Memories of day when Boston firefighter saved Boston cop in Fallujah

For two Hub officers, a day to remember

By Renee Nadeau Algarin
Tuesday, May 31, 2011

When Staff Sgt. Terrence Burke, a Marine Corps reservist and Boston cop, was blown out of his Humvee by a roadside bomb and lay bleeding in a Fallujah street in 2006, it was a Boston firefighter who came rushing in under insurgent fire to pull him to safety.

Burke, now 33 and an amputee but still a Boston cop, used his keynote address at yesterday’s Memorial Day observance in Dorchester to publicly thank Boston Fire Lt. James O’Brien for saving his life. Thousands of miles from home, O’Brien — a Naval Reserve Medical Corpsman — was one of two medics who pulled Burke and two other Marines to safety that September day.

“I was definitely going into shock, but I was conscious. I remember being on a stretcher and then being on the back of an evacuation vehicle,” Burke said, rattling off his injuries: a severely injured left leg that had to be amputated; a fractured right ankle and left forearm; two collapsed lungs; a ruptured ear drum; and third-degree burns over nearly 20 percent of his body.
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For two Hub officers, a day to remember