Double-amputee Afghanistan veteran helps crash victims on icy road

Double-amputee veteran helps crash victims on icy road
Dayton Daily News
Clint Davis
December 10, 2013

FAIRBORN — A local couple say he’s a hero — but Larry Draughn said he was just doing what he hoped anyone would.

“I didn’t want to see anybody stranded on the side of that road, it wasn’t safe,” said Draughn, a Marine veteran who lost both his legs four years ago in Afghanistan after a roadside bomb exploded just two weeks into his deployment.

During Sunday’s snow storm, he used his pickup truck to pull three unlucky drivers out of a ditch at the side of an icy stretch of Regina Drive.

“It was a sheet of ice and people kept going into the ditches behind my house,” Draughn, 26, said. But Draughn was sure about one thing, “I wouldn’t call it heroic.”

Wendell Ledbetter, 77, is one of the drivers Draughn helped — getting him out of the ditch within 10 minutes.

“People weren’t slowing down and they were slipping, sliding by,” Ledbetter said. That’s when he said Draughn helped him out with his winch and a laugh.

Ron Alvey
Larry Draughn, a Fairborn resident who lost his legs while fighting in Afghanistan in 2009, helped save three drivers who slid off the road during Sunday’s snow storm.

“I said, ‘Sir, I’ll get down and strap up the car for you.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ve got metal knees, they don’t get wet,’” Ledbetter recalled.

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