The Tribe That Runs Toward the Wreckage

As I sat down to read board papers on Saturday night, I had a quick scan of the news headlines and the first article I came to was about a young police officer who was critically injured in the line of duty and was, as I read, on a ventilator in Wellington Hospital. He’d been out doing something as routine as it gets, deploying road spikes to stop a fleeing driver, when he was hit. Two teenagers have since been arrested. His colleagues describe him as a “fantastic young man” and a “good bloke.” I don’t know him. I never will, probably. But I sat there for a good few minutes with my board papers untouched, just thinking about him, and about his family, and about the crew he works alongside who are, right now, going through something that most New Zealanders will thankfully never have to understand.

Among those not directly connected with emergency services, there’s a lack of understanding of just how much situations like this cut deep. It isn’t an abstraction. It isn’t a headline you scroll past on the way to the sports results. For those of us who wear a uniform, or who used to, it’s personal in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who has never sat in a briefing room and watched a room full of grown adults go quiet.

I am a firefighter with close to thirty years’ service, and I can distinctly remember every single time in that thirty years, and luckily our record here in New Zealand means that there are not many times, that a fellow firefighter was killed in the line of duty. Muriwai, Tamahere, Foxton, Morrinsville: just a small sample of the places that conjure up vivid memories for every firefighter, and every emergency service worker, in New Zealand. You don’t forget where you were when you heard. You don’t forget the silence that follows. And you don’t forget how, for weeks afterwards, everyone in the job carries a little more caution, and a little more grief, into every job they turn up to.

Here’s the thing the general public rarely has to reckon with: they have the enormous luxury of not seeing the things we see. Most people go through life without ever cutting a roof off a car to reach a family who didn’t make it, without standing in a house that’s still smouldering knowing you were too late, without turning up to a job you can never quite explain at the dinner table because there isn’t a version of it fit for polite company. That’s not a criticism of the public. It’s simply the deal. We sign up so that they don’t have to see it. But it does mean there’s a gap in understanding that’s almost impossible to close from the outside.

What people outside the job also don’t see is the accumulation. It’s not just the line-of-duty deaths, though they certainly leave their mark. It’s the everyday horror that comes with the territory, call after call, year after year. Every firefighter, every police officer, every paramedic has a handful of scenes burned into them that they will carry, quietly, for the rest of their lives. You learn to function around them. You don’t really get over them.

And here’s the thing the outside world rarely understands: it’s precisely because of that shared horror that the bonds inside these jobs run so deep. When you’ve stood in the wreckage with someone at 3am, in the rain, doing something no person should really have to do, you come out the other side connected to them in a way that’s hard to replicate anywhere else in life. We talk about it as a brotherhood and sisterhood because that’s genuinely what it is. It’s forged in call-outs nobody wants to remember, held together by the crew standing next to you when it happened, and by an unspoken understanding that they’d do the same for you without a second’s hesitation. That bond doesn’t care what agency’s crest is on your uniform: fire, ambulance, police. When it’s bad enough, we’re all the same tribe.

It’s a strange kind of family. Nobody chooses their crewmates the way they’d choose a friend. You get rostered on with people, thrown into the worst nights of other people’s lives together, and somehow that produces a loyalty that outlasts postings, promotions, even retirement. We forge a bond with people we might not otherwise do so, because we shared something on a handful of bad nights that nobody else in our lives can fully understand.

That’s the part I keep coming back to tonight, not the politics of it, not the arguments people want to have online, just the simple fact that somewhere in Wellington there’s a crew of police officers sitting with each other right now, leaning on exactly that bond, because it’s the only thing that makes sense of a night like this.

So today, instead of the usual rant about business or technology or whatever else normally occupies this space, I just wanted to put something on the record: to the officer fighting for his life, and to his crewmates who are almost certainly sitting in a station somewhere right now not quite able to process it, we see you, and we know exactly what you’re carrying this week, because we’ve carried versions of it ourselves. That’s what this brotherhood and sisterhood is for. Kia kaha.