I hate to be a big buzz kill, but you will not be doing these cool law enforcement things forever. Just as your equipment gets old and weathered, so will you. And like your gear, you will be obsolete one day. Reality check.
I am writing these mean words to remind you to enjoy these times of your life. I was once in my twenties, lean and invincible. Professionally, I had it all: Midnight Shift, SWAT, and K9. I didn’t know how well off I was. My work days consisted of speeding from one adrenaline rush to the next.
It is all a blur now, though. I’m twice as old as I was then. Probably twice as slow, despite decades of physical maintenance. So many of those critical incidents are not quite lost in my head, but buried in the past and difficult to dig up.
In some ways, I am lucky in memory. I have meticulous K9 records, which benefitted me in Court then and aid my recollections now. I also wrote the majority of the after action debriefings from the 12 years of SWAT operations while I was Team Leader, so those missions are archived.
Nothing will bring back the slide show of daily amusements and frustrations from the last 25 years. I wish I could remember all the quirky happenings from thousands of shifts. I’m Continue reading
entry, fields of fire, and threat identification. In some FPS’s you can dial down the number of adversaries to make it more like a building search, rather than a straight-up firefight.
