The U.S. Air Force medal ceremony honoring Tech Sgt. Shawn Rucker lasted far longer and caused Rucker more prolonged anxiety than what he endured on the night he saved Nancy Shatley’s life.
Even so, Rucker, looking a little embarrassed in his dress blues, managed one more act of generosity to the Shatley family on Monday.
Rucker two years ago ran into a house roiling with smoke and flames and carried 78-year-old Nancy Shatley outside, with smoke filling his lungs and pieces of the house falling down around him.
Moments after receiving the Airman’s Medal at McConnell Air Force Base, Rucker pointed journalists toward a civilian in a striped shirt standing yards away from the generals, colonels and majors.
The Air National Guard officers had talked only of Rucker in the ceremony, but Rucker pointed out that Mike Shatley, the man in the striped shirt, “did all the things I did” and helped save his mother’s life.
Maj. Gen. Lee Tafanelli, the adjutant general of Kansas, hung the medal on Rucker’s chest at McConnell on Monday, with more than 100 uniformed officers and enlisted personnel applauding. He told how Rucker, a Kansas Air National Guardsman, put his life at considerable risk.
Rucker, an intelligence analyst, had just finished a work shift at McConnell on Nov. 24, 2012, and raced past his own house when he saw a smoke plume and a glow on the horizon several blocks away.
The Airman’s Medal is one of the higher awards given by the Air Force for risk-taking heroism in a noncombat situation, Tafanelli said. The medal ranks higher than the Bronze Star and just under the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Typical of Rucker’s character, officers said, is that the military didn’t learn about Rucker’s heroism for a long time. Rucker didn’t tell anybody in the Air Guard about what he had done.
Family members told them about it later. Only then did the Air National Guard start the investigation that led to the medal’s award, two years after his life-saving acts.
Nancy Shatley, her son Mike said, had Alzheimer’s disease and died of that in April 2013, many months after he and Rucker saved her life.
“But because of him, we got to spend more time with her,” Shatley said.
The Shatley family sat through the medal ceremony and then told how Rucker acted fast and decisively to help people he didn’t know.
The family had gone to bed.
“I heard this popping sound,” Mike Shatley said. He found the entire back of the house engulfed in flames. He called out, got his wife outside – and realized immediately that his mother was still in the basement, trapped.
Rucker rolled up to the house at that moment, said Becky Shatley, Mike’s wife. Rucker already had 911 emergency dispatchers on his cellphone and was calling in a location.
He ran to the house. He and Mike Shatley ran down to the smoke-filled basement with Mike leading the way to his mother’s bed.
She was sound asleep. “I don’t think she even realized what was going on,” Rucker said.
The situation was so precarious, Rucker said, “that I had to stop for a bit, still inside the house, to try to get my breath.”
Rucker stayed with Nancy Shatley and her family until the Wichita Fire Department arrived. Their home was destroyed.
Rucker works for the Air National Guard’s 184th Intelligence Wing. He said he has served one deployment, six months long, in the war in Afghanistan, working from 2010 to 2011 in an intelligence gathering unit that analyzed and reported real-time images on the battlefields.
Rucker, 41, said he grew up in Wichita, graduated from West High School in 1991 and joined the Air Force 12 years ago because he wanted to serve his country.
On Monday, high-ranking officers made him put on his dress blues and stand at attention, feeling nervous while a two-star general hung a medal on his chest.
They told him to take the rest of the day off.
©2014 The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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