An Army lieutenant colonel has been honored by the director of the Secret Service for his heroic actions last fall, according to Department of Defense News.
Lt. Col. James Jones was assigned to the White House medical evaluation and treatment unit, serving as the unit’s director and as the physician assistant to the president's doctor, when the incident occurred. On April 6, he was presented with the 2017 Director's Lifesaving Citation.
On Sept. 26, Jones was on a presidential detail with the Secret Service in Peru, hiking at 18,000 feet in the Andes Mountains. A Secret Service agent was rescued by Jones after he determined that exposure to the high elevation had caused fluid to build up in the agent's lungs. Jones commandeered a pack mule to transport the agent, while administering anti-inflammatory medication, his citation reads. With little to no sleep, Jones hiked down to base camp with the agent, coordinating and accompanying him on his four-hour journey to a hospital in Cusco, Peru.
Two American students who were on the hike developed the same lung condition just two days later, needing live-saving aid from Jones. The two were also malnourished, and one of them began to develop fluid on the brain from the high altitude. In addition to caring for and coordinating rescue efforts for the agent and the two students, Jones’s citation also notes that he provided care to indigenous people at base camp after word spread through the region that a doctor was with the hiking group.
Five days after these health scares, Jones himself needed help, after being bitten by a venomous pit viper. The bite caused him to lose consciousness twice and suffer multiple severe reactions. The Secret Service agent who rescued Jones were also given an awards by the Secret Service director.
Jones attended the ceremony with his wife thinking that only they were being presented with awards.
"We were there to thank them for what they did for me," said Jones. "I'm a medical guy, I'm supposed to do that on a day-to-day basis," he added.
Jones praised the agents who rescued him, calling them compassionate and skillful.
"The Secret Service is one of the most professional groups in the world," he said, "but the [group on the detail] in Peru was a notch above."
As Jones lost consciousness during the snake bite, he didn’t know some of the details of his rescue until he heard the events recollected at the ceremony.
"I knew it already — how close I was to death. It gives you a different perspective realizing it could have been a different story for sure if [the agents] had not intervened," he said.
While there is no mention of what Jones and the Secret Service presidential detail were doing in the Andes Mountains, The New York Times reported in January that then-President Obama’s eldest daughter Malia went on an 83-day hiking trip in South America.
Malia — who is on a gap year between high school and her freshman year at Harvard this fall — went on the journey intended to give students the chance to "examine current political trends, social movements and environmental conservation efforts in the mountains and jungles of Bolivia and Peru," according to The New York Times. President Obama was in Peru in November for the APEC Peru 2016 meeting, but Malia is the only member of the first family known to have been in the Andes Mountains last fall.
The trip was coordinated by a Colorado-based company, Where There Be Dragons, that organizes educational gap year trips.
