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Jean Miele had been on a business trip to Washington; by the time he got back to Brooklyn, Josh was already at Methodist Hospital. Mr. Miele was shocked at the sight of his son: “His face was a mask.” Josh’s skin had turned brown, his features altered. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know anything about what to do about this.’ ”

Doctors crowded around the boy, trying to save his sight. Mr. Miele began to feel reassured until the next day, when an intern came up and whispered to him that if they didn’t get Josh to a military hospital, and soon, he was going to die. Only the military had the ability to deal with that kind of injury. There was a pay phone in the waiting room. Mr. Miele made it his.

He managed to get through to Park Slope’s congressman, Hugh L. Carey. After some misplaced jocularity — “I’ve had 14 kids and they’re always getting into trouble” — Mr. Carey got in touch with the Surgeon General’s Office. There was a conversation with Josh’s doctors. Then a call came to the pay phone from Col. Basil Pruitt, a doctor who was head of the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, the only military hospital at the time dedicated to treating burn victims.

Colonel Pruitt said he was sending a medical team and a C9 transport plane to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey to get Josh. All Mr. Miele had to do was get his son there. He worked that phone some more, shoveling in dimes, talking to the duty officer and a helicopter pilot at McGuire, and a desk sergeant in the 78th Precinct. He came up with a plan. They all went along after he explained what had happened to Josh.

And so it was, later that night, that the whoop-whoop-whoop of an Army chopper filled the air above Prospect Park, and five police cars with their lights on formed a star pattern on the Sheep Meadow, and the pilot saw it through the haze, and landed right in the middle, and then lifted Josh, his mother and father into the sky.

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Colonel Pruitt ran the Brooke Army Medical Center from 1968 until 1995, and still practices today in Texas. He had thousands of patients in those years but remembers Josh and his family quite vividly. “For such a devastating injury, they were very realistic about what to expect,” he said. Josh was burned over 17 percent of his body, with 11 percent third-degree burns, mostly to his face. Colonel Pruitt said his chief goal was to save the boy’s sight. But he knew right away that this was hopeless.