In medicine, grave circumstances sometimes require toxin-anti-toxin therapy: poison against poison.\u00a0 Chemotherapy may make a cancer patient feel sick in different ways, but it can save the patient\u2019s life; therapeutic radiation may have ugly side-effects and therapeutic amputation literally costs you a part of your body, but if it takes the cancer away and saves your life, it\u2019s an acceptable price.\u00a0 Having to kill another human being is a traumatic experience, but if it saves your life and\/or that of another good person, it was worth the ordeal.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s something well understood by Dr. Richard Carmona.\u00a0 Under President George W. Bush, he served four years as Surgeon General of the United States.\u00a0 Prior to that, though, he had overcome being born poor by joining the Army, becoming a Green Beret medic and gaining combat experience in Vietnam, and thereafter working his way through medical school.\u00a0 He went on to become a pioneer of the SWAT physician concept: a doctor capable of performing emergency surgery if necessary right there <\/em>at \u201cthe sharp end\u201d to save a life when someone took a bullet.\u00a0 Dr. Carmona performed that function for the Pima County Sheriff\u2019s Office, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.<\/p>\n It was in that city when, in 1999, he was off-duty and came upon a vicious psycho with a gun who was about to murder a woman he was carjacking. Unknown to Dr. Carmona, that man had earlier murdered his own father.\u00a0 Carmona instantly drew his department issue Colt .45 auto, and saved the innocent woman\u2019s life. In the course of that gunfight, he was wounded by the killer, but his own accurate gunfire killed the gunman.<\/p>\n I met Dr. Carmona early in this century, when he was Surgeon General and a guest speaker at an annual conference of ASLET, the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers. Many years later, I was able to sit down with him in Tucson and interview him.<\/p>\n