On one of the first days of the USNS Comfort's mission, I met Lt. Cmdr. Mill Etienne, a Haitian-born Navy doctor who is a true American success story. His parents fled Haiti when he was 5 and settled in New York, where his father drove a cab and his mother cleaned houses. Mill didn't want anything to do with his former island home and cringed at the sound of his family's tropical lilt.

Through hard work, he attended Yale, went to medical school and became a Navy officer. When Haiti's capital was devastated by the earthquake, the 34-year-old quickly volunteered to help on the Comfort. He's been treating patients pouring in from Port-au-Prince, and has even found time to help arrange cultural awareness seminars and write a manual describing Haiti's history and people. For more about his extraordinary story, here's a longer profile on Mill that I wrote with Jill Rosen in Baltimore.