He didn’t expect to find himself in the middle of a disaster on the streets of the capital city. But when it happened, he knew what to do.

In a taxi on Friday when the accident occurred, he jumped out and ran to the people lying sprawled on the sidewalk. “I thought I was gonna find people in pieces,” he says. “I expected to find hamburger all over the place. Luckily, no one was dead.”

Sypher, who had trained as an emergency medical technician in the military, performed an immediate triage on the two people who’d been struck, checking them for injuries and broken bones; then he calmed the shocked group of bystanders. The paramedics came and whisked the victims away; it was unclear why the driver had lost control.

At the scene, he says, a homeless veteran walked up and offered to help. Sypher handed him his card.

Kushner, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Angels in America, said he wrote three drafts of the Lincoln script, which ultimately zoomed in on the president’s life during the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. The film is based in part on the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Kushner said he “picked over words” in the final script with actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Lincoln in the film, “trying out different sentences—what if we did this, what if we did that.” Kushner called the back-and-forth a lot of fun.

When it came time to start filming, however, Day-Lewis explained to Kushner that it was time to move into a new mode. “He said, ‘I hope you won’t feel bad when I stop speaking with you on the set. At that point, I can only have a conversation with Steven.’”

Kushner said, “We texted.”

Today, her husband, Kevin, sat in the audience at the summit, drawing a standing ovation. He has had a phenomenal recovery. “The vegetative state they thought he was gonna be in was not,” said Walker, who now works as an advocate for the U.S. Army Wounded Warrior Program, which provides services for severely injured soldiers.

Walker was one of four panelists who described the toll war takes on families, and the grassroots groups that have cropped up to help.

Panelist Kim Ruocco said her family suffered a devastating blow when her husband took his own life after serving in Iraq. “My husband lived a heroic life but died a not-so-heroic death,” she said. “My fear was that the way that he died would wipe out the way that he lived.”

Having lived through such tragedy, she now works with other families who have lost a loved one to suicide, serving as a director at the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. “When someone dies by suicide, the family has a completely different kind of grief process,” she said. “My passion was to figure out how to help other families once I finally got through it.”

Peter joined the Student Veterans of America on the board of directors as a way to provide support in colleges across the country—there are currently 660 active chapters.

“So we do it together,” he said. From issues of acclimation “to issues of mental health, we try to get everyone in the same room talking. So you don’t have a guy who comes back who is older than everyone else and behind everyone and who is alone. We don’t want someone to suffer alone.”

Both Elizabeth Perez-Halperin and Eli Williamson, also panelists, say they set up their organizations with the idea that the best support they could provide veterans was getting them jobs.

Perez-Halperin is the president and founder of GC Green, a general contracting firm that uses a veteran-based workforce and construction solutions for renewable energy projects. Their slogan is:” Getting Green Done with Vets.”

Real time, Sorkin said, "is when a half hour for you in the audience is the same as a half hour for the character on the screen. There will be no time cuts. Each of these three scenes is going to take place before a product launch—backstage before a product launch. The first one being the Mac, the second one being NeXT (after he had left Apple), and the third one being the iPod."

Jobs’s launch of the Macintosh computer in 1984 effectively began Jobs’s meteoric climb; NeXT, in 1990, showed his efforts to begin anew after leaving the company he founded, and in 2001 the iPod singlehandedly changed the way that audiences consume media. 

Yes, that’s the entire film, according to Sorkin, who is currently writing a draft of the script, which he hopes to end with the quote, "Here's to the crazy ones,” a reference to an ad campaign that Jobs had created.

"If I can earn that ending, than I'll have written the movie I want to write,” said Sorkin.

Khairallah was serious about helping. He went with the soldiers that day as they cleared the town of bombs, serving as their translator. Then he joined the troops permanently, making $5 a day. "I had this dream to rebuild Iraq. So this is where I can fit, rebuilding my country," he said. He described one night when the soldiers came under attack and he pulled one of them to safety, losing his leg in the process.

"People look at me and say, 'Why did you do it?'" he said. "It's just a human reaction. You work every day with these guys, they become like brothers, family. That's how I felt, you know—he'll stick up for me, I'll stick up for him."

Later, when the troops left, Iraqis turned on him. "They looked at me as a traitor to this country. They held the Koran towards me," he said. "My house was bombed several times … three times I was driving a car and they shot at my car. I had to leave the country."

That wasn't so easy. He wound up stuck in Jordan for four years trying to prove that he was a refugee who had worked with U.S. troops, he told moderator Howard Kurtz, Washington bureau chief for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. "I was losing hope ... I felt that my life is gonna end soon, there's no option for me," he said. "I had to prove my leg got blown up because of the war. I had to bring all the papers and do all the interviews … prove my case."

Castner told Donvan that when he first joined the military he had wanted to work as an astronaut. But when he discovered EOD, he said, “there was this incredible brotherhood I wanted to be part of. I knew if I succeeded … I would’ve done something really hard that I could be proud of.”

That brotherhood has suffered its share of casualties over the past decade of war; Castner referred to a memorial with the names of EOD officers who have died in the line of duty, and said that more names were added to that memorial last year than in any year since 1945.

“If you look at those names, nearly every single one of them, something killed them that they never saw,” Castner said, calling the element of surprise the biggest threat to all bomb defusers.

“The IED that somebody else discovers … in some ways they’re doing a lot of the more dangerous work. If I know where it is, I’m not in danger anymore,” Castner said. “I never worried about the bomb I knew about. I worried about the bombs that were hidden.”

“What was remarkable about this source was his motivation,” said Crumpton. “We paid him a modest salary but he was really motivated by how he could help his people and he thought the U.S. was the route to that.”

Later Crumpton learned that the asset had been killed trying to cross a dangerous war zone in Africa. Crumpton said the man was an example of a hero that he knows the identity of—“but no one else will.”

Another instance of personal heroism that Crumpton touched on was not of a CIA officer, but of a CIA officer's wife. Mike Spann was the first American to be killed overseas after the attacks on 9/11 and he was also a CIA agent. Crumpton was a close friend of Spann’s and his wife, Shannon, and was responsible for breaking the news of Mike’s death to her. After the funeral, Shannon asked to see Crumpton, and it was a visit he said he expected would need lots of tissues.

“It's very hard to be an ambassador behind the walls,” Albright said. She called Stevens, a career diplomat who worked at State when she was its first female secretary, “the kind of person we need to have…Chris wanted to get out from behind the walls and represent the U.S. in difficult places—to be the eyes and ears of the president and the American people.”

Lévy, who came to Libya to work with, advocate for, and report on the rebels during their struggle with Gaddafi, recalled his time with Stevens during the nation’s civil war, when despite the risk, “we stopped in many cafés, many little spots because he wanted to mingle, to speak, to go to the real population—to speak with Syrians, speak with women."

“I think history will be written one day of the role of Ambassador Stevens in this war,” Lévy said, recalling a discussion with the Libyan opposition where he and Stevens called on them “to open a new front in the mountains…and Ambassador Stevens was so convincing, so eloquent” he carried the issue. “It was his taste and his will to be free.”

Tawanda "Tee" Hanible, a gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps, was among them. Once a rebellious teen, she joined the Marines in a desk job, then later married and went to Iraq as a young mother. She's now the founder of Operation Heroes Connect, which links veterans with at-risk kids. 

She described one particularly difficult kid who was paired with a staff sergeant. "He stuck with this kid from day one," she said of the sergeant, who became a real mentor. "He just continued to be on his side." The boy got his GED and is joining the Army, she said—a win for both.

Another panelist, Army veteran Howard "Ford" Sypher, is director of field operations for Team Rubicon, a veterans-service group that swoops in to provide disaster relief when humanitarian crises hit. Working now in areas decimated by Hurricane Sandy, he said, "Veterans are leading the way to recovery."