“I absolutely believe I’m a knight,” Artis continues as the dimming sunlight glints off Lake Michigan and begins to cast long shadows in the trim hotel room. “If I close my eyes and look back, I would have been a knight. I would have been a dented-armor, rusty-old-raggedy-horse, ‘Sancho, get my armor,’ shaving-bowl-on-my-head kind of guy.” For the thousands of people to whom Artis has personally handed a fifty-kilo bag of wheat, he surely is a white knight, appearing magically when all hope has been exhausted and then returning again and again, keeping his word, until all items he’s promised are delivered.

Artis insists that all the materials Knightsbridge distributes are given by hand to the end user. He and Laws and the other members of the Knightsbridge team individually give each bag of rice, each blanket, and each tent to the head of the household who will use the goods for his family. Knightsbridge uses a punch-card system to keep track of what each family has received so that no one and no item is overlooked. Frequently, they will make three or four visits to an area before everything is distributed.

He sits down with community elders to find out what they need and then procures the goods. “What do you need? Tents? Okay, we’ll do tents. Cook pots? All right, we’ll order cook pots,” he explains to me. “You need blankets? We’d have to get blankets from Iran, but it’s illegal for me to do that. Ah, I know a criminal. He’s a smuggler out of Iran. I pay him to smuggle the blankets.” And on it goes. The point is not only to provide lifesaving food, medicine, and shelter but to do so with dignity and without disruption to existing tribal or communal ways of life. Artis knows he’s an outsider in cultures very different from his own, and he stays out of politics and religion or any form of long-term structured intervention. “Hand to hand, eye to eye, heart to heart” is how he puts it.

This is definitely chivalric stuff. Artis has just received his sixth knighthood. Yet there’s more to his character than knightly honor, a part more akin to Robin Hood than to Sir Lancelot. It has to do with his “skill set,” as he likes to refer to it. He has no overhead, takes no salary, doesn’t put money aside in the bank, and will only accept donations if they directly serve an upcoming mission. “I don’t ask for stuff unless I need it,” he emphasizes. But he also makes it very clear that when he expects a favor returned, he can be a tough enforcer. “Don’t put me in a corner,” he says with a temerity that leaves little room for doubt. “And never get between me and helping somebody.”

Artis is no foolhardy knight. “I carry a gun to use it, and I will if I have to.” He travels with bodyguards and knows an infiltrator when he sees one. In Afghanistan once, he caught one of his bodyguards who claimed no knowledge of a foreign language suspiciously taking notes in English. Certain he was being set up by the Taliban, Artis fired him on the spot and left his fate in the hands of the Afghan general in charge, whose code of ethics had little to do with Western respect for human life. “I said to the general, ‘Your country, your rules.’”

In the summer of 2004, while working in Jolo, one of the southernmost, poorest, and most dangerous islands in the Sulu Archipelago of the Philippines, Artis went into cardiac arrest. For two minutes he was dead. In a turn of benign providence, the equipment that saved his life had been brought to the outpost hospital a few months prior to his collapse—by Knightsbridge. Less than a month later, Artis was back in action, parachute jumping for sport. “I’m not afraid of anything,” he says. “I’m nuts. I’m absolutely out of my frigging mind.” But nuts to what purpose? Artis and his colleagues in Knightsbridge International have brought hope and dignity and much-needed material sustenance to hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, goods totaling many millions of dollars. “We’re not heroes,” he goes on. “We do heroic stuff.”

Later, walking along Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s famous miracle-mile shopping street, jostling the hordes of pre-Christmas shoppers, I wonder what turns anybody into a true hero, a knight of valor and perseverance. I remember Artis’s deference when I pressed him on his motivation for doing the work he was doing. He turned the question back on me, saying that everyone who asked him that question knew the answer for themselves. He then went on, “There was no defining moment. No light came on. No earth-shattering revelation. It was just a gradual awakening within me that—you know what?—I have a responsibility.” And the audacity to try anything, I realized, that vanquishes the ordinary and makes his less-than-saintly life the stuff of legendary goodwill.