40 Acts of Valor: Stories of Selfless Heroes

During the Chernobyl meltdown, Oleksander Lelechenko was the deputy chief of the electrical shop. To keep his younger coworkers from being exposed to radiation, he himself went through radioactive water and debris three times to make emergency repairs. After receiving first aid, he again returned to the plant and worked for several more hours. He died in a Kiev hospital less than two weeks after the disaster.

Actor Robert Patrick was involved in a boating accident on Lake Erie in 1984. He nearly drowned after swimming for nearly 3 hours while helping to rescue the other people stranded at the accident site.

In 2009, an Italian neurosurgeon named Claudio Vitale had a heart attack while performing surgery on a patient. He kept going when he realized that if he stopped, his patient would never recover. Half an hour after finishing the surgery, the doctor underwent an angioplasty.

In 1907, a Mexican railroad brakeman named Jesús Gracía saved the entire town of Nacozari by single-handedly driving a damaged and burning train containing dynamite six kilometers away from the town before it finally exploded, killing him.

Iqbal Masih was a kid in Pakistan who was sold into bondage. At the age of 10, he escaped the shackles of bonded labor, freeing over 3000 children who were trapped in the same carpet factory he worked in. He was responsible for bringing down Pakistan's carpet exports by $34 million and was therefore murdered in 1995 at the age of 13.

Richard Zednik, the goalie for the Buffalo Sabres, had his carotid artery cut by another player's skate in 1989. This caused him to lose so much blood that eleven fans passed out, two more had heart attacks, and three players threw up on the ice. The team trainer rushed onto the ice, reached into his wound, and simply pinched the artery with his fingers until additional help arrived, saving his life.

In 2015, MMA fighter Matt Hamill noticed a car speeding down the wrong side of the highway. So he turned around, chased the car, and safely forced it into a grassy area. He then punched out a window to stop the car, potentially saving the child passenger's and the inebriated mother's lives.

At least twice, CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta has been on location reporting but needed to step in as a neurosurgeon: once on a Marine in Iraq and the other on a little girl injured during the Haitian earthquake. The Marine was shot in the head during the opening days of the invasion of Iraq. Without proper tools, Gupta performed the brain surgery with a Black and Decker handheld drill. The Marine lived.

In 2009, four prisoners at the Hillsborough County Jail in Florida saved a corrections officer from another prisoner. The inmates who rescued him were in prison for assault, armed robbery, home invasion, murder, and sex offenses, but they saved the deputy because he treated them like human beings.

In 2012, Anthony Omari took a machete to the face from attacking robbers while defending an under-resourced Kenyan orphanage his family runs. He saved 37 orphans that day. The attack was in revenge for the previously foiled robbery, when Anthony threw a hammer at one of the thieves.