Ambulance Driver Quotes

Remember this. The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact. So don't fuck with us.

TO ALL THE ambulance drivers firewatchers air-raid wardens nurses canteen workers airplane spotters rescue workers mathematicians vicars vergers shopgirls chorus girls librarians debutantes spinsters fishermen retired sailors servants evacuees Shakespearean actors and mystery novelists WHO WON THE WAR.

Survivors are often good at both resolving and generating crisis. While this capacity to handle crisis can make you a good emergency room worker or ambulance driver, it can also be a way for you to keep yourself from feeling. If you are addicted to intensity and drama...you may be running from yourself.

Patrick O'Brian is an incredible Naval Author. During WWII he drove ambulance during the Blitz. As a Paramedic myself, it is good to know an "ambulance driver" can become an exceptional naval author.

The God of the Bible is not an ambulance driver who shows up after the wreck and hops out and thinks, Okay, let’s do some triage here. The God of the Bible does not show up after the accident and try to fix it. That’s not what He does.

Is an aid worker any less American, less essential, than a desk sergeant? Is an ambulance driver any less important than a Marine? And what happens when an American citizen goes in search of truth for the greater good? Is that not as patriotic as the actions of a soldier in a firefight?

An ambulance took four hours to reach a car accident and take the injured driver to hospital. He could have died in that time and he was lucky to live. I found myself practicing first aid skills I only knew from theory and courses, then later having to assume a level of responsibility I hadn't expected.

The good doctor reassured John these were people who put their psychopathy to good use. They lived productive, well-adjusted lives as surgeons, CEOs and ambulance drivers. The light bulb went on. The CSC [Correctional Service of Canada] doesn't have to go through all these gyrations to reprogram anyone, they just have to find every inmate the right job!

Ambulances drove down the beach to collect ATV drivers three or four times a day.

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey was compounded by Carrington’s suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf ’s nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: ‘I couldn’t get on at all if it weren’t for you’ (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf ’s Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was written ‘as an argument with him

Remember this,” Tyler said. "The people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. We’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you’re asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. "We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact,” Tyler said. "So don’t fuck with us.

It’s even possible that Marilyn was found still breathing, rushed to Santa Monica Hospital by ambulance in an effort to save her, and returned to her own bed only after she was dead. There is some testimony to this on the part of ambulance drivers from a company that had transported Marilyn before. Anthony Summers reports the possibility that her unsuccessful rescuers could have been Robert Kennedy, or Peter Lawford, or both, responding in alarm to a last slurred phone call from Marilyn.

They spent most of that first summer in a campground in California, near the town of Oceano, central coast. South of the beach access road, people rode ATVs over the dunes, and the ATV engines sounded like bugs from a distance, a high buzzing whine. Ambulances drove down the beach to collect ATV drivers three or four times a day. But north of the road, the beach was quiet. Leon loved walking north. There wasn’t much between Oceano and Pismo Beach, the next town up the coast. This lonely stretch of California, forgotten shoreline, sand streaked with black.

Clara Barton was a famous Civil War nurse. When she began nursing, she used her own money for her supplies. She drove a horse-drawn “ambulance” right onto the battlefield to help save wounded soldiers. For this reason she became known as the “Angel of the Battlefield.” Jack put the book away. Then he hurried to Annie. He looked at the woman sitting in the driver’s seat of the wagon. She doesn’t look like an angel, Jack thought. The woman was very small. She had a plain, serious face and dark hair pulled back in a bun. She wore a long black skirt and a black jacket. In

I can see that he wants to laugh but the expression on my face stops him. “We have no women drivers.” “You do now.” Honestly, I’m so tired of this bullshit. I can’t have a byline because I’m a woman. I can’t apply for a marriage license on my own because I’m a woman. I can’t drive an ambulance because I’m a woman.

Sherlock: They came out of EROC with $33 million dollars in small bills. They loaded their haul into an ambulance, American-made, in the late '90s. They haven't been gone more than an hour. Joan: The driver has a lazy eye, the other two met in basketball camp and one has canine lupus. You see how it feels? Just tell me how you know. Elementary Season 1 Snow Angels

There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society. They are living in tragic conditions because of the terrible economic injustices that keep them locked in as an "under-class," as the sociologists are now calling it. Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.

Most people actually ignore things out of the ordinary. Or, worse, hope that someone else will take care of it. I remember being on the train in Chicago in a car with about a dozen other people. On the other side of the car, a man suddenly fell off his seat. Just… toppled over into the aisle. He started convulsing. There were three people between me and him. But nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. I stood up, “Sir?” I said, and started toward him. And that’s when everyone started to move. I called for someone at the back to push the operator alert button, to tell the train driver to call for an ambulance at the next stop. After I moved, there were suddenly three or four other people with me, coming to the man’s aid. But somebody had to move first. I stood in a crowded, standing-room only train on another day and watched a young woman standing near the door close her eyes and drop her papers and binder onto the floor. She was packed tight, surrounded by other people, and no one said anything. Her body began to go limp. “Are you OK!?” I said loudly, leaning toward her, and then other people were looking, and she was sagging, and the buzz started, and somebody called up from the front of the car that he was a doctor, and someone gave up their seat, and people moved, moved, moved. Somebody needs to be the person who says something is wrong. We can’t pretend we don’t see it. Because people have been murdered and assaulted on street corners where hundreds of people milled around, pretending everything was normal. But pretending it was normal didn’t make it so. Somebody has to point it out. Somebody has to get folks to move. Somebody has to act.

Remember this. The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact. So don't fuck with us.

She also saw an interesting sight. On a curve not far from Little Rock a busload of Elks had turned over. The bus was on its right side in the ditch, the front wheels still slowly turning, and the Elks were surfacing one at a time through the escape hatch on the left side, now topside. One Elk was lying on the grass, maybe dead, no ball game for him, and others were limping and hopping about and holding their heads. Another one, in torn shirt-sleeves, was sitting on a suitcase on top of the bus. He was not lifting a finger to help but as each surviving brother Elk stuck his head up through the hatchway, he gave a long salute from his compressed-air horn. The big Trailways cruiser began to slow down. When the man saw this he turned with his noise device and hooted it -- there could be no mistake -- at the driver. Norwood was talking to a man with bulging eyes across the aisle who had gone broke in Mississippi selling premium beer for $3.95 a case on credit, and they both missed it, that hooting part. They did help load the injured into ambulances. The former tavern keeper found a silver dollar in the grass and kept it.

Explaining the rise of MSNBC, the Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said: “I think there are a lot of people out there who are dramatically troubled by the direction of the country, and they would like to be reminded that: (A) they’re not alone, and (B) there’s an alternative”. But loneliness isn’t the problem; the direction of the country is. And being alone together is not an alternative direction, just as a cancer support group does not shrink a tumour. It’s probably true that viewers of MSNBC are sometimes inspired to give money to progressive candidates, and perhaps there’s someone out there whose politics were changed, rather that their loneliness assuaged, by Rachel Maddow. It’s certainly true that a hybrid car gets better mileage than a traditional gas car. But primarily, these things make us feel better. And it can be dangerous to feel better when things are not getting better. […] Too often, the feeling of making a difference doesn’t correspond to the difference being made – worse, an inflated sense of accomplishment can relieve the burden of doing what actually needs to be done. Do the children getting vaccines paid for by Bill Gates really care if he feels annoyed when he gives 46 percent of his vast wealth to charity? Do the children dying of preventable diseases really care if Jeff Bezos feels altruistic when he donates only 1.2 percent of his even vaster wealth? If you found yourself in the back of an ambulance, would you rather have a driver who loathes his job put performs it expertly or one who is passionate about his job but takes twice as long to get you to the hospital?

THIS IS MY ABC BOOK of people God loves. We’ll start with . . .           A: God loves Adorable people. God loves those who are Affable and Affectionate. God loves Ambulance drivers, Artists, Accordion players, Astronauts, Airplane pilots, and Acrobats. God loves African Americans, the Amish, Anglicans, and Animal husbandry workers. God loves Animal-rights Activists, Astrologers, Adulterers, Addicts, Atheists, and Abortionists.           B: God loves Babies. God loves Bible readers. God loves Baptists and Barbershop quartets . . . Boys and Boy Band members . . . Blondes, Brunettes, and old ladies with Blue hair. He loves the Bedraggled, the Beat up, and the Burnt out . . . the Bullied and the Bullies . . . people who are Brave, Busy, Bossy, Bitter, Boastful, Bored, and Boorish. God loves all the Blue men in the Blue Man Group.           C: God loves Crystal meth junkies,           D: Drag queens,           E: and Elvis impersonators.           F: God loves the Faithful and the Faithless, the Fearful and the Fearless. He loves people from Fiji, Finland, and France; people who Fight for Freedom, their Friends, and their right to party; and God loves people who sound like Fat Albert . . . “Hey, hey, hey!”           G: God loves Greedy Guatemalan Gynecologists.           H: God loves Homosexuals, and people who are Homophobic, and all the Homo sapiens in between.           I: God loves IRS auditors.           J: God loves late-night talk-show hosts named Jimmy (Fallon or Kimmel), people who eat Jim sausages (Dean or Slim), people who love Jams (hip-hop or strawberry), singers named Justin (Timberlake or Bieber), and people who aren’t ready for this Jelly (Beyoncé’s or grape).           K: God loves Khloe Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, and Kanye Kardashian. (Please don’t tell him I said that.)           L: God loves people in Laos and people who are feeling Lousy. God loves people who are Ludicrous, and God loves Ludacris. God loves Ladies, and God loves Lady Gaga.           M: God loves Ministers, Missionaries, and Meter maids; people who are Malicious, Meticulous, Mischievous, and Mysterious; people who collect Marbles and people who have lost their Marbles . . . and Miley Cyrus.           N: God loves Ninjas, Nudists, and Nose pickers,           O: Obstetricians, Orthodontists, Optometrists, Ophthalmologists, and Overweight Obituary writers,           P: Pimps, Pornographers, and Pedophiles,           Q: the Queen of England, the members of the band Queen, and Queen Latifah.           R: God loves the people of Rwanda and the Rebels who committed genocide against them.           S: God loves Strippers in Stilettos working on the Strip in Sin City;           T: it’s not unusual that God loves Tom Jones.           U: God loves people from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates; Ukrainians and Uruguayans, the Unemployed and Unemployment inspectors; blind baseball Umpires and shady Used-car salesmen. God loves Ushers, and God loves Usher.           V: God loves Vegetarians in Virginia Beach, Vegans in Vietnam, and people who eat lots of Vanilla bean ice cream in Las Vegas.           W: The great I AM loves will.i.am. He loves Waitresses who work at Waffle Houses, Weirdos who have gotten lots of Wet Willies, and Weight Watchers who hide Whatchamacallits in their Windbreakers.           X: God loves X-ray technicians.           Y: God loves You.           Z: God loves Zoologists who are preparing for the Zombie apocalypse. God . . . is for the rest of us. And we have the responsibility, the honor, of letting the world know that God is for them, and he’s inviting them into a life-changing relationship with him. So let ’em know.

Terrible accident; body parts was everywhere—-fingers, toes, wings, beaks. Ambulance people tried to scoop him all up, but apparently it ain’t so easy as you might think—telling a chicken from a Chinaman, I mean. Anyways, they got his weight off his driver’s license, picked up a hundred and thirty pounds of pieces and buried ‘em. Now his wife come every year 'bout this time to pay her respects. We don't serve chicken while she's here. Hope you ain't got a taste for it.

He’s been banned,’ said Lesley. ‘Until he passes the advanced driver’s course.’ ‘Is that because you crashed that ambulance into the river?’ asked Abigail.

In the blink of an eye, I swooped upon him and began to quench my insatiable hunger with his warm, delicious blood. I called for the nurse, and then the receptionist, and also ravaged one occupant remaining in an examination room. The office had closed for the day, and there were no more patients outside in the waiting room to call in. I was feeling much better, but I still had room for the ambulance drivers.

I thought about everything. I thought about the Abeona Shelter and the work my parents clearly did for them. I thought about my dad’s letter to Juan, how he wanted to give me a chance at normalcy. I thought about moving back to the United States, that drive down to San Diego, the crash of the car. I thought about that ambulance driver, the one with the sandy hair and green eyes. I thought about the way the expression on his face told me that my life was over, how I knew right then and there that even he, this stranger with sandy hair and green eyes, knew my future better than I did. I

Runaway costs are crushing the American medical system. Hispanics are the group least likely to have medical insurance, with 30.7 percent uninsured. Ten point eight percent of whites and 19.1 percent of blacks are without insurance. Illegal immigrants rarely have insurance, but hospitals cannot turn them away. In 1985, Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires hospitals to treat all emergency patients, without regard to legal status or ability to pay. Anyone who can stagger within 250 yards of a hospital—a distance established through litigation—is entitled to “emergency care,” which is defined so broadly that hospital emergency rooms have become free clinics. Emergency-room care is the most expensive kind. Childbirth is an emergency, and hospitals must keep mother and child until both can be discharged. If the mother is indigent the hospital pays for treatment, even if there are expensive complications. Any child born in the United States is considered a US citizen, so thousands of indigent illegal immigrants make a point of having “anchor babies” at public expense. The new American qualifies for all forms of welfare, and at age 21 can sponsor his parents for American citizenship. In 2006 in California, an estimated 100,000 illegal immigrant mothers had babies at public expense, and accounted for about one in five births. The costs were estimated at $400 million per year, and in the state as a whole, half of all Medi-Cal (state welfare) births were to illegal immigrant mothers. In 2003, 70 percent of the babies born in San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton were anchor babies. In Los Angeles and other cities with heavy gang activity, hospitals must deal with “dump and run” patients—criminals wounded in shootouts who are rolled out of speeding cars by fellow gang members. Illegal-immigrant patients often show up without papers of any kind, and doctors have no idea whom they are treating. Mexican hospitals routinely turn away uninsured Mexicans, and if the US border is not far, may tell the ambulance driver to head for the nearest American hospital. “It’s a phenomenon we noticed some time ago, one that has expanded very rapidly,” said a federal law enforcement officer.

Performance Tactics on the Road Tactics are generic design principles. To exercise this point, think about the design of the systems of roads and highways where you live. Traffic engineers employ a bunch of design “tricks” to optimize the performance of these complex systems, where performance has a number of measures, such as throughput (how many cars per hour get from the suburbs to the football stadium), average-case latency (how long it takes, on average, to get from your house to downtown), and worst-case latency (how long does it take an emergency vehicle to get you to the hospital). What are these tricks? None other than our good old buddies, tactics. Let’s consider some examples: • Manage event rate. Lights on highway entrance ramps let cars onto the highway only at set intervals, and cars must wait (queue) on the ramp for their turn. • Prioritize events. Ambulances and police, with their lights and sirens going, have higher priority than ordinary citizens; some highways have high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, giving priority to vehicles with two or more occupants. • Maintain multiple copies. Add traffic lanes to existing roads, or build parallel routes. In addition, there are some tricks that users of the system can employ: • Increase resources. Buy a Ferrari, for example. All other things being equal, the fastest car with a competent driver on an open road will get you to your destination more quickly. • Increase efficiency. Find a new route that is quicker and/or shorter than your current route. • Reduce computational overhead. You can drive closer to the car in front of you, or you can load more people into the same vehicle (that is, carpooling). What is the point of this discussion? To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: performance is performance is performance. Engineers have been analyzing and optimizing systems for centuries, trying to improve their performance, and they have been employing the same design strategies to do so. So you should feel some comfort in knowing that when you try to improve the performance of your computer-based system, you are applying tactics that have been thoroughly “road tested.” —RK

This novel business is an awful business. Why the hell did I ever get mixed up in it?

My parents objected strenuously, but I finally talked them into letting me join up as a Red Cross ambulance driver. I had to lie about my age, of course, but even my grandmother could accept that. In my company, which assembled in Connecticut for training, was another fellow who had lied about his age to get in. He was regarded as a strange duck, because whenever we had time off and went out on the town to chase girls, he stayed in camp drawing pictures. His name was Walt Disney. The armistice was signed just before I was to get on the boat to ship out to France.

Workers new to the job, rookie cops and ambulance drivers, struggle with the mess. Their eyes reel at ripped distortions that blur a formerly human identity. Experienced death workers throw a professional switch in their brains and see the face more clearly. Their eyes methodically link dismembered limbs, realign a rictus grin, and separate identity from wreckage. Cooly. As connoisseurs. For the investigators a dead body is not so much victim as evidence, the ultimate clue to the workings of the perpetrator. Banked

People who suffer from flashbacks often organize their lives around trying to protect against them. They may compulsively go to the gym to pump iron (but finding that they are never strong enough), numb themselves with drugs, or try to cultivate an illusory sense of control in highly dangerous situations (like motorcycle racing, bungee jumping, or working as an ambulance driver). Constantly fighting unseen dangers is exhausting and leaves them fatigued, depressed, and weary.

Many public services were also outsourced. While PFI was largely about building and running infrastructure, outsourcing was mainly about handing services over to the private sector to manage, notably IT. HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs), DVLA (the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency), the NHS and local authorities awarded enormous IT contracts to external suppliers. Public services, including rubbish collection, school meals, building maintenance, prisons and even ambulance and probation services, were placed in the hands of private providers, often by local authorities: at its peak in 2012–13, the value of outsourcing contracts awarded by the latter reached £708 million.19 Since then, however, the value of local-government outsourced contracts has steadily fallen. The trend is similar for central-government IT outsourcing. Public organizations have increasingly found that outsourcing has not delivered the quality and reliability of services they had expected and has often not been good value for money either.

SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT SUVs were parked at jaunty angles near the main house with their doors wide open, an ambulance driver was arguing with deputies to clear the way so he could back his vehicle in, and the FBI helicopter sat in a back pasture like a giant insect on a break.

To supply a column of this size, in the depth of winter, was a problem demanding most careful consideration. There was a train of one hundred and sixty-eight wagons and seven ambulances, with two hundred and nineteen drivers and attendants; and a pack-train of four hundred mules cared for by sixty-five expert packers, to follow after the cavalry whenever it should cut loose from the main body. No finer, cleaner-cut expedition was ever known in the annals of the Regular Army.

Sasha sleeps as Richard and his companions goof around, play fighting. Sleeps as Richard’s cousin Lloyd bounds up and down the aisle flirting with a girl up front. Sleeps as Richard surreptitiously flicks a lighter and touches it to the hem of that gauzy white skirt. Wait. In a moment, Sasha will wake inside a ball of flame and begin to scream. In a moment, everything will be set in motion. Taken by ambulance to a San Francisco burn unit, Sasha will spend the next three and a half weeks undergoing multiple surgeries to treat second- and third-degree burns running from calf to thigh. Arrested at school the following day, Richard will be charged with two felonies, each with a hate-crime clause that will add time to his sentence if he is convicted. Citing the severity of the crime, the district attorney will charge him as an adult, stripping him of the protections normally given to juveniles. Before the week is out, he will be facing the possibility of life imprisonment. But none of that has happened yet. For now, both teenagers are just taking the bus home from school. Surely it’s not too late to stop things from going wrong. There must be some way to wake Sasha. Divert Richard. Get the driver to stop the bus. There must be something you can do.

Women serving as nurses and ambulance drivers in WWI also experienced shell shock, but they were typically not diagnosed or treated for their symptoms. If they were diagnosed, the diagnosis was hysteria, and they were immediately discharged from the war. Officials in France, Belgium, England, and the United States considered women of less value than combat soldiers and so made less effort to treat or retain them. In addition, when doctors thought about war trauma, they didn’t include interpersonal trauma that occurred outside of combat, such as sexual violence and the trauma of witnessing the effects of warfare. Yet women were exposed to just as much violence, if not more, than many men. Nurses had to care for horrific injuries and participate in surgeries, including amputations for men with gangrene. A Canadian military nurse, M. Lucas Rutherford, wrote that among all the conditions, shell shock was the most distressing and difficult to treat because the afflicted soldiers were often unreachable, unable to communicate.28

I’ve come to volunteer.” “Go see Marie. She directs the nurses.” “No. I have an ambulance.” I can see that he wants to laugh but the expression on my face stops him. “We have no women drivers.” “You do now.” Honestly, I’m so tired of this bullshit. I can’t have a byline because I’m a woman. I can’t apply for a marriage license on my own because I’m a woman. I can’t drive an ambulance because I’m a woman.

It’s even possible that Marilyn was found still breathing, rushed to Santa Monica Hospital by ambulance in an effort to save her, and returned to her own bed only after she was dead. There is some testimony to this on the part of ambulance drivers from a

The highway that takes travelers from Abu Dhabi to Dubai is clean and fine. Illuminated at night by cat's eye reflectors, it's a highway designed for machines, where Lamborghinis speed, why the desert got bisected, why the camels were fenced out. But Chainsmoke couldn't be bothered. He spent his trip napping on a stranger's shoulder, dreaming about money. He woke to honks. There had been a pileup not far from the Jebel Ali zone. A trailer overturned. Happened too quickly for the brakes to even matter for the cars behind. The smaller cars got smaller. Bodies lay where they landed, most still inside battered vehicles, like bits of fish. The ambulance had not yet arrived. A young Emirati left his Land Cruiser to direct the traffic. Chainsmoke looked at his watch, estimated the number of vehicles, how slowly they crawled. "Could we make it in 45 minutes?" Chainsmoke bellowed. The driver shrugged his shoulders. "Patience boy," said the stranger whose shoulder he napped on. "Anything can wait after children have died.

the boy had killed only eight. The presence of a lone FBI agent only complicated the situation more. What had he been doing there? Eyewitness reports of a brief firefight outside before the massacre only piqued his curiosity. A frenzy of reporters and news cameras had flooded the scene outside, held at bay by tight-lipped crowd control officers. Detective Harper noticed that Darion had failed to upload his video in time. After recovering the busted-up GoPro, he viewed the recording and was met with gruesome scenes of the carnage—death captured in real time. Harper placed it in a sealed evidence bag to be transported to the evidence room with everything else. The detective did a Hail Mary and then tried to get some ID on the shooter. Nothing on the scene directly linked him to a terrorist network. He had no identification on him. Suddenly, Harper heard on his radio that another man, who resembled the diner gunman, had been hit by a truck, not far from the diner. *** Craig tried his best to maintain control of the crash site. He called Patterson repeatedly but only got voicemail instead. A sick feeling brewed in his stomach as he heard sirens blare from a few blocks over. Police were everywhere on the street around him. Paramedics had the driver of the truck—an unconscious white-haired man—on a wheeled stretcher and fitted into a neck-and-shoulder brace. As they pushed him to the ambulance, one EMT held an oxygen pump over the man’s face and pumped intermittently. Rasheed lay in the road unconscious among broken pieces of the truck’s front end and a backpack full of pipe bombs. It was a surreal scene, the second time Craig found himself in the middle of the street amid destruction and chaos in a matter of days. The tide seemed to be turning against him. He forbade investigators to touch the pipe bombs and demanded that the paramedics handle Rasheed with the utmost care.

one moment you are pruning trees and the next you are an improvised ambulance driver, wondering what it is the man will do with this when he tries to sleep tonight, watching the small child with the face full of shrapnel he helped carry into the van, watching it replay in his mind for the rest of his life.