The Things We Carry | Craig Malin

with homage to Tim O’Brien

“Anybody see anything they didn’t want to see?”, Captain 2 asks on the cold ride back to the station. It’s an opening for discussion, but there’s not much offered. A dozen or so firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, doctors and a helo pilot did all we could for a man battling death, and death won. Death does that, on the regular.

You learn early on that you are going to be angry with the reaper o’grimness fairly often. So you are going to have to come up with some coping strategies. I’ll get to mine at the end, but yeah, I saw something I did not want to see. Mortality.

“Leave a truck, take a tool”, Captain 1 said. Different call, but about the same timeframe. Early on in the adventure, I’m ever grateful for those six words of wisdom. Because at the start, you have no idea of how any of this stuff works, and short pieces of generalized advice are gold. You then work through the fear of taking the wrong tool and looking like an idiot or forgetting which of the three hundred and fifty-two compartments on the rig has the right tool. Tool users and problem solvers. At the core, that’s who firefighters are.

Each one of us creates our own personal tool set we carry in the nooks and crannies of our bunker gear. Full battle rattle, ground up (from memory, at thirtysome thousand feet), looks like this:

Left boot - carbon fiber insert (for the toe that killed a truck)

Left turnout pants pocket – tool pouch with scissors, multi-headed screwdriver, phillips jewelers screwdriver, pocketclip screwdriver (a lightweight talisman from Dad's tool collection), grease paint crayon, vice-grip pliers, chemlight stick, small crescent wrench, 10 mm box end wrench, allen wrench combos (SAE and metric), 24 inches of duct tape and (not in the pouch) small throwaway flashlight

Right turnout pants pocket – 16 foot (diameter) rescue webbing with locking carabiner, velcroed in the pocket flap for immediate access, separate pouch with three color-coded climbing slings (2 foot, 4 foot, 8 foot and carabiners)

Pants belt loop – rescue belt with (at structure fires) 3.5 lb. head axe in axe loop (ice axe loop from Black Diamond – highly recommend) and ladder hook in front loop

Left outside lower jacket pocket – structure fire gloves on strap, water-proof note pad and red marker, extra pair rubber gloves, combat tourniquet

Right outside lower jacket pocket – two spring clamps, extra pair foam ear plugs

Left inside jacket pocket - fire hood

Left outside jacket pocket – otf knife, heavy duty wire cutters, multi-tool on lanyard carabinered to outside loop

Left outside loop – extraction gloves on carabiner

Right outside loop – flashlight

Traffic vest – Guardian Angel light #1 on right front outside loop

Radio strap – small flashlight tethered to gear keeper, Spyderco rescue knife with lanyard, radio w / speaker / mic

Helmet – Guardian Angel light #2 on rear, Streamlight helmet flashlight, two door wedges tucked behind shield, skull cap and safety glasses tucked on top of helmet suspension webbing

All in and not counting the boots, pants, jacket, helmet, belt and suspenders, that’s 48 tools/things I carry on me. Just 46 though, if it’s not a structure fire. That does not count the SCBA and / or the thermal imaging camera and / or the Halligan / pike pole / ax / chain saw / box light / ladder, hose, etc., that I grabbed off the engine to comply with the “Leave a truck, take a tool” rule.

46 might be too many. See also: over-prepared city manager / alpinist. But, except for the metric allen wrench combo, I’ve used every other tool... except for the chemlight stick, which once could have been helpful, but I did not have. So I fixed that. The funniest thing is if someone asks a group of firefighters for a flashlight or knife, two dozen flashlights and a dozen knives are offered up in under two seconds. And, there was that one time Dalton said he needed a 10mm wrench and I just whipped one out of my pocket like that was normal. That was a good moment.

There are far more good moments than things you don't want to see moments. But the don't want to see stuff stays with you, and you have to find a peaceful space for it; a compartment in your head well insulated with empathy, humility and resolve. In small towns, the house or the side of the road where you saw the thing you did not want to see is going to be inescapable. You are going to have to go past it - maybe daily - so you are going to have to make peace with it.

Volunteer firefighters and EMTs don’t just carry gloves and flashlights and multi-tools with them. They carry a community’s fear and trauma with them. Who else is going to carry it? There’s a banner in the fire station that reads, “No one is coming. It’s up to us.” Fairly fatalist stuff.

But we also carry the community's hope. So let’s take this hopeful path for a bit. When Fire Prevention Week rolled around, no one took down the "No one is coming banner". But there was a video screen that lightened up the “Expect Fire, Expect Victims” banner with “Expect Trees, Expect Kittens" (be careful Homer, they'll rip you to shreds if they get the chance).

Anyway, Thursday and Friday of Fire Prevention Week sees more than 400 kids coming through the station. Department members who can get off work show up to teach / entertain 400 plus pre-K to fourth graders. Huge fun, with the only downside being all the cookies you cannot eat, for fear of running out if the kids outnumber the cookies.

My job was “Friendly Firefighter”. The task is to start in normal clothes, then fully gear up for an interior fire search, and get the kids to understand the scary looking guy in the helmet and mask is not someone to be afraid of. I might have oversold the child-friendly energy and enthusiasm, more than a few times. But I don’t recall any complaints from the kids I scooped up to take to “safety”. I recall laughter, and “Save Me, Save Me” hands being raised. And hugs from the little ones. I repeated the super-friendly superhero shtick I did not count how many times over the two days, but I got two nights of very restful sleep. Crawling around with fifty pounds of gear on and tossing kids over your shoulder for two days as Friendly Firefighter Craig is juuuusssttt a touch tiring. Thankfully, Captain Brandon took a few turns too.

So, here’s the good news. I walk to work these days. Out the backyard, over the trout stream, past the ball diamonds and through the new playground to Village Hall. Only better commute I could imagine is south on Lake Shore Drive to City Hall, but Chicago is not a city-manager kinda place.

The walking work commute includes the radio strap / flashlight / rescue knife combo along with the Village Admin workbag these days, so there's a fair bit of community apparatus hanging off my shoulder. And here’s where the little path we took through Fire Prevention Week gets back to the main trail of what we carry. Walking home from some catch-up work at Village Hall the Saturday after Fire Prevention Week, a girl playing at the new playground – either first grade or kindergarten is my guess – waves and shouts “hi, Firefighter Craig!”. Not Village Administrator Malin. Firefighter Craig.

Pretty sweet deal.

So yes, we with the pockets and straps and fire engines and ambulances full of tools carry the community’s fear and trauma. But we also carry skills, resolve and faith. We also carry the community’s hope, and spirit.

Positivity is the most indispenable tool we carry.