Letter from Texas: Lysa Hieber – A Quiet American Hero
Amid political vanity and division egged on by the Trump administration, the story of one nurse shows how courage, compassion and commitment still define the best of America.
Edward Girardet·
US President Donald Trump’s self-aggrandising demands to be awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize have provoked ridicule across the world. The spectacle of a leader begging for recognition stands in sharp contrast to the reality that, despite the noise of political vanity, America still produces true heroes: ordinary people whose quiet service to others is more deserving of honour.
This past summer I found myself in San Antonio, Texas. Normally, I would have set out with notebook in hand, trying to make sense of why the United States has become such a bitterly divided country. There is no shortage of material and the situation is only growing worse.
Continued mass shootings, including the May 2022 massacre of nineteen pupils and two teachers at an elementary school in the Texas town of Uvalde, remains one of the nation’s rawest wounds. Gun violence has reached such grotesque proportions that killings linked to politics, ideology or simple rage scarcely shock anymore. (See Global Geneva article on Charlie Kirk)
Equally urgent are questions of health care in the richest country on earth, where one in three citizens cannot afford to fall ill. And then there is the soaring cost of living, which pushes more families, living from pay cheque to pay cheque, to the edge of poverty even as corporate wealth reaches dizzying new heights. Trump's tariffs are only making matters worse.
All of these themes cry out for attention. Yet, for personal reasons, this Letter from Texas has taken a different turn. A family tragedy reshaped everything.
Two vehicles squashed into one at Sandy Creek from the north Texas floods.
Edward Girardet
The Texas Floods
On 4–5 July 2025, torrential rains in the north Texas Hill Country sent the Guadalupe River surging more than eleven metres in a matter of hours. The waters swept away houses, trailers, trees, bridges, cars, livestock and people. At least 135 lives were lost, among them children enjoying themselves in summer holiday camps. Hundreds of families were left destitute.
In the immediate aftermath, volunteers rushed from across the state to help. Among them was my wife’s sister, Lysa Hieber, a 65-year-old nurse and veteran of the Iraq War. She drove two hours north from San Antonio to Sandy Creek, one of the communities worst affected.
Two weeks later, survivors were still complaining that federal agencies such as FEMA, stripped of funds under the Trump administration, and even the American Red Cross were failing to respond quickly or effectively. “No officials are stepping up to help us,” one resident told local television.
In that vacuum, volunteers like Lysa became indispensable. Despite searing heat and long hours, they set up makeshift clinics, distributed food and water, and improvised emergency shelters. Lysa’s nursing skills proved vital. She organised IV drips for the dehydrated, got on the phone and email to press supplies into the right hands, and improvised treatment where official channels faltered.
Her persistence was not universally welcomed. Some officials bristled at her determination to cut through red tape. As one fellow volunteer put it: “She irritated the hell out of them because she was bypassing procedure. But she got things done.”
Several weeks into her service, Lysa began to feel unwell. She checked into a local hospital, but, unexpectedly, within hours, she was gone – likely from complications linked to an old military infection. It was 2 August 2025.
A Different America
Lysa’s death was devastating. Yet in reflecting on her life, we all felt oddly reassured. For even as politicians bicker, posture and erode the very institutions designed to help, there remains in America a stubborn, deeply ingrained instinct to serve others.
This is not new. From the Marshall Plan after the Second World War to the creation of the Peace Corps, from global health campaigns to philanthropic foundations, American generosity has been a pillar for hundreds of millions if not billions of people, both at home and abroad.
To the chagrin of many, much of what is good has been undermined by Trump’s “America First” rhetoric. This has sought to belittle or dismantle much of this legacy by cutting funds for USAID, Centers for Disease Control, Voice of America, National Public Radio (which provides disaster alerts) and other vital bodies. (See Global Geneva article on International aid)
But the traditional impulse of helping others has not vanished. It survives in individuals like Lysa, who act not for recognition but out of decency.
These are the quiet heroes: people who represent the better side of the United States. They do not demand to be awarded prizes. They simply step forward when others need them.
Memorial for Lysa at Sandy Creek.
Edward Girardet
A Nurse, a Veteran, a Volunteer
Lysa was one of them. Nursing was her calling, an undervalued vocation perhaps yet indispensable everywhere. She had served in the US Air Force’s MASH unit during the Iraq war, deploying for nearly a year. Rising eventually to the rank of lieutenant colonel, she collected a stack of commendations that her family only discovered after her death.
After leaving the military, Lysa continued her work in health care while a single mother raising three children. Alongside her job, she helped out tirelessly whether strangers or friends and family. In Bangkok she worked with the impoverished in the city’s slums. In northern Thailand, she supported a Buddhist monk’s programme that trained girls from hill tribes as nursing assistants, offering them an alternative to sex trafficking.
Lysa's approach to life was effusive, bohemian, sometimes impulsive. She loved dragonflies and butterflies, delighted in parties, and radiated energy that spilled into others’ lives. But she remained unfailingly professional in her work. Her children and now her grandchildren were her anchor.
When the Texas floods struck, it was characteristic of Lysa - as with others - to respond without hesitation. For Lysa, helping was not a question. It was what one did. (See K-Sat TV report on Lysa Hieber)
Lysa's open approach also brought different people together, regardless of their political backgrounds. At her funeral, one of the volunteer team leaders who came to speak was Stewart Rhodes, a former paratrooper and founder of the Oath Keepers, an extreme right-wing militia. Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy related to the 6 January 2021 assault on the United States Capitol resulting in an 18-year prison sentence. As with other rioters, this was recently commuted by Trump. Looking down from where she is now, Lysa, who opposed Trump and was sympathetic to migrants, must be indeed chuckling over the irony.
Honouring an exceptional nurse and individual
Ten days after Lysa’s death, we gathered in San Antonio to celebrate her life. Friends, family, nurses and soldiers came together. A squad of fellow veterans fired a three-volley salute; an honour guard presented the United States flag to her next of kin. Her nursing colleagues performed a final roll call, formally releasing Lysa - as per tradition - from duty.
A representative of the San Antonio Nurses Honor Guard spoke movingly: “Nursing is a calling, a lifestyle, a way of living. Lysa is remembered for the difference she made as a nurse, for stepping into people’s lives in moments both ordinary and profound.”
Reciting the lines from a nurse’s poem, she continued:
“When a calming quiet presence was all that was needed, Lysa was there… When a silent glance could uplift a patient or a family member, Lysa was there. When a situation demanded a gentle touch, a firm push, or an encouraging word, Lysa was there. To witness humanity, its beauty, in good times and bad – Lysa was always there.”
It was a fitting tribute.
Flood victims thank the volunteers for their help.
Edward Girardet
The Measure of a Life
In truth, Lysa never boasted of her achievements. She was too busy living them. She took in the homeless – both people and stray dogs. She comforted strangers, cajoled colleagues, and fought for patients. She would tease friends with: “Let me be miserable with you – you can’t do this alone.”
My wife Lori, one of Lysa’s closest confidantes – they had talked by phone almost daily wherever they happened to be across the globe - summed up her sister’s essence in three words: courage, commitment, compassion. Courage in Iraq, commitment to her children, and compassion for whomever crossed her path.
Lysa’s last messages from Sandy Creek, days before her death, reflected the same spirit: practical, insistent, hopeful. She reported that supplies had arrived, that harassment of volunteers by officials had ceased, that the community centre was taking shape. She was still working, still pushing, right to the end.
Ture heroes who do not boast
In celebrating Lysa’s life, we acknowledge a truth about America. Despite the ugly noise of MAGA politics and Trump's insistence on extolling his own largely fictitious achievements, there remains an extraordinary tradition of ordinary citizens stepping up for others.
These volunteers – nurses, firefighters, teachers, church groups, neighbourhood associations – are the lifeblood of a society that can appear otherwise fractured. They are not motivated by wealth, nor by the craving for recognition that consumes autocrats like Trump. Instead, they embody a conviction that helping others is simply what one does.
If Nobel Prizes were truly about peace, then it is people like Lysa – anonymous to most of the world and indispensable to those they touch – who should be honoured. Both in life and in death, her approach underlines something essential. Political leaders may chip away at institutions, and public trust may fray, but the human instinct to care for others persists.
Lysa spent her last days in service, echoing the biblical commandment as expressed by one of her colleagues: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. It is a simple creed, but one that defined Lysa as a nurse and as a human being.
America today is widely portrayed as polarised, angry, even broken. But beneath the surface lies another country: a nation of quiet heroes, unheralded and unpretentious, who embody the best of its traditions. Lysa was one of them.
And that, many of us realise, is a life worth living.
Edward Girardet is a Geneva-based foreign correspondent and author. He has reported conflict, humanitarian and environmental issues worldwide from Afghanistan to Angola for more than 40 years.