Fred Cuny grew up in Dallas dreaming of flying fighter jets. He failed the language requirement for officer school and lost that future in a single stroke. What he found instead was disasters, one after another. For twenty-six years the big Texan with the soft voice walked into the worst places on earth, more than fifty countries, wherever an earthquake or a famine or a siege had broken a population and left it to die.

In 1993 he took on Sarajevo. Serbian forces had cut the city's water, and residents were dying at the river and the collection points, picked off by snipers as they filled buckets. Cuny had water filtration units the size of shipping containers custom-built in Houston, flew them into the besieged city aboard C-130s, and hid the machinery in a tunnel above the river. By the summer of 1994, a quarter million people had water in their homes, and the sniper casualties dropped.