I Still Wake Up in a Cold Sweat

I occasionally still wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.  I don’t do it as much as I did 20, 30, and 40 years ago, but I still do it.

My good friend Doc Brad Spaulding, was a deputy sheriff before he became a doctor.  One evening as we visited reliving our past lives he commented that we’ve seen things that men aren’t supposed to see.  He was right, you know.  By the way, I miss Brad.  A different enemy got to him.

The things I saw bothered me and yes, occasionally kept me up at night.  But, they didn’t have the same impact on me as did the other thing that kept me up.

I was on duty the evening that Richard was shot in the chest.  He was off duty at the time.  It was touch and go for him for a while.  But, as soon as the news came over the radio everyone on the department went on hyper alert.  We all began looking for a suspect and a suspect car without knowing what to look for.  It didn’t matter.  It kept us busy in spite of the difficulty of looking through the tears.

Richard survived and the shooter was identified.  We all breathed a sigh of relief.  However, it was a stark reminder that at any time, for any reason, and in any manner it could have been any one of us.  It could have been Frank.  It could have been me.

Police live on the edge.  I know.  Police do things that most people don’t do.  There’s a price for doing that.  Some officers are killed in accidents while in pursuit of someone who has committed a crime.  Some are killed while responding to an accident or a crime when a person not paying attention pulls out in front of the speeding police car.  Some are struck and killed by cars while the officer is out issuing a motorist a traffic citation or while changing a stranded person’s tire.  Some drown while trying to save someone else.  Some are stabbed to death.  Some are exposed to hazardous materials in the line of duty.  Some even contract deadly diseases while trying to help another.  Some have been poisoned.  Of all the manners of death an officer can face though, gunfire outnumbers them all.

Sometimes the gunfire is in the heat of a gun battle.  Lately, ambush seems to be the preferred method of killing police.  Sometimes police are killed with their own duty weapon as they scramble to retain their weapon from the “bad guy” who didn’t want to go back to prison or decided it was time to kill a cop.  That was my story, but I lived to write the reports.

Police officers know all of this.

So, when the dust settles officers tend to look back and evaluate or assess what they did earlier in the night or day or evening and think about where things could have gone south.  They think about things like when their cars fishtail and their back bumpers hit the guardrail protecting them from a 500 foot drop-off.  Had the guardrail been just a little weaker or had they hit it just a little harder someone would be knocking on a surviving spouse’s door.  They think about drawing their weapons first and the other guy having second thoughts and what if.  They think about the shadows that move in the darkened buildings that were left unsecured.  (Your heart hasn’t sufficiently stopped if you haven’t seen a moving shadow in a building at two in the morning.)  They think about the car that started to pull out in front of them but stopped just in time.  They also think about the times when they pulled a gun on a suspect, finger on the trigger but didn’t pull it.  Of course, it usually is the right decision, but what if he or she should have pulled the trigger.  Or, what if he or she pulled the trigger but should not have done so.  These are the kinds of dream - nightmares - that wake police officers up.  The dead bodies, abused babies, tortured souls - the things Doc Spaulding talked about -  simply add to the nightmares.

They have constant reminders.  Friends they’ve never met end up being the headline; except now it seems that it happens so often that it’s a byline.

I occasionally still wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.  I don’t do it as much as I did 20, 30, and 40 years ago, but I still do it.