It takes a special person to answer the call to serve our country. It takes just as much spirit to answer the call when your community needs you most.

To find out how an Army specialist made the most of a dire situation, Manuel Cruz of the 10th MP Company looks to his family.

"Military and police officers [are] two people that I always look up to. It just made me want to be in the Army and then be an MP," Cruz said, describing his father and grandfathers' service to our communities.

It's a posting that would see his unit get called up locally during one of Western New York's most fatal storms.

"You get put on standby, you know something's coming, possibly like next day or a couple of hours, you get the actual phone call," he said. "A lot of people are going to be in need. A lot of people are going to be in need of help. So that's when we'll actually be told a time and place to actually come."

Trying to get to the unit's headquarters in East Buffalo wasn't going to happen.

"All the roads were completely blocked off, or a lot of people were stuck. I didn't realize how bad it actually was until I started getting into the city," Cruz added. "No, it was going to be a bigger blizzard than what was initially thought."

So South Buffalo is as far as he got.

"I parked my truck over there. That's where I realized that I couldn't continue going where I was," he noted on a roundabout along McKinley Parkway. "I couldn't make it to the armory where I was told and reported to go to. That's where I eventually ended up stopping here and that's when I got out, grabbed my shovel and was like, ‘I'm going to start helping people.’"

First, he helped dig out a transit police officer coming home from a 24-hour shift.

"That's when I started hearing tapping on a car windshield. I thought I was hearing things, so I searched around. I thought someone was knocking or maybe my mind was playing tricks," he said. "That's when I realized that there was a car underneath all this snow."

Freeing a man who was having a heart attack, Cruz would carry them on his shoulders all the way to Mercy Hospital. To say it was 'nearby' in the biting winds and snow mounds would be generous.

"My adrenaline was running and it just was mind over matter," Cruz explained. "I had to get him there and that's what I was going to do. There was nothing that was going to stop me to get him here."

Making an entire shift of it, the number of people Cruz helped grew before the roads were good enough to make his way safely home to tell his family and friends what he'd done.

"[It’s] not something that I like to boast about,” Cruz said. “It's something that I was trained to do and it's something I'll always continue to do. It's just part of me and it's part of who I am.”

And that's why Army Specialist Manuel Cruz is your 2023 Military Red Cross Real Hero.