A Badge & A Dream in the Combat Zone Many are the students who will try to get the job of their dreams, but few of them will ever succeed to graduate with honor to become the most popular teacher in the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, specially if the student will have to bear "A badge & A Dream in the Combat Zone." John Patrick Murphy was one of these students. He was born downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the University of Arizona where both of his parents were working as teachers. In 1971, John lost both parents to a car accident, and at the age of 19, he become the father of his two younger brothers and a sister. after a struggle to stay together, the children who had no relatives to claim them ended up at an orphanage. John Murphy moved to Boston to live with the only relatives he had from his mother's side of the family who were immigrants from Italy. Unable to support his way through college without a job, John Murphy joined the Army and he was assigned to an armada of helicopter gunships that was mainly doing rescue work. After three years in Vietnam, he was himself wounded while rescuing a wounded soldier in battle. From that point, the Army felt that he was not fit for any more combat duties, and in his post service, they helped the sergeant to pursue his father's dream. Unfortunately, the ex-sergeant didn't get far with his impossible dream as it took lots of money as well as several years of intense study to qualify as an economic teacher at Harvard University. After failing all these efforts, the ex-sergeant followed up the example of other veterans who had found good jobs in the police force. At age of 24, John Murphy had become a police officer at the time when the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of busing to end school segregation. The instability of the educational system made Boston to become a leading voice across the nation to protest against the decision made by the Supreme Court of the United States. Parents were refusing to send their kids to school, and hundreds of violent high school teenagers were unleashed in the Streets of Boston, creating numerous crimes in broad day light. Many of these young offenders were protected both by their age as well as by their parents who had disarmed any efforts by the police officers to bring order and peace in the city. When John Murphy had began his new job as a police officer, Boston had grown up already to be one of the most violent cities in the nation. Nevertheless, officer Murphy kept following his dream, and although he had witnessed numerous dangerous events in war and the states that made him scream in his sleep at night, he remained focused without ever missing a class or any other academic work assigned to him. Officer Murphy's sense of duty lead him to be a role model trainer at the police academy. But John would not let the fate of his job surrender his father's dream, which and more importantly an own dean and kept following his destiny with "A Badge & A Dream in the Combat Zone" until the student officer walked through the iron gates of the oldest institution of higher education in the United States to become the most popular teacher of its time. The impossible had become possible as John Patrick Murphy's dream had crossed its expectation for the one time teenager of less fortune with an unknown destiny had become the next president of Harvard University.