The giving Back Awards: 15 People Who Make America Great

He won medals in combat, and now he's handling a crisis on the home front.

Ten years ago, Timothy Hernandez seemed destined to wind up in prison just like his older brother. But when Hernandez became a father, he joined the Army instead. "I'd always heard that the Army would change your life and make you a better person," he says.

Now Hernandez is the one changing lives. After 9/11 he headed to Iraq as the gunner aboard a Bradley fighting vehicle. Riding along at the end of a long convoy in June 2003, Hernandez heard an explosion rip through the desert. A roadside bomb had hit a trailer far ahead; when Hernandez arrived on the scene, insurgents opened fire. For the next hour, Hernandez pulled injured soldiers from the wreckage as grenades and AK-47 fire flew all around. He dodged bullets to aid comrades who'd been separated from the convoy, and again to rescue maps and other sensitive materials from the burning vehicles. Hernandez didn't emerge unscathed--he suffered shrapnel wounds in the knee, foot, hip and lower back, and earned a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and a promotion for his efforts. A few months later he was wounded again, this time in the forehead, eye and cheek. Many soldiers would have called it quits; Hernandez won another Purple Heart--and re-enlisted.

But shortly after he returned to Fort Polk, La., to begin retraining, he began to have shooting pains all over his body and, not content to sit behind a desk, applied for a medical discharge. It was then that his family life began to crumble. Both of his parents, who'd been caring for his imprisoned brother's children, died within weeks of each other--and Hernandez came face to face with the realization that his first act as a civilian would be for his family (his wife and their four kids) to embrace his nieces and nephews as his own. "I made an oath to go back and help them out," says Hernandez, who recently arrived home at Queen Creek, Ariz. Army Spec. Edgar Fuentes, who trained under Hernandez, thinks his sergeant is up to the job. "When he says he's going to get something done missionwise, he gets it done," says Fuentes. Based on Hernandez's record, no mission is impossible, after all.

—Daren Briscoe

14 - The Genius