War Stories

“Hey, hey, hey if you’re going to tell my war stories then get it right.” I said as I entered the conference room. It never fails when you get a room full of firefighters the stories start. Now first responders do not have the same sense of humor or lack the same filters than normal folk use when having a conversation. The term for it is Black Humor and outsiders would miss much of the humor of it. It is, however a very necessary thing. It is a coping mechanism. First Responders have to deal with situations that would level most people. Imagine not only having to deal with a grievous injury to a child but having to stay calm and dispassionate and still do your job. Not easy on a caring person. I don’t think that people migrate to the fire service because they are uncaring and naturally dispassionate. I think it is quite the opposite. I think that men and women migrate to being first responders because they care. We call them war stories. War stories are something that firefighters know well. They are a way of sharing an experience with others. Others who know what you are dealing with. Others who know what it means to be woken out f a sound sleep at three in the morning. At three in the morning on a night that is thirty below and to be plunged into a life and death situation before you are even fully awake. I have never been to war. But I have an appreciation, not of what it is like, but I have a greater than normal gratitude for what they have been through. I hope that they can forgive our appropriation of the name.
As I made the exclamation Victor spun on his heel and faced the doorway. “How the hell are ya!” He said extending a hand the size of a baseball mitt. It was a hand I knew well. Vic and I go way back. Nearly twenty years ago he brought the freight to the tiny store I ran in Ft. Resolution. He would make the five hour return trip from Hay River our nearest large center. He was a big guy with a great sense of humor and a willingness to try anything that made him invaluable to his employer. It also made him invaluable as a volunteer firefighter. Vic had joined the HRFD long before he was old enough to be a fire fighter. He hauled hose and filled air bottles and did all the inglorious jobs that are so forgotten by the public who see people showing up on a shiny truck and forget about the hours it took to polish that truck. They never see the guys scrubbing filthy hose or pouring over text books and spending weekends practicing in layers of sweaty bunker gear and clammy rubber face masks. Vic was a yeoman. He was the real deal. We knew each other quite a while before we found out that the other was a firefighter.
It happened just after the events that Vic was relating to a room full of territorial firefighters in Yellowknife for a course. Now I can’t blame someone for telling this story, even if it was rightly mine to tell. It was a great story. It wasn’t everyday that a fire hall burns to the ground. That’s right; I have a hard time believing it too and I was there. I imagine Vic had told the story before, he was a good storyteller. I have no doubt that he has told the story many times since. Vic put an arm around me and introduced me to the Fire Service members in the group. Some were in uniform, some, like me were in plain clothes. I shook hands all round. It was in just such a situation that we both found out the other was a Firefighter, over a handshake. With only a slight prompting from Vic I began to tell the story.
It had begun; as so many Firefighting stories do at three in the morning. Three o’clock of a frosty Easter Sunday morning. I had been deeply asleep when the wail of the fire siren sent me scrambling. This was not supposed to happen. The fire siren, an air raid style siren mounted on top of the fire hall was activated inside the fire hall. We were supposed to activate it after we arrived. What was supposed to happen first was that the fire phone was supposed to ring. The fire phone was a special modification to your normal phone. It was one long ring that rang until you picked it up. We were supposed to be able to activate the alarm from our home phone but that feature never really worked. It had to be pushed manually. At three a.m. there was no time to figure it out. I sprang from my bed and hurried down the hall toward the back door.
Standing on my back landing was the RCMP Corporal and the Nurse. I knew one thing for sure, this wasn’t a drill! I flung open the hall door to grab my parka. It had fallen down the basement stairs. There wasn’t time to get it now. I pulled on my boots as I opened the door. Since the nurse was there only one thing occurred to me, that someone was hurt. What greeted my ears was almost as hard to comprehend. “It’s the fire hall!” the Corporal said. If it wasn’t 3 a.m. I would have thought he was joking. As we dashed to the RCMP Suburban I looked toward the fire hall, I could not see any smoke. “I had a look, I don’t think it is too bad,” The Corporal said as we made our way to the hall. When I reached the door I put the back of my hand against it the way I was trained. Warm but not hot; I thought as I planned what to do next. No other firefighters had reached the scene yet. I crouched and opened the door. A wave of heat and smoke belched past my face. I stuck my head into the hall. Blinding smoke made my eyes water. I surveyed the scene and closed the door. Everything I could see was ablaze. Smoke was layered down nearly to the floor. The heat was terrific. The Corporal stood over my shoulder. I looked back “What is your definition of a bad fire?” I asked sarcastically.
A million things were going through my mind but one thing was apparent. I needed to get the truck out of there. If I did I could fight this fire. If not; the hall, the truck and all our gear was toast. Literally! I looked into the Corporal’s eyes. “I am going in. I gotta get that truck out,” I said in as calm and steady a voice as I could manage. “I’ve got to set up a perimeter.” He said. A towns’ person had stopped. I looked him in the eye. “I am going in there. Do NOT let this door close, you hear me? If it closes I am dead.” I tried not to let my voice betray my fear. He told me he would not let me down. I crawled in on all fours. The smoke was choking and the heat was reminding me of my bare arms and face. I crawled to the center of the hall. I knew without my personal protective equipment or PPE as we call it; I couldn’t stay ion here long. I felt naked. Normally when we crawl into a burning building we have layers of special fabric, we have masks and air packs and helmets and gloves. In my track pants and T-shirt I felt very exposed. I turned to the rack where I knew all that good stuff was hanging. It was all in flames. The gear was alight and the boots were dripping flaming drops of molten rubber on the floor. No help there I thought. I turned back to the task at hand. The tears were running down my face from the acrid smoke. As my eyes passed where the open door should have been I could see nothing. “Keep that damn door open!” I yelled. “It is open, Greg!” came the timid reply. Crap, I thought. I am in big trouble.
I made it to the pillar that separated the two bays of the hall. I stood up and took the chain that opened the door in my hands. It was oddly sticky as though coated in glue. Perhaps some sticky byproduct of the fire I thought as I raised the door. A welcome blast of icy minus thirty air hit me as the door came grudgingly up. I got the door to shoulder height. But it would go no further. I put my shoulder under it and heaved. No dice. I was out of air and my lungs were burning. My eyes were useless. I could see nothing. Nothing at all.
I knew I had to get out of there. Having gotten the chain out of the holder I knew I could close the door and still open it from outside. I reluctantly let the door close and grabbed my breath. I reached down and took the door in my hands again and lifted it to the shoulders. Still it would not open. I could see very little due to the smoke. It was then that things started moving in slow motion, the way they do in those Lethal Weapon movies. In slow motion I saw the Corporal running towards me. He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled. As we were rolling on the icy surface of the parking lot I saw sheets of flame come down the inside of the garage door. As the door dropped the flame reached the ground and shot out towards us. The all hell broke loose. I had seen something parked in the usually empty bay of the fire hall. In the smoke and flame, even though I had passed within six feet of it I could not tell what it was. I had assumed it was the Hamlet truck, a five ton flatbed. It was in fact the Zamboni from the arena a block away. An ice cleaner. It was a tractor that towed a box and cleaned the ice. As the door closed I could see, through the three large windowed panes the tractor shot into the air. At the same instant the door started to buckle and the panels of the door began to idly towards us through the air. The Corporal and I scrambled on the ice, slippery and wet from the heat a huge mushroom cloud followed us down the driveway. Pieces of door flew past us through the air like tinfoil, twisting as they went. As the door vaporized the flames shot skywards thirty feet over the roof of the fire hall. We landed in a heap on the street. As we looked back it was obvious that there was no way to save anything. I looked at the Corporal, “We have to get the water trucks.” I yelled. “We have to save the surrounding buildings.”
Water is delivered in small northern towns. The water truck acted as back up to the fire truck. They have nozzles too. We found the water truck contractor awake and already in action. I positioned the trucks so as to protect the exposures. The rest of the firefighters were arriving and soon we had the situation under control. The Corporal showed up with an RCMP parka which he draped over my shoulders. I had forgotten how cold it was. “I’ll take you to the nursing station” he said. I was puzzled. What for? I asked dumbly. “Look at your hands.” He said nodding at them. I looked down. My hands were covered in black soot and angry red blisters were visible on all surfaces of the palms. They did not hurt at all. I tried to make a fist. No dice. The fire chief nodded and told me to go. I sat in the nursing station while a friend who was a male nurse worked on my hands. “I can’t get the black off. It’ll tear the blisters and it will get infected.” I looked at my arms. The palms of both hands were burned. Every joint was blistered on every finger and large patches of both forearms were one giant blister, from wrist to elbow. The areas that were not blistered were red. “Contact burns to the palms. Radiation burns to the forearms he said writing notes on my chart. “You must have grabbed something hot!” He added. “The chains, I guess.” I said. “No wonder they were sticky. They were red hot.” It was beginning to make sense now. “When the adrenalin wears off those are going to hurt. I am going to give you something.”
I left the Nursing station and walked back to the scene. “Get some sleep.” the Chief said “It’s going to be a long day.” Things had been moving way too fast. In my living room they were moving way too slow. I began to pace as the adrenalin indeed wore off. I suddenly felt intensely tired and I hurt so much. I did the only thing I could think of to do. I called my Mom. It made me feel better to talk to her.
Later that day we sat around the RCMP detachment debriefing. It was here that I got brought up to speed on what had happened. It is funny how little you know even when you are in the middle of something. The one thing that puzzled me the most was what had started a fire in the building that was essentially a big concrete slab. It seems that two young men had been siphoning gas out of the fire truck. They had two full five gallon cans of gas siphoned when one of them knocked one can over. They were; of course smoking. The flames shot in every direction at once. One of the guys had beaten the flames with his leather jacket, burning it badly. This is how they got caught. Meanwhile at three a.m. Easter Sunday morning the Nurse’s boyfriend was upstairs in the bathroom with a girlfriend who was not the nurse. They kept quiet until the guys who set the fire left and then they went and got the nurse and the nurse the Mounties and so on.
The Fire Marshall confirmed all this when we sifted through the wreckage later that day. I felt a little better. The fire had started under the fire truck and there was never any chance of my getting the truck out of there. I needn’t feel guilty. Later in the week the Hay River Fire Department agreed to lend us an old truck. They were parked in the parking lot of the Hamlet Office when I arrived. There was Vic walking towards me in a HRFD jacket his hand outstretched. I slid my bandaged mitts out of my sleeves and held them up like he was holding a shotgun. He laughed and gave me a chuck on the shoulder. The boys of the HRFD could not help but give us a ribbing. There were more than a few snide comments. The Fire Marshall, who knew what I had been through smiled but notably did not laugh. The Hay River Firefighters walked us through the operation of the old truck. My Chief walked up to me as I was talking to Vic afterwards. “Treat him with respect Vic he’s my new Deputy.” Vic laughed. “Try not to burn our truck down O.K.?” He said and automatically he extended his hand to me to say goodbye. Once again I slid my bandaged hands out and held them up. Vic instantly snapped to attention clicking his heels and raising his flattened hand to his cap brim. I raised a bandaged hand to my brow. Our eyes met and there was more in that moment than a conversation of an hour could convey. An understanding of one firefighter to another. Of one human being who knows what happens when you go into a burning building. Of someone who knows that there are no such things as heroes. No heroes who are invincible and brave beyond belief. Just mortals, doing what they know is right. Just neighbors who are doing the only thing they can do. The best that they can.