Plastic surgeons Curtis Cetrulo and Dicken Ko performed the 15-hour operation on Thomas Manning, a 64-year-old who lost the vast majority of his penis in order to cure him of his cancer.

There have been two other penis transplants—one in China in 2006 that failed, and a successful one in South Africa in 2014.

Though penis transplants have thus far been rare, urotrauma is not. Cartel and Ko say that there are many young men—many of them military veterans—languishing in silence without their penises because of injuries sustained in Iraq or Afghanistan.

And so Cetrulo, Ko, and Manning have decided to be very public about the surgery in hopes that the procedure becomes more common.