Editor’s Note: Police1 recently launched a new series, “First Person,” where members candidly share their own unique cop’s-eye-view of the world, from insights into issues confronting cops today to observations and advice on living life behind the thin blue line. This week’s feature, written by Duane Wolfe of the Parkers Prarie (Minn.) Police Department, reminds us that bravery is not the absence of fear but the ability—and the willingness—to take action despite fear. Do you want to share your own “First Person” perspective with other P1 Members? Email us.
By Duane Wolfe
Parkers Prairie (Minn.) Police Department
A long time ago when the Earth was flat, Wooly Mammoths roamed the tundra, and cops carried revolvers, I decided I wanted to be a police officer. So I went to college to work on my degree, part of the requirements for which was that I had to do an internship with a police department. I’d get a uniform and ride around in a squad car for eight weeks.
The cops I rode with were all strong, tough, and fearless. I wanted to be like them. I wasn’t yet...and I knew it. I wasn’t strong or tough or fearless.
We responded to an accident involving a drunk driver who had rolled his car, been ejected through the front windshield, and managed to survive. I remember it was one of those nights you can see your breath but it wasn’t cold. As the driver lay in the ditch each one of the cuts on his body had a small column of steam rising from it and the headlights and squad lights seemed to make them dance.
As they worked on the semi-conscious driver he became combative. Being worthless for anything else I was assigned to help hold him down so they could finish working on him prior to transport. I still remember the mixed smells of dew, blood, soil, booze, and radiator fluid. The more firmly we tried to hold him down the worse he fought. He was a slippery, bloody mess, but eventually he was back-boarded and transported.
This was the early 80s, so HIV was something that only occurred far away and would never touch us. That is to say, I had no gloves. When we cleared the scene I had to be careful how I held my hands to avoid getting blood on my light blue shirt. I remember looking down and seeing my arms covered, almost up to my elbows, in someone else’s blood. I can still remember what it felt like having to force my fingers apart to keep them from sticking together, as the blood started to dry. I can still remember the smell.
We had been headed to dinner when the call came in, so when we were done we headed to a local restaurant. We went into the bathroom and washed our hands. As we sat at the booth all eyes were on me since this had been my first “real” call.
Each of the officers assured me, “You’ll get used to it, kid.”
They started to tell stories about other, even bloodier accidents and I wondered if I had what it took, because out there in the dark I was uncertain, unsure, and scared. Scared I would do something wrong, scared I would be asked to do something I couldn’t, and just plain scared.
When the waitress arrived and took our orders I told her I wanted a hamburger, paused and added, “rare” just to let them know that I wasn’t bothered by the accident. They all smiled and laughed and I felt like I had taken my first steps towards being strong, tough, and fearless. I ate the hamburger quickly even though I wasn’t hungry just to show them that I wasn’t bothered by what I had seen and what I had done.
But that night, I didn’t sleep. I kept playing the call over and over in my head. It bothered me. It bothered me that I wasn’t tough like them and that this call kept me awake. It bothered me that I didn’t feel as confident as the officers on the scene appeared to be. It bothered me that the feel of someone else’s blood drying on me bothered me. It hadn’t seemed to bother the other officers. The fact that it bothered me bothered me. But their words came back, “You’ll get used to it, kid.”
Fast forward a few years. I pinned on a badge, uniform, and gun. The guys I worked with all seemed strong, tough, and fearless. Some of them were even younger than me. I hadn’t been on long when one night I got a call of a motorcycle/car accident. It was out in the county but I was closest so I shot out there – red lights and siren.
It had been shift change at the local factory as a thousand people got off work and headed home. Someone got impatient and decided that the 200 cars on the highway in front of them were driving too slow and decided to pass. Apparently they didn’t notice the motorcycle coming their way.
Yamaha versus Cadillac is never an even fight.
The driver of the Cadillac was OK. I placed her in my squad car and went looking for the driver of the motorcycle. He was lying in the ditch. I grabbed the first aid kit and went to him. HIV was still only in the big cities not in rural northern Minnesota. Meaning, I was ungloved.
It was another one of those nights when you can see your breath. He had a pulse and I could see the steam rising as he breathed slowly. I flashed back to the night of the first accident, only this time I was all alone. I started to do an assessment, checking for obvious injuries, his head and neck where ok, each arm ok, chest and spine ok, pelvis ok, left leg, smack. When I got below the knee my hands came together in a mess of bloody and blue jeans. Up to this point I had been fairly strong, tough and fearless, after all I had been a cop for seven months.
My mind started to race. I had received First Aid training. I had the first aid kit. Despite my best efforts I couldn’t find anything in there for a severed limb. I had a C-collar for an injured neck. I had air splints for broken bones. I had a mask for CPR. Where was the severed limb kit?
Someone in the crowd yelled, “Oh, my God his leg is cut off! He needs a tourniquet!” Yeah, he needs a tourniquet. I went up to the car and looked for something to make a tourniquet out of. The tire iron and my inner duty belt would do the job. I advised dispatch of the situation and requested that they please tell the ambulance to get here NOW!.
As I readied the tourniquet I remembered that I had to write down the time it was applied. I looked at my watch and it was 0037. I remember the time to this day. I readied the tourniquet. I heard a voice behind me quietly say, “He doesn’t need a tourniquet”. I turned and a deputy was standing over my shoulder like a guardian angel. I never heard his siren or his approach. I said, “You’re an EMT. You take him”. I was only a First Responder and he was more experienced. He had been on for a whole year.
The ambulance arrived and took over. They told us to try and find the missing appendage in case it could be reattached. The deputy and I went looking. We looked at the impact site and the distance and direction the motorcyclist had been thrown and tried to figure the flight trajectory of a severed leg.
We searched one side of the road with our flashlights and found his boot and then, on the off chance that the impact had sent the limb in the opposite direction, the other side of the road. A group of men asked us what we were looking for and we told them. They said they would help look. The ambulance crew advised us they were close to leaving and that the limb had to be found.
Due to the heavy traffic there were plenty of bystanders who could make a search line. We had just started to gather the crowd together to direct them in the search when we heard a loud, high pitched voice under obvious stress yell,” Officer, Officer!” We turned and looked and our volunteers standing in a small circle, faces an ashen gray, pointing at the ground.
We ran over and there lay the limb still wearing a white sweat sock with three red stripes. My first thought was-“Man those Hollywood horror movies do a good job it looks exactly the same” and the next was, “Whose gonna pick it up?” Apparently the thought crossed the deputy’s mind at the same time. We looked at each other. Thinking quickly (for once) I said, “We’re in the county, it’s yours”. Undeniable jurisdiction having been determined he picked it up by the socked ankle and we jogged across the field together to the waiting ambulance in full view of the bystanders. I heard later that some people in the crowd had vomited at the sight.
As we continued with the accident investigation I had to stop several times and scrape off something that was stuck to the bottom of my boots. One looked a lot like part of a knee cap.
When I got home I couldn’t sleep. I knew I was full of adrenaline. I was also full of doubt. I anguished over why I hadn’t been able to make a simple decision like the deputy had. Why had I frozen? Was I incompetent? When I talked to the deputy he said, “You’ll get used to it.” At least he didn’t call me kid, I was older than him.
When I told the story of the accident later I would refer to it as , “The Night of the Three Legged Race”. Gotta be tough. Gotta be strong. Gotta be fearless. That’s when I became aware of the wall that I was building. Slowly but surely, brick by brick, I was walling myself off from the outside world. The wall was my defense and my prison because inside that wall was what I didn’t want anyone to see-my fear. As the wall got higher we got used to living together. Sometimes he stalked me, sometimes I stalked him but eventually we got comfortable with each other. Behind that wall I could examine my fears and shed my tears. I once read that “Fear is caused by what you know about yourself inside.” Man, was that ever true.
As time passed and the wall got higher and I got comfortable with my fears I found I could talk about them with those I trusted, a little at first to test the waters. Once that bond was established I could talk about some, but not all them and that helped. I found that my fellow officers had the same feelings that I had and that I wasn’t alone. If I reached out someone would be there but I had to pick carefully because some still chose to hide behind their wall.
But it wasn’t just with other cops. I had been lucky I had a smart wife and she made sure there was always a door through that wall for her. I was lucky that she spent her days working with Emotionally/Behaviorally Disturbed children because sometimes she had to deal with an Emotionally Behaviorally Disturbed husband.
Even with this breakthrough there were still problems. I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on inside me. So all I could do was react and deal with it the best I could. I knew that after a stressful incident I needed to exercise. What I didn’t know is the chemicals in my body would make me depressed and not want to exercise. So the stress would only build until the chemicals burned off. I remember one day driving down the road off duty and having to pull to the side of the road quickly so I could puke. The fruit salad I had just eaten made a lovely and brightly colored arch as I projectile vomited onto the sidewalk. Good times.
Another time I had responded to a barricaded subject with a gun as part of the SRT team. The suspect was holed up in a two story playhouse. We took up a position within 30 yards in a dense swamp. Each time he would come out of the house and into view I would put the scope crosshairs on his head. This went on for several hours. He didn’t know it but I was getting to know him very well through that scope. I got so I could predict which way he would move, when he would turn and go back into the house. I would read the expression on his face and I was close enough to hear him when he talked to himself. At the same time if he threatened me or my fellow officers I was going to kill him.
He finally surrendered “without incident”. I was jacked up on adrenaline but once again I didn’t know about the crash to come. My wife and I went and visited friends. I sat in a chair barely speaking as I ran the call through my head over and over again. I was worried. I was scared. My wife finally came over and told me we were leaving. On the way home she told me, in not very gentle terms, that I had been rude and impolite. I called back later and apologized to my friends for my behavior. He was a former cop so he understood.
The fear in my mind this time was that I had lost it, gone round the bend, I was psycho. I had spent several hours with the crosshairs on that guys head, ready to shoot him and I hadn’t had a moment of doubt or reservation. That scared me. There was something wrong with me. I called my instructor from SWAT school and I told him what had happened. He told me that I had reached a place in my training and confidence level that allowed me to block out those thoughts and focus on the mission. He said that is where I wanted be, where I needed to be to do that job. So I wasn’t crazy, just ready.
I count myself blessed for the officers in my career who have given me the chance to talk about what was on my mind. In turn I have always tried to be there for those around me who needed someone. After a few years on the street I had an opportunity to go to work full time as a police trainer at a college. I still work part time as a police officer and I still live with my fears.
One of the things that I promised I would do when I became a trainer was to tell my students about the fear and stress of the job and how to deal with it. I got the state P.O.S.T. Board to include an understanding of the effects of stress into the pre-service learning objectives. As a result I’ve done a lot of research in the area and found a lot of good resources.
From reading and hearing Dr. Alexis Artwohl author of Surviving Deadly Force Encounters I learned what fear would do to me, what I could do to deal with it and what I could do to reduce my fears.
From Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing and On Combat I learned about the Warrior Mindset, more about stress and how to handle it.
Dr. Bruce Siddles book, Sharpening the Warriors Edge explains how the brain and body react under stress, how it affects performance and how to improve that performance.
I had an opportunity to hear Dr. Kevin Gilmartin speak on Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement. After all my experiences and research I figured I had it all figured out but went to listen to him anyway. I was wrong. He gave me an understanding of what it was like for my wife to live with me through all this. When I got home that night I apologized to my wife for all I had put her through for all those years. With tears in my eyes I thanked her for staying with me in spite of it all. She just laughed and said that she stuck around because she understood what I had been going through having dealt with Emotionally Behaviorally Disturbed kids for 15 years. Oh, yeah and that she loved me. Some cops aren’t that lucky and we’ve been together for 20 years.
The title of the article is “The F-Word” and like the other f-word fear can be a dirty word. A word not used in certain company, a word thrown about lightly by those with the least knowledge of it. A word wrapped in mystery to be snickered at and made fun of by those who have little knowledge of it, a word spoken in whispers by the immature and uninitiated.
I can write about my tears because I learned from Bobby Smith, a trooper blinded by gunfire that, “Tears are a sign of strength, not weakness.” I can write about my fears because I was told by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.”
I’ve had great teachers in my life some direct and some indirect. Some were great examples of what I wanted to be. Some were great examples of what I didn’t want to be. I’ve learned a lot. I learned that all cops are strong-some physically, some mentally, some morally, some ethically, most are a combination.
I’ve learned that the truly tough among us have an infinite capacity for tenderness. Most importantly, I learned that there are no fearless cops. To quote Eddie Rickenbacker, famed WWI flying ace, “Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared.” Sun Tzu said, “Courage and fear are the same, it is a matter of direction and momentum.”
So do me a favor. Never just tell a rookie they’ll, “get used to it.” Don’t be afraid to use the f-word. Tell them. Tell them it’s OK to be afraid. Tell them it’s their responsibility to harness that fear.
Tell them.
