leg that was only bone below the knee.

Then Arredondo put the camera away. He asked the injured man his name.

“Stay still,” he remembered saying, in accented English. “The ambulance is here.”

In the moments after Monday’s bomb attacks, there were bystanders who defied human instinct — and official orders to evacuate — and ran toward the smoke, instead of away.

There was a Kansas doctor who ran back to help after completing 26.2 miles. A District native who ran down from a post-race party to apply tourniquets. A couple who tried to stop a stranger’s bleeding with a wad of coffee-shop napkins.

And, most astoundingly, there was Arredondo — a man once so broken by grief that his breaking made national news.

First, his son died in Iraq. Then, when Marines came to tell him so, Arredondo set himself on fire inside the Marines’ van. Then, years later, as he was healing, his other son committed suicide.