Burke: Gratitude for those who go out, but may not come back

Published 1:30 am Monday, December 19, 2022

By Tom Burke / Herald columnist

I ended 2021’s “Year in Review” column with: “Here’s hoping next year’s review will have even more Good, less Bad, and no Ugly.”

Well, that didn’t work out so well.

Because while there was an awful lot of good, there was a ton of bad, and more than a bunch of ugly.

The best of the “good” was legislation actually helping people; the U.S. House Jan. 6 committee, mid-term elections favoring those who favor democracy; and an economy getting back on track.

The worst of the “bad” was (is) worldwide more than 1,800 people a day are dying from covid (that’s a World Trade Center death toll every 36 hours, the entire body count of the Vietnam War every month, and twice all our WWII deaths a year); the Russian invasion of Ukraine; climate change-related disasters, multiple mass murders; Roe v. Wade overturned; and Trump’s theft of top secret documents.

And the ugliest of the “ugly” was the persistent lying by Trump and the MAGAs with their Q-conspiracy-driven election denial until the release of Trump’s digital trading cards. Talk about U-G-L-Y! Terrible photoshopping and stupid pictures. Really?

But rather than focus on past accomplishments and failures (or new, absurd Trump scams), I’m struck writing this end-of-year retrospective by the people reminding me that hope remains alive for our great American dream.

Ya see, at Thanksgiving, part of our extended family celebration included (as it almost always does) the childhood buddy of my middle son. He’s a 20-plus-year member of a crowd whose official motto of “Semper Paratus”— and if your Latin is no better than mine and you don’t recognize his organization, it’s the U.S. Coast Guard and the phrase means “Always Ready.”

And as noble (albeit a bit institutional) as “Semper Paratus” is, it’s their unofficial motto that illuminates their core philosophy — and that, gentle reader, is, in very plain English — “Ya gotta go out. Ya don’t have to come back.”

Think about that when you report to work tomorrow and sit down to write some code or fill an order for a double-shot, skim-milk latte or fit on a headset in a call center; that today, as just a regular part of your workday, there were a very real chance you might not live through your shift! Wadda ya think? Your kinda job?

The origin of “Ya gotta go out,” is attributed to a Life-Saving Service (the old name for the Coast Guard) keeper, Patrick Etheridge, during a 1904 rescue on North Carolina’s Diamond Shoals when a surfman voiced concern that the heavy seas and killer surf meant the crew might get out to the shipwreck in the station’s surfboat, but might not make it back. In response, Keeper Etheridge shouted: “The regs says we’ve got to go out and it doesn’t say a damn thing about having to come back!”

(FYI: They did come back, affecting the rescue in an open, oar-powered, wooden surfboat and setting the standard all Coast Guard crews strive today to emulate. And for the record, current Coast Guard surfboats are self-righting (in case of roll), metal hulled with a sheltering cabin and the crews belted in.

And that “Ya gotta go out” philosophy is the same that sent New York City firefighters racing into the World Trade Center on 9/11 (where 343 of them perished) and the men and women of the police and military into similar danger.

I don’t think any of us have to look far to find similar examples of dedication. Both my oldest son and my daughter’s beau are Seattle firefighters; my wife was a nurse for more than 50 years; and I worked closely with the men and women of the Maryland State Police protecting a governor. Their job was to step in front of the bullet.

Unfortunately, today, it isn’t just Coasties, firefighters, the military, and the police who daily put their lives on the line. Doctors, nurses, nurses aides, and even the hospital housekeeping staff run the risk of death because of covid and other diseases.

And who would have thought school board, or town, county and city council members or even teachers would have to consider physical injury or death as part of their job?

There are only 50,000 on active duty in the Coast Guard; 1,000 Seattle City firefighters, and 200 Everett firefighters; and while they represent every possible political party and philosophy they all hew to the standard expressed by Patrick Etheridge to his surfmen as they balanced their lives against their duty to a crew of strangers on that cold and stormy night. “You gotta go out. You don’t have to come back,” they were told. And out they went.

If, if only there were more people in Olympia and Washington, D.C., who put duty ahead of power; duty ahead of revenge investigations, Q-conspiracies, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Christian-nationalist domination, and the announced candidacy of a self-admitted thief, traitor, liar and tax cheat (and now, who’s “trading cards” you can buy for $99 each and see him photoshopped on the [poorly] illustrated body of a top gun pilot, just like Ron DeSantis).

If only they actually acted like the New Zealand coastie who said, “We do this job because every once in a while someone is out there without hope, desperately praying for their life, and we get to be the answer.”

Amen, brother.

Slava Ukraini.

Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.