Silver Star: Sgt. Russell Lee Collier ran towards the fire near Bagdad and laid down his life for a fellow soldier

Sgt. Russell Lee Collier

Twenty-one years ago, on a dusty road north of Baghdad, an Arkansas National Guard medic made a choice that still echoes in the Ozarks and at Fort Hood, Texas.

Sgt. Russell Lee Collier, 48, known simply as “Doc” to the soldiers of the 39th Infantry Brigade, was on traffic-control duty in Taji on October 3, 2004. When small-arms fire cracked from a nearby building and Sgt. Christopher Potts of Rhode Island fell wounded, Collier did what medics do: he ran toward the danger

.He handed his M16 to the nearest soldier, grabbed only his aid bag, and sprinted across open ground. He never reached Potts. Enemy bullets cut him down just steps away. Both men died that afternoon

For that act of trading his weapon for a medical kit and racing unarmed into gunfie the United States Army posthumously awarded Russell Collier the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest valor decoration.

President George W. Bush also signed his Purple Heart, and Governor Mike Huckabee added the Arkansas Distinguished Service Medal.

At Collier’s funeral in Harrison’s Eagle Heights Baptist Church, his widow Veronica accepted the medals while their 9-year-old son Hunter stood beside her.

“He died doing what he loved,” his sister Carolyn Pfaus told reporters the next day. “If he had to die, he would have wanted it this way.”

Born in Crossett and raised on Army posts from Georgia to Germany, Russell followed his father’s footsteps into uniform the moment he graduated high school in Wuerzburg in 1975. He served in the Army, transferred to the Navy, then came home to Harrison and joined the Arkansas National Guard in 1999.

With 18 years of service already behind him, he was months from retirement when the 39th Brigade mobilized in 2004 in the largest Arkansas Guard deployment since World War II.

Back home he worked the night shift at a factory, earned his EMT license, and grilled the best steaks in Boone County. He sketched, played guitar, and doted on his three children: Mary Virginia and Wayne in North Carolina, and little Hunter.

.Seven years after his death, Fort Hood renamed its troop medical clinic the Sgt. Russell “Doc” Collier Health Clinic. Retired Maj. Gen. Ron Chastain, former Arkansas adjutant general, told the dedication crowd: “He demonstrated the Warrior Ethos in its purest form — he placed the mission and his fellow soldier first.”

The clinic still bears his name. The scholarship fund local banks started for Hunter has helped send Ozark kids to college. And every year, Harrison pauses to remember a quiet man who spent his life healing and protecting and who, when the moment came, laid down his rifle for a medical bag and ran toward the sound of a brother in need.

Sgt. Russell Collier was buried in the Springfield (Mo) National Cemeterycame home to the hills he loved. But every soldier who walks through those clinic doors at Fort Hood carries his story forward: a reminder that courage sometimes looks like an unarmed medic sprinting into fire, because someone else is hurt.

Greater love hath no man than this…