Where are you from? I was originally born right outside of Nashville, Tennessee in Davidson County, but the birth certificate says Hermitage, named after The Hermitage, or Andrew Jackson’s home. However, Nashville is where I cut my teeth.

How did you come to live in Jackson? Rani. Rani had the opportunity (a little bit enforced and a bit chosen) to come out here to run a Bed & Breakfast: she’s in the hospitality industry. I had never been further west than Denver and I had absolutely no idea what Jackson was. We drove out here in April of 2008 and, going through Riverton and coming through the flat lands, I was initially unimpressed until I came to Pinedale…when I saw the Tetons and experienced that natural astonishment that mountains will cause, I understood where the impulse came from.

How would you describe your job? I am a captain at Station 1 on A shift. In my own words, however, my job is to integrate a response that takes the best and the worst strengths of the crew into account. That’s how I would describe the job of a captain: making sure the pieces get used in the right way. By saying that, I’m not downplaying the human aspect of it, I’m not saying our guys are pieces…but that’s what my job as a captain is: to make sure the right thing is done at the right time with the right resources in the right way.

What do you do in your free time? In my non-work free time, I interact with my family as much as possible. I continue to do what scholarship I can, and that scholarship generally revolves around classic Greek and Latin. That was very much an important part of who I was; it had nothing to do with teaching and it had 100% to do with how it helped cultivate who I am. I like to read those works. So, my answer would be reading, but that sounds very mundane…before I went to graduate school, I was in the restaurant industry where I trained as a chef, and I still very much like to cook. I like to workout, like any other good firefighter, although there are probably a lot of us that don’t, but I enjoy that. My simple answer would be: workout, cook, scholarship, and think about the next tour. I know I get ribbed about that, but I do begin to work on the upcoming tour generally by day two of our days off. I enjoy the actualization of firefighting.

How long have you been a part of JH Fire/EMS? Since 2008. 

What made you want to join originally? I was looking for an outlet that wasn’t academic, or that fulfilled a more well-rounded element of my life. I think a lot of folks do it to help others, which I’m sure was in there as well, but…I can’t help it, I have to quote Homer. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles once said ‘I need to be a sayer of words and doer of deeds.’ I had heretofore before joining the fire department been an academic, but reading during that academic period, I was wanting to add doing to thinking. That was the initial impulse to join when I had the opportunity. Prior to that, it manifested as an impulse to join the military. I needed to combine action with thought, as I said. I went to discuss Officer Cadidacy School when I was 29 or 30, which was old for the military, but I went to West Point, did the whole test, and chose military intelligence. They sent me to learn Farsi…‘this guy knows Greek and Latin, he can learn Farsi.’ I didn’t make the 10% cut that they were looking for. SO. I still wanted to join, and, undaunted, I said I’m going to enlist. 97 Echo was my MOS with human intelligence gatherers, door kickers, and I continued to talk to my recruiter. I deferred deployment and did all the training at a base in Brooklyn, and then Rani got pregnant. My recruit told me, ‘Dude you’re 32, you sure you want to do this? You already have a career. With babies and pregnancy, I think maybe you should consider not enlisting.’ After that, I came out to Jackson with my family and I wanted to dedicate myself to something that wasn’t purely theoretical. Side note: I was living the aesthetic force. I clove to it very easily. 

A lot of people say ‘helping people,’ but I wanted to live something. Forceful aesthetics.  

What are your current certifications? Paramedic, Fire Officer 2, which includes all of the certs below it, tactical medical certifications (I try to keep up with the tactical world as much as possible), and I organize trainings with law enforcement here, and then there are the Hazmat certs…Hazmat technician as well as various other elements that are unimportant and a specialist certification in highway tanker response. OICS until the cows come home. National Fire Academy I’ve been to a number of times, from hazmat to command and control, those are great courses. Confined space rescue technician, ropes, whatever other captains are telling you. It’s forgotten that Hazmat is a rescue discipline, but I teach it as a rescue discipline. People get scared of it just because chemistry is intimidating.

What are your future goals in the department? Since this will make it into something and be published somewhere, and it should, I will say that I want to be able to determine the strategic direction of the department, and for me that would be further promotion into Battalion Chief, etc. An important caveat with that, at this stage and stake in this game, is that there is nothing more rewarding than operations. I would emphasize that further with my words I could, but captain is one of the most fantastic jobs in the fire department. I tell Chief Moyer this: I have one foot in the trench to how we direct this department strategically, but then I get to be with you, I get to be with the firefighters, and I get to have the dirt, the blood, and the soot, which is so important, and I don’t want to forget that. From the earlier question, I come from an academic theoretical background where we deal with big things, and I think that has helped me direct the department in what small ways I have. There are a lot of different directions we can take this department in, but operations is so alluring. 

I want to be in a command position without leaving operations.

What about your goals for the department? Oh wow…that is a big question. I want to continue to help integrate all aspects of response. I don’t want that to come across as a canned answer, we’re doing things correctly, but one thing that bothers me about how this and other departments operate is that they want to treat response as unscientific. I think a goal for the department would be to tighten up how we use data, which helps drive our response. What I would do for the department in the future is make sure we modernize how we respond. We’re a very progressive department, but I hope we begin to understand that statistics matter. Who responds, how we respond…statistics should support operations, operations should not support statistics. 

What would you say is your favorite part of the job? The most rewarding part of the job is the team and watching the team manifest into something greater than the sum of its parts.

What about the most challenging? If you turn the coin over, if watching the team blossom is so rewarding, then when it doesn’t work well, that is the most challenging aspect. It’s not a problem, and it’s not necessarily people not following the system I put in place, but there’s unknown parts of this job, just like there is for anything that deals with the human element, but we’re dealing with rapidly evolving elements. There was a military theorist called Clausewitz who wrote extensively about ‘the unknown unknown.’ Watching the team fail is never fun; the fun part is working together as a team to overcome it. 

What advice would you give new recruits? Stay ready to be humbled. I use the words humility and humbled multiple times throughout my career while talking to people because, again, everyone of us will be put on the crucible at some point, and to think you won’t is blindfolding yourself. I tell myself that often. I know I’ve seen some things, and the more you get into it, the more you feel like you haven’t been tested yet. I’ve been at the babies. Been at the fires. Been at the deaths. But still, what is the one call that’s going to test me beyond my breaking point? All I can do is bring back the knowledge I have, the training I have…but no matter what I do, I have to be humble. Never forget: be humble. You can be a fire captain god, but something’s going to hand your ass back to you some day. 

What do you wish you had known when starting? I think the job’s taught me the steps I need to know along the way. ‘Take care of yourself, be humble, take time for yourself, the family matters, it’s a marathon not a sprint’…those are all cliches, but we learn them along the way because they are important. I think one of the things you start to notice is that most people don’t know what we do…that could be what I tell my past self. Most people don’t know what we do, and that’s good to know. 

What would you say is the most valuable trait for someone to have in this line of work? Resilience. 

What do you think you bring to the department? A long-view perspective of the strategy of how the department’s going to run in five years. It takes the long view, and I appreciate wrangling with what the long view is.

Would you say that you have a mentor or someone or something that guides your moral compass? I’ve never said this phrase before, but this is what guides my moral compass: the intersection of history, philosophy, and literature, and how those three things can be actualized. That’s what I’ve just realized in this moment. There has never been one person that makes this department, it’s an amalgam. I want it to be known that it is multiple aspects of multiple people. I’m not more important to this department than you are, and I don’t mean that fatalistically, but you contribute just as much as I do and that is important to remember.

How has your family felt during your career? Do you approach any specific conversations with them about your job and being gone? Time has been good. As I told you, you grow over time, but Rani’s always been great. We’ve been married a very long time, since ‘96. She’s grown to know who I am over the years, so she was easily able to accommodate when I wanted to bring in action vs thought and the Iliad lifestyle of being a thinker and a doer. She was just used to me getting up to go, and now when I get up to go the joke is, it’s her time. She loves it. Then again, we have a 17-year-old, not a 2-year-old. We’re lucky though, we’ve always been able to do that. He’s always been easy…until he turned 16. 

Do you have a fun fact about yourself? Everybody knows I play drums, that’s an easy one. But between you and me, we judge the person we see and I am a big second wave and hardcore punk fan. I realize I don’t share that enough. Baroque classical music blows my mind everytime I listen to it. Bartoli is like the fairy queen for me…but that’s what everyone expects me to say. Emo punk? It’s great, but it’s not real.