I hung on for 10 years with a Wisconsin volunteer emergency medical service (EMS). The training was demanding, continual, ubiquitous, and the pay a stipend at best. The time commitment was overwhelming. The concurrent certification levels a service must maintain are mind numbing. It is possible then that all the people on your ambulance do not have the same level of training or certification. People just assume all emergency medical technicians (EMT) are paramedics. That is not the case. Depending where you live, you may have someone who is almost at the medical doctor level, yet then again in some small village you may get a crew of first responders that have a couple credits of technical school training. If you are lucky you have personnel certified somewhere in between. Some are paid, some work for free. Often on a large emergency event you have a mix of paid and unpaid personnel. Volunteer services all over try to come up with schemes to stay in business. Some give up. People often work their employment out of town these days and are not around to man the rig (ambulance) during the day. If you have a heart attack in the evening you might have a larger contingent respond to you but maybe not. In a 24-hour work world, potential volunteers are gone at night too. Oh, yes, it is EMS week.
When I moved to a bigger town with a paid ambulance service that did not need me as a volunteer and has no auxiliary option, I looked hard to find a nearby town to volunteer at. Some services still insist on requiring people to live in the city limits to be an EMS member. This seems strange in an era when local newspapers field an article now and then singing about the manpower shortage of volunteer services. Now the fuel prices are prohibitive to drive to a nearby town, time is too valuable to sit in a fire station for hours, and then wait for an emergency call for hours basically for free. In my case, I have to work three under-employed jobs to almost make ends meet in this new global economy. In addition to having to pay bills, I have given up on trying to beg EMS services to take me on. It is like the helicopter crash theory is it not? The chopper can stay in the air even with five things wrong with it. It is the sixth concurrent problem that brings the bird down.
Between serving in the Army at the end of a contentious war, taking care of a parent with cancer at home, and serving 10 years on a rural Wisconsin ambulance service, I know what an emergency in life really is. I met people on my service I will try to keep in touch with for the rest of my life. I learned things about myself I did not even begin to understand in the Army. I learned things about medicine as a lay person that doctors did not even learn just 50 years ago. Some of the things I gleaned from EMS helped save my back side as a journalist in Iraq. But all that being said, I have left EMS behind.
The services will adapt to change or parish. Communities will cope as best they can. But here is the caveat. If I see one more milk-toast article bemoaning the plight of volunteer emergency services like fire and ambulance I am going to cry. The thing those articles will not tell you are some of the items I mentioned above. There is also another phenomena I fear may be subconsciously present and always omitted from the story. Some volunteer organizations seem to thrive on playing the under-appreciated role. It is not blatant, but rather latent. Perhaps it is so enculturated in EMS to be under funded and under staffed it has become a beast un-and-to-itself. By the by, I take a great risk at suggesting this possibility. If I were in the Middle East again, depending whose ox I had just verbally gored, I might be stoned or beheaded for suggesting a message like this about a sacred institution - in our case, the perennial volunteer fire department, and in the last 30 years the inclusion now of the volunteer ambulance service in that sacred club. Hopefully here in rural America I will merely generate a second glance at the issue and not have my head handed to me. I did after all walk the walk for 10 years. I responded to plenty of real emergencies in 10 years. Many of the people I tried to help were on earth for their last day, many also got to see another day. The prevailing wisdom suggests EMTs usually only make it about two years in the culture of the volunteer public safety role. Like I said, I made it ten.
The training never ends; there is little pay; the time commitments are overwhelming; the certification requirements are confusing at best; the 24-hour work culture competes with voluntarism; some services are still caught up in ritualized inefficient membership rules; there is often disconnection with the community one volunteers for; and, now the fuel prices make it hard to drive to a volunteer location. Hmmm, we are up to eight challenges. Oh, oh, hmmm, what was that about a plane crash? Good luck communities, you will need it in today's social realities.
This week's Wisconsin soldier to remember is Army Specialist Eugene A. Uhl III, 21, of Amherst. Uhl was with Battery C, the 1st Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Eugine was Wisconsin's seventh soldier to die in Iraq. Uhl was his family's only son, the youngest of four children, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quoted his mother as saying he would have been the last male family member likely to pass on the Uhl name. He was scheduled to be married in June of 2004. According to the Journal Sentinel his mother also said he would have turned 22 on Thanksgiving. Uhl had been stationed in Iraq since February. He entered the regular Army in June 2002 after first joining the Army National Guard in 1999 and he expected to make the military a career. Eugene was killed when two 101st Airborne Division UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters collided in mid-air over Mosul, Iraq, on November 15, 2003. This was the same crash that killed Army Sgt. Warren S. Hansen, 36 who was last week's Daily Dadio honored Wisconsin soldier.
3,422 Americans have been killed in Iraq since Spring 2003.
25,378 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Iraq since Spring 2003.
73 Wisconsin soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Spring 2003.
102 journalists (several nationalities) have been killed in Iraq since Spring 2003.
Soldier of the week, military casualty, and journalist casualty information sources: Committee to Protect Journalists; cnn.com; and, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
