Illumination Rumination

If I Wasn’t a Writer — I Would Be a Fighter Pilot

Or maybe a firefighter. Oh wait, I did that already

This article is in response to a writing challenge posed by Sherry McGuinn answering the question — “What would you be if you weren’t a writer?”

This challenge was made within the ILLUMINATION publication, but I am choosing to pull in some of those outside the publication as an extension of Sherry’s challenge. So, if you have no idea why you were tagged in this, or what in the world is going on, that is why.

Without further ado, if I wasn’t a writer, I would be a fighter pilot. But before we get into that story, I need to lead with this one:

Before I was a writer, I was a firefighter.

I spent 26 years in the fire service, two as volunteer then 24 professional full-time years. I worked in a variety of roles including firefighter, fire engine driver, paramedic, fire engine captain, division chief in charge of EMS, assistant chief over a variety of divisions and also interim fire chief. The big boss. Which, in a city fire department is really just a middle manager in the city services, but the title is cool: THE Fire Chief.

I have run into burning buildings many times. Kicked in doors, cut up roofs and walls of buildings with chain saws to ventilate them, bashed in windows, driven really fast with the lights and sirens on, blown the air horn therapeutically at drivers that wouldn’t move over, brought people back to life, watched helplessly while people died in spite of our best efforts, administered Narcan way before anyone even knew what Narcan was, paralyzed people and put a tube in to assist in breathing, stuck needles directly into peoples’ hearts, and lain awake at night at home second-guessing whether there was anything I could have done better to make a difference.

I have been on television and in the newspaper many times. Here we are cutting up some poor family’s very fancy roof after the husband caught it on fire using a propane torch to loosen up old paint under the eaves. We chased the fire around for hours as it smoldered its way through the densely layered cedar shake roof. I am in the red helmet in the ladder truck bucket.

Many people would consider that to be an amazing and fascinating career, and it was. But, my one regret in my life is that I didn’t choose to be a pilot when I went into the military in 1986.

Instead I became a Russian Language Interrogator. A hot commodity in the Cold War. My recruiter talked me into going to language school by saying that is what he was pushing his kid to do when they graduated high school. Made sense. I didn’t have a better plan (the fighter pilot thing perhaps more of a Top Gun-fueled hazy fantasy at that point), so I said okay.

Learning Russian was great (I hardly speak a lick now, but I was pretty decent in ’87). Interrogator school was fascinating, and I nearly went back as an instructor in 1991 as many of the faculty had been deployed in the first Gulf War.

But that fell through and I ended up returning home to an Army Reserve unit at Ft. Lewis, WA. I felt my buyer’s remorse. By then (20/20 hindsight) I knew that I should have held out to be a fighter pilot rather than just enlisting and taking the recruiter’s word. Now, without any college under my belt to even make the officer rank needed to be a pilot in most services I had to find a work-around.

In the Army, helicopters are often piloted by Warrant Officers; a strange hybrid of enlisted and officer rolled into one. No college necessary. I was making some headway at putting together a compelling enrollment package to apply for warrant officer and make a bid for rotary wing pilot school.

However, as it so often does, real life began encroaching mightily on my dreams. Namely a new house purchase and a biological clock urging us to have kids put my need for a very steady (and more than the military pays) paycheck.

I started a job as a commercial electrician apprentice that would have unexpected demands for my time on weekends if there was a push to get a project done. That conflicted with the Army Reserve, and I reluctantly stepped away from that; my hopes and plans to become an Apache pilot permanently suspended.

We bought our first house in Marysville, WA right down the street from the fire station. One day they hung out a sign that said, “Volunteer Firefighters Needed!”

The rest is now history.

So, there you go, Sherry! And also P.G. Barnett, Chris Hedges 🦄, Charles Roast, Rasheed Hooda, Stephen Dalton, Jezebel, Gurpreet Dhariwal who Sherry called out with me to respond.

I see that Joe Luca and Kevin Buddaeus have both written to this prompt as well. There may be others, but I don’t think I have seen them yet. I would love to though, so please tag me in any “If I wasn’t a writer” responses.

I am also going to link in Julia E Hubbel, Trista Ainsworth, Terry Mansfield, Aurora Eliam, CMP, Michele Thill, KeepingItRealWithAnnick, Terri DelCampo-Nelson, Corrine Roberts, Tree Langdon, René Junge, Paul Myers MBA, Tim Maudlin, Desiree Driesenaar, Erin King, Dipti Pande, and Robert Nelson purely because they had the good fortune of being on the ILLUMINATION front page at the time of my typing.

My apologies if you have written one already and I missed it. I am trying to keep up with my reading, but with over 200 writers submitting I am having a hard time catching everything.

For that reason, when you do write yours, tag me in it and I will definitely read!

As mentioned above, I am passing this challenge on to some writers that don’t necessarily write on ILLUMINATION. My reasoning is two-fold. One to broaden our networks and horizons and see / read other writers that we might not otherwise. And two, reciprocally, to introduce some people to the publication if they haven’t been exposed before.

So, Dawn Bevier, Zita Fontaine, Andrea Macaluso, Kristi Keller, Jason Weiland, Darrin Atkins, Jyssica Schwartz, Luis Godinho, Chaz Hutton, Jason Byrne, Roz Warren, Sean Kernan, Jessica Lynn and Megan Holstein— If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing?

This isn’t an arbitrary net. I follow each of these writers and have read many hours of their work. Now I want to hear what they would do if not writing. I hope they will oblige!

Those of you are not writers on ILLUMINATION and would like to be added, if only for the sake of posting this response there, private message me here and I will get you added.

If you liked this article, you may also like:

Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.