At around 6 a.m. on Aug. 8, Cory Markotjohn was driving to his girlfriend’s house in Cape Breton when his car hit a pothole, causing a wheel to break off. The vehicle careened into a concrete pillar, the force of the collision knocking him unconscious. The car started to burn.

Just then, five men from Eskasoni First Nation were driving down the Trans-Canada Highway, on their way to work at the Marine Recycling Corporation in Sydney.

One of the men, welder Cregg Battiste, saw the smoke rising from an underpass. He pulled his truck over to see if someone needed help. His colleagues in another vehicle did the same.

Battiste ran toward the burning vehicle, his four coworkers not far behind. When he got there, he could see Markotjohn passed out and sprawled across the front two seats. He wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead.

“The flames were just as hot as what we use when we’re welding,” he tells CTVNews.ca.

Battiste opened the driver’s door and tried to pull Markotjohn out, but his 240-pound body wouldn’t budge.

“How much time do we actually have left?” Battiste remembers thinking. “In movies, the car explodes.”

As the men struggled to free Markotjohn, they could hear a woman’s voice crying “Cory” through the car’s Bluetooth speaker. Battiste gave the woman the location of the accident, as the five men raced against time.

Eventually, they realized Markotjohn was caught on the emergency brake. After Battiste climbed in and freed the body, they were able to pull him out and carry him to safety.

Minutes later, the entire vehicle was engulfed in flames.

Markotjohn began to grunt, then to cry out and move his legs.

Markotjohn’s girlfriend, Cheryl Peters, soon arrived. She had been speaking to him over the phone when the accident occurred.

Soon, an off-duty nurse stopped her vehicle and administered first aid. Paramedics and police followed.

The five men continued on to work, not knowing the name of the man they had rescued.

Blaise Marshall, one of the five men, says he can still remember the crackling sound of the burning windshield as the men struggled to get Markotjohn out.

The brush with death was traumatic, and none of them could concentrate on their work that day.

“I was just dazing out and stuff. That’s all I was thinking about really,” Marshall says. “I was just thinking about what happened, his ear. His ear was completely off, just hanging by a piece of skin.”

The men’s boss sent them home for the day.

They returned to commendations, but Marshall says they didn’t have closure.

“I just want to see who I saved,” he tells CTVNews.ca.

Thanks to a plea posted on Facebook, Peters and Markotjohn were able to locate all five men, along with a sixth man who had also tried to help.

Markotjohn crushed a vertabra and broke his neck, his collarbone and his scapula in the collision. He nearly lost his ear. He hasn’t been able to go back to his job as a nurse at a long-term care home since the accident, which has put a strain on him financially. But he feels lucky to be alive.

Days ago, the father of three posted a message on Facebook to make sure his community knows about the heroes who saved him.

I was finally in contact with 4 of the 5 men from eskasoni who pulled me out of my burning car on August 8th this year....

Posted by Mark Markotjohn on Sunday, September 23, 2018

“Without these heroic and courageous men I would not have survived to be able to hug my children, today,” he wrote.

“It’s not just me that it would have affected,” Markotjohn tells CTVNews.ca. “There’s so many other people that it would affect. I’m very grateful for what these men did.”

Markotjohn is vowing to “pay it forward” if ever he can.

“If I ever see anybody, if I ever come across a situation where somebody needs assistance, I’m definitely going to do whatever I can to provide help,” he says.

Details of a meeting haven’t yet been arranged, but Markotjohn says he hopes to take the five men out for dinner.

Battiste says he’s looking forward to it. “I’m just happy that he’s actually doing OK,” he says.