Princess Diana, and Ken Rutherford and Jerry White, right, who together founded Landmine Survivors Network, now Survivor Corps, with two Bosnian survivors in July 1997.

Jerry White knows how to grab an audience’s attention. He takes off his leg and passes it around.

But that’s not to say he needed something that unusual to keep folks listening when the Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient talked at Hampton High School, the Hampton Community Center and the Ellis School last week. Everyone paid attention.

“I didn’t know there were hundreds of thousands of land mines left in Israel,” Mr. White said as he described how, at the age of 20 in 1984, he stepped on a land mine while hiking with two friends. “I was lucky because one of my friends knew how to tie a tourniquet and the two of them were strong enough to carry me out of there.”

The incident cost him the lower half of his right leg and severe wounds to his left leg. “We literally prayed our way out of the mine field,” he told the gathering at the community center.

Mr. White was a student in Israel when he had his accident, and spent the next six months in the country. Once again, he said he was lucky “because they have the best hospitals in the world.”

His sister Susan White, who lives in Hampton and was one of the reasons for his recent visit, said, “It was a life-changing experience for him.”

Mr. White told of feeling sorry for himself, an emotion that was quickly nipped in the bud by a stranger whose name he would never know.

“He walked in to see me, and was a double-amputee himself. When he asked me what had happened he said, ‘Do you still have your knee?’ That is important to be fitted with a prosthetic. ‘I said, yes. Then he asked if I could still have children, because that is a common injury with land mine accidents,” said Mr. White. “I told him, “I think so.’ Then he told me, ‘Then you just have a nose cold,’ and walked out of the room.”

From that experience, Mr. White said, he realized he lost his leg, not his life.

Years after his accident, Mr. White became a leader in the “International Campaign to Ban Land Mines,” which led to the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. Through his work, Mr. White has traveled worldwide, bringing attention to land mine accidents, including accompanying the late Princess Diana on her last humanitarian trip. “She had the ability to draw people in and really listen to them. She was so full of empathy, just a wonderful human being,” he said.

Today, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and four children.

At the community center, Mr. White read from his recently released book, “I will not be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis.”

In the book, Mr. White chronicles his own story of survival and those of others who have survived war injuries, cancer, painful divorce and tragedies. “When people ask why I wrote this book, I tell them that I have traveled all over the world, meeting survivors of all types. I noticed that some survivors seem to have evolved and thought, ‘What could we all learn from these survivors? Why are they not like those survivors who seemed to have devolved?’”

His work also led Mr. White to co-found the nonprofit organization Survivor Corps, which is dedicated to helping all survivors of war.

“We started out as the Land mine Survivors Network, an organization to help victims of land mine accidents. But over the years, we realized there were other victims of war who needed assistance — child soldiers, war widows, and veterans,” he said.

The name change of the non-profit coincided with the release of Mr. White’s book, said Ricki Weisberg, communications manager for Survivor Corps. All net proceeds from the sale of the book go to Survivor Corps.

An important component of Survivor Corps is a support network for U.S. veterans returning from conflict. “We found that once they were through medical services, these men and women needed something else. Rehabilitation also happens inside, but they weren’t seeking the services they needed to heal that way.”

After the presentation at Hampton High School, 15-year-old sophomore, Jessica Iwasaki, said, “I learned that being a survivor doesn’t mean you have to lose your leg or something that big. Being a survivor can mean surviving a little thing.”

Because Jessica is a native of Japan who moved to the United States when she was 7 and did not know English, she can relate to some of Mr. White’s struggles. “He really went through a lot and shared so much with us. I learned that you shouldn’t live in the past,” she said. “He was so inspirational.”

In addition to his presentations to students and community members, Mr. White is meeting with people who work with veterans throughout the country, including in Pennsylvania.

“We have discovered that what they are doing in one place isn’t necessarily what they are doing in another, so we want to see what is working, and try to coordinate it.”

Peer networks are a big part of Survivor Corps, according to Mr. White. “All survivors that we meet have something to share and we have found that survivors learn from other survivors. That is why the peer networks are so important” he said.

For more information about Survivor Corps or Mr. White’s book, visit www.www.survivorcorps.org.

Via the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, http://ping.fm/rmuDN