Academy cadet triumphs over personal tragedies

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Steve German
  • Air Force News Agency
U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. (AFNEWS) --  As part of a church group, Cadet 2nd Class Erik Mirandette felt a need to help other people. His journey would take him more than two years and 9,000 miles across the African continent -- a journey that would cost him more than time and distance.

"It was a sense of restlessness that I wanted to make a difference. You see on TV the situations overseas and specifically for me in Africa, and just this desire to become involved to make a difference for somebody other than myself," said Cadet Mirandette, during a presentation at the National Character and Leadership Symposium here in February.

With the help of his brother, Alex, and two friends, Cadet Mirandette traveled across the continent delivering medicine to small towns that needed it. But, it was near the end of their journey, in Cairo, Egypt, that their trip took a tragic turn. A crowded marketplace was the setting for a terrorist attack that nearly killed him.

"Approaching us came this guy, about 18 years old with a bucket clenched to his chest," Cadet Mirandette recalled. "Inside the bucket, forensics teams would tells us later that there was the equivalent of about 20 kilos of TNT blanketed with nails. He blew himself up about 10 feet away from me."

Cadet Mirandette described the chaos that followed.

"The moments after that are just utter hell," he said. "There's a cloud of choking smoke that fills the air. Body parts strewn all over the ground. You're laying in the street naked. Most of my clothes had been blown off. My body doesn't work, the nerves in my leg had been severed. Half of my left arm was blown off, hundreds of nails sticking out of my arms and legs and head. It's a pretty nasty situation."

The scars he carries don't compare to the loss he suffered.

"Then I looked for my brother," he said.

But his brother didn't make it.

Despite losing roughly 65 percent of the back of his left arm and still carrying some of the nails in his body, Cadet Mirandette returned to the academy with a new passion -- one to put such attacks to an end.

"I'm trying to go for OSI," he said. "If I don't get that, I'm gonna try and go into intelligence and hopefully put some of this experience to work to prevent similar attacks on good people."

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