Dedicated to the first responders

To the people who go when the call comes.

Fire, ambulance, paramedic, search and rescue. The job is to arrive at the worst moment of somebody else’s life and be useful in it — often a stranger’s, several times in a shift — and then to drive back, write it up, and go home and eat dinner.

Plenty of people here wore one uniform and then another. Plenty never wore a military one at all. Neither counts for anything on this page. What is shared is the callout, the shift, and the thing at three in the morning that you have never quite put down.

Police have their own page — not because they are not first responders, but because the job is different enough to be worth its own room.