I Am A Search and Rescue Officer for the U.S. Forest Service

Third Entry

Well, once again, you guys have blown me away with your staggering amount of responses to my stories! There's no way I can respond to each of you individually, so I'm just going to address some common things again, and then move on to the stories. I'm going to write as many as I can think of, in addition to my friend's stories, and I will probably not update again until I get a chance to answer some questions that I myself have for my superiors.

Alright, so the common questions I found you all had:

I am not comfortable talking about where exactly I work, unfortunately. In all reality some of the things I've mentioned here could get me in a lot of trouble or fired, so it's best if I just don't discuss too much. I will say that I'm in the United States, and in an area that is comprised of a great deal of wilderness. We're talking hundreds of miles of thick forest, with a mountain range and a few lakes.

There is still a great amount of interest in the stairs, and luckily for you guys my friend has a story that I think you'll all be very interested in. I'll go into that more at the end of this update. As for whether or not I have ever thought of asking my superiors about them, I have, but again, I don't want to risk my job. However, one of my former superiors no longer works as an SAR officer, and it's possible that he may be willing to talk to me about it. I'll be speaking to him later in the week, and I will let you all know what comes of that.

As far as advice on becoming an SAR officer goes, I think the best advice I can give is to contact your local Forest Service office and see if they offer and training courses, or what the qualifications are. I've been doing this for years, and I started out as a volunteer helping on SAR operations. It's a great job, despite the occasional tragic situations, and I wouldn't want to do anything else.

Alright, let's move on to the stories:

The first happened on a case that I went out on right after I got out of training, and was still pretty new to everything. Before I took this job, I was a volunteer, so I had a basic idea of what to expect, but on those calls you're mostly dealing with finding lost people after vets have found signs of them. As an SAR officer, you go out for all kinds of cases, from animal bites to heart attacks. This case got called in early in the morning, from a young couple who were up on one of the trails that goes by the lake. The husband was completely hysterical, and we couldn't really figure out what was going on. We could hear the woman screaming in the background, and he was begging us to come up there right away. When we get there, we see him holding his wife, and shes got something in her arms. She's screaming these awful, almost animal-like screams, and he's sobbing. He sees us and he screams at us to help them, to please get an ambulance up there. Now obviously we can't just drive an ambulance up the walking path, so we ask him if his wife needs help, or if she can walk on her own. He's still hysterical, but he manages to tell us that it's not his wife that needs help. I go over while one of the vets tries to calm him down, and I ask the wife what's going on. She's rocking, holding something, and just shrieking, over and over. I crouch down and see that whatever she's holding, it's covering her with blood. That's when I notice the sling on her front and my heart sinks. I ask her to tell me what's going on, and I sort of pry her arms gently open so I can see what she's holding. It's her baby, obviously dead. His head is caved in on one side, and he's covered in scratches. Now, I've seen dead bodies before, but something about this whole situation hits me hard. I have to take a second to compose myself, and I get up and go get one of the other vets, who's standing by. I tell him that it's a dead kid, and he sort of pats my shoulder and tells me he'll deal with it. It took us over an hour to get this woman to let us see her kid. Every time we try to take him from her, she flips out and tells us we can't have him, that he'll be okay if we just leave her alone and let her help him. But eventually, one of the vets manages to calm her down, and she gives us the body. We took it back to the med area, but when the EMTs showed up, they told us that there was never any hope of saving the kid. He'd died instantly from the trauma to his head. I was good buddies with one of the nurses who met them at the hospital, and she told me later what had happened. Turns out the couple had been walking with the baby in the sling, and they stopped because the kid was fussing. The dad takes the kid and is holding him, looking out over this little gully by the path. The mom comes to stand next to him, but she ends up stepping on a loose patch of soil, and she trips. She falls into the dad, who drops the kid, who ends up falling about twenty feet down this little gully onto the rocks at the bottom. The dad climbed down and recovered the kid, but he'd fallen right on his head, and was dead by the time he got there. The baby was only about fifteen months old. It was a total freak accident, a series of events that coalesced into the worst possible outcome. Probably one of the more awful calls I've been on.