Heroes: A Guest Post by Kevin Hazzard

The harrowing true story of the American medical team at Phoenix Air, who set out on an impossible rescue mission during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Kevin Hazzard on writing No One’s Coming.

I was invited in the summer of 2021 to tour the rural headquarters of Phoenix Air. I’d heard a little about them but not much, just enough to know the company was small and eccentric and that I wanted to know more. It was August, brutally hot and I was half-melted. After hours of walking the hangars, meeting engineers and pilots, doctors, nurses, mechanics, I was ready to go when one of them said something so unbelievable I thought probably I hadn’t heard it at all. It was a comment made in passing, mumbled really, an aside to an aside. One of the pilots, a man named Darrin, had once flown a mission so dangerous that the night before takeoff his family threw him a Last Supper. Just in case he died. I didn’t know where he was going or why but I knew whatever waited on the other side of that anecdote had to be good.

Of course what waited on the other side was Ebola and the incredible story of the people who pulled off this harrowing and improbable rescue. The story was full of twists and turns; I was shocked more than once while reporting it—Darrin was the only person in his family not there for his own Last Supper—but the most surprising aspect of all was just how unprepared the rescuers were. That they agreed to do it, despite their fear, and then that they pulled it off, was a remarkable display of selflessness. And really, to me, that’s the most important take-away of this story. How doctors and nurses on both sides of the Atlantic responded to a crisis they weren’t prepared to handle, that could easily have killed them, yet they risked their lives for perfect strangers simply because they believed it was the right thing to do.

A lot of lip service is paid to service and sacrifice but here was a group of people asked to put their lives on the line for a principle. And they did it. And they would do it again, willingly, for any one of us. People often ask where the heroes have gone and to that I’d say they’re right here, within the pages of this book.