Volunteers under Fire

“We love every second of it, even when it’s tough,” Sam said when I got him on the phone recently, after he finished work and was heading home to take care of his two-year-old son. “If you didn’t do it or if there wasn’t enough volunteers, the community would be at a loss… The town can’t afford to have a 15-man full-time firefighting unit.”

The fire service Sam works with provides a hotline for when something graphic and traumatizing happens on the job, and Sam has received peer-to-peer training to recognize PTSD among his colleagues. He also has his wife, whom he calls his “rock,” and his friends and family. “They helped me get through [it]. That’s my way of dealing with things. But other people don’t have friends. They just shut down and don’t want to talk about it,” he said, wondering aloud about his 24/7 on-call side gig: “How do you balance the impact of the job of being a volunteer firefighter and also having to do your actual job?”
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