‘Anybody can be important’: First-year Nevada airmen on heroic rescue at Zion

LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – When a spontaneous hiking trip turned into a life-threatening scenario, several Nevada Airmen jumped into action.

The group of seven Nellis Air Force Base Airmen rescued four people, including a pregnant woman, from a flash flood at Zion National Park.

The airmen have only been in service for less than one year, but their superior officers say they’ve already exemplified what it means to be a United States Airman.

“There’s kind of this thing in the military in general that the higher your rank is, the more important you are. But, I feel like anybody can be important, no matter the rank or no matter who you are,” Airman 1st Class Demarcus Norman says.

The rescue happened mid-August. The group says they noticed signs of an incoming flash flood and hurried to high ground.

That’s when they noticed a woman floating in the floodwater, and Norman jumped into the water to save her.

“When I saw her floating, I really just thought to myself, if I have the chance to save somebody, or anybody else had the chance to save somebody and it was my family member, I’d want them to do the same thing,” Norman says.

Once they were able to resuscitate her, she told them she was pregnant, and hiking with three others.

The group says they made an agreement that they were not leaving until everyone injured got out safely.

They ended up finding the three others, one of them was stuck on the other side of the floodwater with a badly broken knee.

They say they formed a human-chain across the water to safely reunite the man with the rest of the group, and then lead them all to an evacuation site where they were airlifted to safety.

“No matter who you are, no matter your position, it doesn’t take much for one person to push a whole group to do something that might seem impossible,” Airman 1st Class Rony Lopez-Aguilar says.

Norman says the woman they rescued called him the next day and thanked him for he and the group’s actions.

The seven airmen: Will Martin, Maximos Olade, Jacob Stillwell, Andres Parra, Christian Reyes and Norman and Lopez-Aguilar, were honored during a coining ceremony on base for exemplifying the Air Force’s core values.

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