Very interesting thread. Thanks.
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@Craig6 thank you for your candor.
My hubby was Special Forces in Vietnam. He says there’re rules for there, and rules for here. You have to know where you are and apply the right set of rules. You must not judge the actions you take in one place by the rules of the other. That will make you insane or take your soul. You must not let the rules run together. That will get you dead or in jail.
Thank you for your sacrifice.
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Call me a sociopath but I too came to grips with this long ago listening to stories from my dad’s friends and fellow classmates that were or had served in Vietnam.
One of them had been a Cpt of an infantry company who’d lost an arm, an eye, and part of a leg to a little girl that detonated an IED as she ran into his CP.
Pregnant women and little kids were favorite tools of the VC.
Later in life I saw some of the very same/similar acts being committed by boys as young as 12 in other parts of the world serving as “soldiers” and “fighters”.
The threat is the weapon and the person’s age/status is irrelevant, stop the threat and don’t think twice about it or question yourself later as long as you did what was lawful and necessary.
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For a little over 26 years I was involved in law enforcement, the fire service and EMS. I am thankful I never had to take a life. I have prepared for that day for since 1985 and still prepare for that day, just in case.
That being said, in a world where you are always responding to other peoples problems, I have seen more than I ever wanted to see and can never unsee it. I have seen brothers hanging from rafters. I have heard and felt the cracking of ribs and felt hands hit the ground doing CPR. The one that still wakes me up at night was an auto rescue on West Chester Pike in Broomall PA in 86 or 87. Car wrecked into a tree in the median. Driver was obviously dead on the scene which EMS confirmed. The car hit the tree on the passenger side. The passenger side was pushed in almost to the center and the driver was pushed over to the center of the seat against the passenger door.
Police, fire and EMS were all on scene and we cut the roof and doors off the car while we waited for the coroner. It was local policy that you did not remove the body form the vehicle unless life saving measures were required. It took the coroner about 90 minutes to get there. When the coroner arrived he assessed the scene and started moving the body with help from EMS. He then yelled to the Fire Chief, “hey Chief, we have a double header.”
It turns out that the driver had a small child with him in the car, probably sitting in the passenger seat. The collision pushed the driver on top of the child. He was not visible without moving the driver’s body first.
None of us were ever told the cause of death of the kid. It was likely trauma from the crash, but I always have wondered, as have many at that scene, if the driver was moved, could we have saved the child? That question still hits me at some of the most inopportune times. It has also made me more situationally aware of my environment and the environment around me.
So, am I prepared to take action necessary to save my life or someone else’s? Yes. How will I deal with it? I know good counselors and have a good group of people who support each other from many walks of life. Long term, I think it will still wake me up some nights.
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I operate trains for a living and have had situations where we struck vehicles and lives were lost. Though this isn’t a self defense scenario I’ve taken the lesson of I can only control my reactions. I cannot control why someone else did what they did and that is not my guilt to bear. I sympathize with those left behind to grieve.
It gives me fuel to train and study harder, being as prepared as I can for making these decisions. These are things I can and should control.
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For me it’s not practical to train as much as I’d like. So I’ve found things that can correlate to training and maximize those opportunities.
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@Scoutbob I’m a Jocko Willink fan - his books mostly. I’ll have to look for his podcast.
It is a tough topic.
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Offical company policy is no firearms on the property ( some parking lots are exempt based on local state laws). I’ll leave it up to bad guys to figure out how tightly that policy is followed/enforced.
Not really practical to rob a train these days. I do feel it’s a very soft target but that could be an entire different thread.
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Zee, what an awesome reply/ answer! This is exactly what I told young officers who worked with me in the prison system. It wasn’t necessarily life and death but the fact that the environment was a different world. To survive you must separate your normal home life/ world from that of prison life, which is definitely not normal. When I went to work I prepared for Mars and when leaving I prepared for Earth? Sounds funny I know but it’s helpful in separating what we do from WHO we are.
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that’s right I think. two worlds, sharing very little in the way of rules.
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Zee, not so much different rules as a difference of behaviour. Rules of society need to be followed however proper behavior is not something the criminal element cares to follow.
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