Journey Through Fire

My Personal Full-Circle Journey Through Fire

By Greg Brewer

When I graduated high school in 1999, I knew my options were limited due to my lackluster academic performance. I knew I could work hard, having worked in construction since I was 14, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after high school.

Auburn, Alabama, where I grew up, offers students the opportunity to join the city fire department and receive financial assistance for college – a program similar to that of the U.S. military. Although a career as a first responder felt foreign to me, I went through the fire department’s version of boot camp, learning how to push past the limits of what I thought I could do. In shock that I’d made it through those first 12 weeks, I graduated and was put on shift.

The Auburn Fire program requires students to be enrolled at a two- or four-year college while working as a firefighter. I started taking classes at the local community college, not knowing what I wanted to major in or if I could be successful in school. It took years, but I eventually finished all my core classes and had gained enough confidence to transfer to Auburn University where I completed a degree in forestry.

After graduating, I left the fire department and went to work as a forester. It was 2006, and I worked for about six months in that industry, which unfortunately was becoming rocked by the economic downturn. Married with a baby on the way, I realized I needed a more stable job. I decided to return to the Auburn Fire Department as a full-time firefighter.

Back in the fire service, I went all-in. The opportunity to help my community and serve my neighbors and the families I’d grown up with gave me the sense of purpose I needed. I took any training opportunity that was available, put myself through paramedic school, and poured everything into being a first responder. I was on an urban technical rescue team, participating in extra training and signed up for extra shift work.

"I was often deployed to Washington D.C.," says Greg. "This time I took pictures!".

My identity as an individual, a citizen, and a man was wholly wrapped up in being a fireman and paramedic. I was comfortable with that. I didn’t care for the political pieces of the job and occasional frustrations, but things on the whole were going well. I loved who I got to be and what I got to do.

What I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t dealing with all the trauma I was seeing. Being a firefighter and paramedic in the town where you grew up has its own challenges. You regularly find yourself performing CPR on someone you know from church. I might be scooping up the body of a fellow high school student or pull up on a scene to help save someone I’d gone to grade school with or had invited over for Sunday dinner. And despite my best efforts, some of those people died or were dead before I had even a chance to help save them.

Granted, I was able to help a lot of folks, but those aren’t the calls I remember. I don’t remember the ones I saved as much as the ones I lost.

Worst of all was responding to a call only to be able to hold children who died in my arms. It is unspeakably horrible to have a small child stare, trembling, into your soul with fear in their eyes. I would be doing everything I knew to do and more and yet would end up seeing the fear and light fade as they passed away. I’d hear the heart monitor move from a steady beep to a solid long beep as I fought to stay clear-headed while frantically working with every drug, tool, and technique available, all while knowing that the sound signified their heart had stopped. That I had been the last person they would ever see.

Those are the images that haunt me.

MEMORY IS AN AVID, UNCEASING COLLECTOR

Oddly, I don’t remember what I had for breakfast today, but I could remember the social security numbers of those children. Years of car wrecks, train accidents, shootings, tornadoes – all the suffering, death, and trauma was piling up around me. Beyond a debrief on shift or writing up my reports, I wasn’t processing any of it. I was focused on the next call or the next shift.

My life had become 20 years’ worth of calls in a small town. There wasn’t – and isn’t – a street there where I don’t have a memory. Yet in the last years of my career as a fire medic I felt I was living in two different worlds, not belonging to either one. I’d once felt like a hero,

Deployed again! "But this time," Brewer says, "I was with my great friend, Tim. We were sent to assist at a medical shelter."

As a disaster medical-assistance team (DMAT) medic, Brewer (photo center) was often deployed to other places – in this case, to Silsbee, Tex., during Hurricane Harvey flooding. "Here we are transferring patient care to a helicopter crew," he explains.

A tradition of high spirited competition can invite disaster. "This is one of countless times the (Auburn University) Toomer's oaks were set on fire after game day and we had to put it out," Greg explains.

but the blood-and-guts world didn’t feel like victory anymore. It felt like loss.

It was a world I was growing weary of. But I couldn’t fit in the other world either – the small, safe town where most people lived buffered from daily trauma. Then, in 2019, an F5 tornado rolled through Alabama and missing my house but 23 people died just a little way down the road from me. Many more were hurt. I was one of the first on scene and the incident commander put me in charge of triage. I triaged every patient that night.

I had trained for a mass casualty incident many times locally and had been on deployments helping with other natural disasters. But that night I heard men saying they couldn’t find their toddlers as neighbors handed me their own crushed children. I had to determine who was placed in an ambulance first because we didn’t have enough of them on scene.

There’s no preparing yourself emotionally for something like this happening in your backyard. I remember feeling like my tank was full; I didn’t want to live in that world anymore. I began frantically trying to think about what other job I could do. For 20 years I had loved serving as a first responder, but I knew if I kept going, I might lose my way and never find it again.

THE HELP OF A FRIEND

Fortunately, I had a friend who knew the spot I was in. He told me about a job opening at the Alabama Forestry Association. With my degree, he said, I had a shot and should apply. I did, and for some reason they hired me! Relieved, I felt this would make everything okay.

What I didn’t realize was that as soon as I slowed down and stopped running daily 911 calls, all the memories and demons would come out to overwhelm me.

For years, my job every day had been to save lives or train someone else to save lives. In this new forestry job, the stakes were not even close to that high, which should have been the space away from trauma that I was looking for. But I struggled with purpose and relevancy. I couldn’t sleep and was experiencing internal reactions that were often out of proportion to situations.

Realizing I needed to reclaim my mental health, I started working out and listening to podcasts about others in similar struggles. I opened up to my wife and to a couple of close friends, talking about what I had seen and what was bothering me.

Now I see that this career move saved my life. I had witnessed firsthand what could happen to a person who reached “the end of their rope,” and I had reached the end of mine. After more than two years, I felt I was adjusting. Now the memories of my previous career are still there, but they don’t take up as much head space as they once did.

Many in the first responder and Veteran community can identify with my story. They live a life and give themselves to a career of service. Then they hit a place where they have to change.

Sometimes it’s by choice and other times it’s forced upon them. Coming to the end of one career and needing another path can be daunting. I remember the feeling of getting to the end of mine and not knowing where to go or what to do. “Daunting” isn’t nearly strong enough to describe it.

WHAT I SEE NOW

This is where organizations like AHERO play an extremely important role. With its partners, they offer help to military Veterans and professional first responders who struggle with transition and purpose and the impact these can have on one’s identity. Often, they are looking for a new beginning. AHERO has the resources to connect and assist service people who need help finding a path to a new career or to make a financial plan or are struggling with substance abuse.

Forestry Works, the company where I work, is a partner with AHERO. Its goal is to connect people to jobs and careers in the forest industry. In matching potential employees with companies and careers in this industry, we seek to fill the nation’s need for management of natural-resources and providing forest products.

Organizations like AHERO are on a mission to serve those who have valiantly served our nation. They partner with others to help these heroes who often feel isolated or discouraged. To hear that there’s a path forward when you feel at the end of yours is to be offered real hope. Connecting our heroes with a job that has an important mission can give them their life back or open a new chapter that they may not have believed was possible. It’s an incredibly wonderful gift to give.

Greg in his "early years" as a firefighter in Auburn. After 20 years, he’s headed into a new career in forestry. Of the town he says, “There isn’t a street there where I don’t have a memory.”