The morning of our last day at North Bend, we were standing in a burn room when one of our instructors began to write in the heavily caked soot on the wall. DTRT, EGH, FTM-PTB, KTF, RFB. The other firefighters nodded in approval while us recruits were, for par, clueless. As he wrote, the atmosphere changed among us, as if something sacred was passing through, and we recruits knew that, whatever those letters meant, we hadn’t yet earned the right to know. No meaning was offered.

Well, I have a certain motivation to find answers (‘insufferable know-it-all’ in the literature), so that night I googled those letters and read, “Do The Right Thing. Everybody Goes Home. F’ the Mutts. Protect the Brothers. Keep The Faith”. And finally, “Remember Fallen Brothers”. 

And I was moved because I knew what filled that dirty burn room was a fireman’s spirit; faith that the job is a noble calling greater than oneself- the very thing that led me into this gig when I wasn’t even sure it existed, and had never seen it. I only had an idea of what seemed to me a most worthy kind of life, and the pluck to leave a world of expectations to find it. So here I’m entrusting to you some thoughts about some things I couldn’t possibly know…but for which I have much faith.

What does it mean to me to be a firefighter?

            Essentially, we are community problem-solvers with a bad-ass toolbox. A solution is demanded, and delivered with service and excellence. Also, knocking down fire and peeling roofs off cars is damn good fun, and beneficial for one’s health [1] .

But what does it mean to be a fireman?

            When people say to me, “you’re too smart to be a firefighter” [2] , it’s apples and oranges. Smart is something you are if you’re lucky, but a fireman is something you are if you’re luckier. And if I ever make it, I will be the most improbable fireman you’ll ever meet. I’m a scrawny, squeaky clean biochemist and I can’t even get the ‘man’ part right, but I’m not a fool to chase down the best life I see.

             A fateful turn for me was in 8^th grade English class. We were reading quietly when gunfire erupted outside the classroom door. Pop! Pop! Poppoppoppoppop! With Columbine still fresh in memory, our teacher panicked and yelled, “Get behind my desk!”- it was the huge, wooden kind that I suppose gave the impression it could withstand heavy shelling. In a jim hill second our entire class of twenty students dove for our lives behind this desk, kicking and flailing for cover in a foxhole far too small. Now, I was all of 5’2” and a hundred pounds. I flung myself on top of the pile, landed on nine different people and displaced a few more by sheer velocity. Had Stuart M., classmate and 6’4”, 240 lb bearded man-child, done the same, we’re talking mass casualty incident. Fortunately, no one was crushed to death, and we were not under attack. As it turns out, the funeral home across the street was firing 3-volley rifle salutes at 1pm on a school day.

It’s a silly story, but I was deeply moved. In the panic of the moment, I reactively saved myself. But as we pushed and flailed with each other behind that desk, and finally turned our eyes to the hallway, we saw our classroom door standing wide open, like an invitation to Kip Kinkel 2.0 to come on in and kill us all. No one had gone back to close it. In that moment, 13 years old, I saw the end result of our selfish instinct and hated it, and, tangled in the pile of arms and legs, I resolved that it was the enemy. Self-survival was alive and well in me then, and still is. As firefighters, it is our privilege to run toward the open door when everyone else is running away. This was once described as “the greatest of loves”. I believe a true fireman has the humility to know what is in him (no hero!), the willingness to sacrifice, and the dependence on grace for the moment when much, perhaps all, is required of him.

To some this will always be “evolutionarily unfavorable”. When I was a freshman in college, I was chatting with one of my professors and mentioned that I was thinking to volunteer for a fire department. ‘Oh really?’ he snorted, ‘Going to rub shoulders with the salt of the earth? I wouldn’t have thought you were the type.’ I smiled, and hated his guts. But then I considered what he said, and realized the truth in it: salt preserves. The fire service preserves the values I hold dearest- sacrifice, loyalty, integrity, community, faith- and doesn’t give a horse’s ass what some soft-handed professor thinks. After that, when I would get discouraged in the midst of a gray academia, and the pre-med rat race, I clung to the thought that someplace, people maybe still believed in those things. A fireman upholds these values (don’t they burn within him?), not only for himself but also for those whose faith is wavering , so that average people who search the world over for a little hope will find them well-kept.

At this point, I’m tempted to delete a lot of these “pretty words” to avoid the over-sentimentality that screams femininity. But if you watch closely, even the men give away their true colors- like when they stand in silent honor of a few letters written on a burn room wall. DTRT, EGH, KTF, RFB, FTM-PTB.

I too say FTM-PTB, not from a clubhouse exclusivism, but because we are grafted into a rich fellowship-“we few, we happy few, we band of brothers” [3] - which is of higher value to me than status, money, and all the other ‘riches’ our society entitles to bright, ambitious youth. I believe a mark of a true fireman is fierce loyalty to his family, his brotherhood, and his community. We are for each other. And in those tight brotherhoods, it’s tough to compartmentalize- they are in each other’s work, play, families, good times and hard times. This is the core of that “most worthy kind of life” I mentioned. And considering how stubborn we are about asking for help, it’s a good thing we’re all so damn proud and stubborn together. Indeed, a fireman lives a shared life- it belongs to his family, his fellows, his community- and that is prosperous.

You ask me why I'm here? I said earlier that being a fireman had something to do with luck. Luck, blessing, call it what you will… All I know is that character is born from our experience, and what we chose to value because of it. And I'm tremendously thankful I ended up here, ever so improbably. So I’m still learning how to act, how to B.S. around the beanery, and to not use big words- but what is easier to learn, a fireman’s spirit or his swagger? I don’t think I’m hopeless yet.