Sooty boot camps, shattered sleep, the constant company of a pager. Ah, college life. 
"When I'm in command at a fire, I'll do my best to get you inside." Pat Brock '81 with trainees of Engine Company 3, the student auxiliary of the Amherst Fire Department. BRYAN LOEFFLER '00 had just put a term paper to bed, and then himself, when the first dreams of the night were shattered by a clangor that had him instantly on his feet, shooting a glance at the red digits of his bedside clock. It was 2:11 a.m.
Bursting into a corridor on the second floor of North Fire Station, a two-story, concrete-slab outpost of the Amherst Fire Department at Tilson Farm on North Pleasant Street, Loeffler joined station-mates Dave Clooney '99 and Brian Scott '00, who had jumped up from a card game. Clooney and Scott had been out twice already on that December evening first to a suspicious blaze in a North Village storage shed, then on an ambulance run to a nursing home and were unwinding over a game of pitch when the alarm sounded for the third time.
"Attention, all Amherst units," came the voice, cool but urgent, over the PA system. "Box alarm, number 17 Hickory Lane." Another station-mate, Tom Janisko '99, came whipping out of his room, where he'd been giving sleep a chance after returning from the second run. Huijing Wu '99 would remain at the ready at the station, along with the other two members of the North Station crew and the backup student firefighters who'd be showing up shortly from their residence halls.
All a cascade of muscle, nerve and valor, the young firefighters hurtled down the stairwell to the gear room where they pulled on pants, boots, coats, helmets. Moments later Janisko was behind the big wheel of the students' own vehicle, Engine 3, and the pumper truck rumbled to life as the garage doors yawned open on an unseasonably warm winter night. Clooney, coordinating this outing as captain, swung up into the "officer's" seat beside the driver, while Loeffler scrambled into a rear-facing jumper seat next to Scott.
Janisko eased the truck out onto the driveway and made a wide left-hand turn onto East Pleasant Street. With too little traffic to justify the siren at that hour, they sped through the streets at a steady purr, only the spinning red light on the roof searing the passing landscape. Three miles across town, on a cul-de-sac in the Echo Hill neighborhood, the students joined the Amherst Fire Department at the scene where a wood-stove fire had spread into the walls of a home.
In recounting the night's events a few days later, Loeffler and Clooney were nonchalant in the way that firefighters often are. People who've interviewed a lot of firefighters say the profession seems to either attract or create modest people. "We really just laid a supply line" four hundred feet of hose to a distant hydrant "for the permanent force," said Loeffler with a shrug. Clooney had gone in after the flames were subdued to retrieve a coat for the chilled homeowner. When the drama was over they ran their engine back to the station. Sleep, when events finally permitted it around 5:00 a.m., came instantly. The next alarm they'd hear was the one waking them for class.
WHY WOULD anyone choose to add, to the general rigors of being a college student, the physical strain, lost sleep, unpredictable schedule, and possible danger of fighting fires? It may sound masochistic to those who haven't experienced it, agree members of Engine Company 3, the student auxiliary of the Amherst Fire Department, or AFD. But for the more than 250 students from UMass and Amherst and Hampshire Colleges who've served since 1953, becoming a firefighter has made college a thrill as well as an education.
Many, however, say they didn't quite know what they were in for when they first walked up to an information table to ask what "E3," as the company is affectionately called, is all about. "I saw it as a free place to live," said former student firefighter Ed Comeau '82. But like a number of E3 alumni, Comeau made fire his career. The chief fire investigator for the National Fire Protection Association in Quincy, who has investigated charred aftermaths from Sweden to Oklahoma City, Comeau "followed E3 right down the road I've been on ever since."
The student firefighting force is not officially part of UMass. It is not a registered student organization and it receives no funds from the university. Its sixteen members are volunteers for the town of Amherst, supplementing its full-time force of thirty-two and "call" force of twenty-two. New recruits are sworn in by the town clerk, who often travels to the students' drills and performs the ceremony on site. Training is coordinated by AFD assistant chief Pat Brock '81, who took over this fall for E3's longtime supervisor, retired assistant chief George Bowler. Brock oversees everything from the grueling orientation called "Wonder Week," in the fall, to pump-operator training in the spring. Young firefighters who earn certification in several areas, including emergency medicine, are paid as regular crew when they "ride third on ambulance" as paramedics. The town picks up any medical bills for any on-duty injuries that aren't paid for by a student's own insurance. One or two work on the call force every summer, and some eventually become members of the permanent force. A number of current full-timers among them captains James Johnson '75, Gary Childs '79, Lindsay Stromgren '90, and assistant chief Michael Zlogar '71 got their feet wet, and hot, in E3.
But the student auxiliary is very much a presence at UMass, if for no other reason than its headquarters at Tilson Farm. Students sometimes find themselves in the position of being the "first do" the earliest arrivals at the scene of a fire at the university most of them attend. And their on-duty schedule follows the academic calendar: they staff North Fire Station from the first day of classes every fall until the last day in spring. Throughout the school year, from 11:40 p.m. until 8 a.m. they alone run the station.
For auxiliary members, that means accepting a relatively sober social life, some restrictions on their mobility, and the constant companionship of a pager. When the belt-worn device emits its sudden staccato shriek and announces a box alarm a report of smoke in a building all sixteen students are expected to report to North Station, no matter what class, meal, personal engagement, or stage of the REM cycle they are in the middle of. Members of E3 inform professors at the beginning of the semester that they may slip out mid-lab or mid-lecture. "Most professors are really understanding," says Brock. "They'll let them make up the work later."
T HE STUDENT AUXILIARY started out as the UMass Volunteer Fire Department, or UMVFD, in 1953 and was originally intended to aid the town's then-small department with campus safety inspections and drills, as well as the occasional fire. In its first years, the student crew reported to the dean of men, reflecting the fact that it was then all-male. Within a decade, it had become a recognized student organization and began receiving some financial underwriting from UMass. In that pre-pager era, young firefighters sat in classes with an ear cocked for three clarion blasts from a steam whistle mounted on the campus power plant.
But by 1970, the town had become a little nervous about the safety of students lending a hand in potentially life-threatening scenarios, and took over the supervision and training of its student volunteers. Then-chief John T. Doherty created the Fire Department Auxiliary and welcomed applicants from the UMVFD. The original group evolved into today's UMass Student First Aid Services, a cadre trained in emergency services who perform safety checks and stand by as fire-marshall/EMTs at large public events.
The new auxiliary was given its own engine to care for and operate initially a 1932 model, and eventually the 1978 Maxim 1500-gallon-a-minute pumper that the students now meticulously maintain. Student firefighters still lived in residence halls, though, so when called to a fire they hitchhiked or hoofed it to the series of makeshift garages in which their vehicle was kept, among them an old gas station on Triangle Street and an old wooden structure in North Amherst.
In 1975, the town built North Fire Station, and included living quarters for about half the student force. This year, seven students live rent-free at the station, in an upstairs suite separated only by an open stairwell from the municipal comings-and-goings downstairs. The suite offers private bedrooms for every resident, a kitchen, and roomy communal areas including a computer room. The collegiate casualness of this eight-room den the big TV, the dartboard and playing cards ever at the ready, the tabletops strewn with textbooks and papers, the cans of soda and boxes of cereal in various stages of consumption, the Escher and Martin Luther King posters on the wall is in lively contrast to the officious and somewhat sterile first floor, and to the garage where Engine 3 and other emergency vehicles wait for the next call.
Victor Zumbruski '84, the current chief, notes that Amherst is not alone in realizing the potential of student brigades. Hanover, New Hampshire, and Worcester, among other cities and towns, also tap the energies of their college populations. A student force is fantastically economical, he notes a well-trained, ever-ready crew that doesn't tie itself up in knots about contracts and unions.
"It's the most cost-effective unit in the town," says Zumbruski. "The town gets a lot more from the students than we give to the students, and we couldn't do without them without costing the town a whole lot of money.
"They're probably our most enthusiastic group," Zumbruski concludes. "They're there because they want to be there." Not that the professional firefighters don't, he adds quickly. But such realities as mortgage payments and spouses who want to know which nights the family is going to be able to sit down to dinner together unavoidably complicate the lives of career firefighters. The students in E3 are still years away from those concerns.
HUIJING WU had had firefighting fantasies since girlhood. "I don't know anyone who didn't want to ride a firetruck," says the Singapore native, one of two women on this year's auxiliary team and the only woman to live at North Station. The fantasy had slipped into the maybe-in-another-lifetime category by the time Wu, then a sophomore, saw Engine 3 parked at the Campus Center as part of a recruiting drive. Thinking that E3 could give her some real-life exposure to the medical career she was contemplating as well as that chance to get on a firetruck Wu decided to go for it. She was chosen from the yearly field of dozens of applicants who are first "paper-screened" and then interviewed by AFD full-timers. The qualities they look for include judgment, fitness, team spirit, a sincere desire to serve, and very important time management skills. "It can get stressful to balance," says Brock. "To fight an all-night fire and jump back into class the next day it could be easy to fall behind."
For the young firefighter, the school year begins with a seven-day boot camp called Wonder Week. (The name gives rise to desperate quips along the lines of "It's a Wonder we're doing this," and "It'll be a Wonder if we make it through.") New recruits and veterans alike show up for the training a week before their academic classes begin. Wonder Week, notes Brock, packs into those seven days the same basic material that is covered, obviously in more depth, in eleven weeks at the State Fire Academy: everything from search-and-rescue techniques in tall buildings to basic truck mechanics. It is close supervision, by both student officers and town professionals, that makes it possible to train students in such a short span of time, says Brock.
Early on a clear morning during this year's Wonder Week, students gathered in a lot west of McGuirk Stadium for Ladder Day. The sixteen young firefighters eleven old-timers and five rookies had broken into groups for exercises that looked like something Outward Bound might devise. In the shadow of the bleachers, one group of gear-laden students was scaling and descending ladders propped against the stadium's concrete footings. Across the lot, trucks raised much more formidable-looking ladders, like mechanical birds craning impossibly long necks, toward the vault of blue sky.
Students took turns crawling up the ladder toward an aerial platform 110 feet in the air. The phobic or exhilarated mental state of the speck of a student halfway up this diagonal shaft could only be imagined. Brock, watching sympathetically from the ground, said that even to the most acrophilic the first climb or two is a trial. But it becomes easier with practice, of which students get plenty during weekly drills throughout the school year. "Fear of heights, the dark, and confined spaces that's one of the interview questions," he said cheerfully.
By the end of the week the recruits might have been crew-mates for years. Now it was time to head to Springfield, where a practice site is maintained for use by fire departments all over Western Massachusetts. Among its dubious attractions are a maze a windowless structure in which firefighters wriggle and grope their way through tunnels and trapdoors to hone their tactile abilities and a "burn house," the charred shell of a generic, two-story house built of indestructible cinderblock, in which fires are set and extinguished again and again.
This would be the "first real fire" for the recruits, and a thrilling morning even for the experienced. By 9:00 a.m. Engine 3, which like a faithful canine seems to accompany the students wherever they go, was on duty at the burn house, hoses hooked up and ready to douse the flames that were quickly consuming the straw and wood strewn around inside. Preparing to enter, the students donned their thermal armor cushioned helmets, unmeltable masks, oxygen tanks, gloves, boots, suspender-pants and coats and checked each other to make sure no chink left even a sliver of flesh exposed. (Fire-fighting is a celebration of gadgets as well as grit, and Capt. Dave Clooney took a min-ute to show off the spring-loaded window punch he carries in his coat along with a pocketful of other contraptions. The most extreme situations can call for "carts," hundred-pound metal boxes covering a full spectrum of contingencies: sledge-hammers, lock-breakers, ninety-degree-angle screwdrivers.)
As flames licked out through the shutters of the house, students entered the choked interior, dragging the hose behind them. For several moments, only the shouts and thumpings of firefighters getting their bearings could be heard. Then the shutters burst open, and smoke, spray, and mist billowed out. There are numerous methods of "attack" on a fire, and in the course of the morning they would have to practice several; in this technique, "power venting," a fountain of water sprayed out the window creates a flow of air that draws smoke out of the building.
The emphasis was first on life-saving, second on "damage conservation" for as Clooney pointed out, insurance companies balk at paying for damage created by overzealous firefighting. Despite the appearance of chaos, firefighting follows a clear chain of command; free-thinking heroics are not appreciated in this hierarchical world. Teams of higher-ranking officers go in first and extinguish the live flames, while the second stage of suppression and "hot-spot" checking is carried out by lower-ranking officers.
After two hours of this, students pushed back their masks on sweat- and soot-streaked faces, guzzled whole quarts of water, unbuttoned their coats, and gathered in a nearby grove of trees to discuss what they'd learned. For the newly initiated, the surprise was the speed with which the fire had spread, the limited visibility, the intractable heaviness of the hose as they wrestled it up the stairs.
One student asked how likely they are to get inside at a real fire, when the professionals would probably be the first line of attack.
Pat Brock acknowledged to the horseshoe of smudged faces gathered around him that students probably would not douse a whole blaze on their own. But, he vowed, "When I am in command at a fire, I make the promise to you that I will do my best to get you inside."
"They're young, aggressive they're normal, invincible kids," said Brock later, reflecting on his young apprentices' eagerness for real action. "Which is at one level fantastic to work with and at another is as scary as being their parent."
Wonder Week, and all the weeks and years of teamwork that come after, meld the students into a fiercely loyal unit. Asked what they got from being part of Engine Company 3, firefighters explained that the big surprise, in the end, is the depth of the connections, the permanency of the friendships forged. The bonds forged in the interplay between leisure and high action, in the instantaneous transformation from buddy to comrade that occurs at the ring of a pager, the shared stress of exams and delight in preparing a meal together, is the bonus of signing up for the job. "I've made better friends here than I probably would have elsewhere in college," says Bryan Loeffler.
According to alumni, those friendships tend to last especially those carried forward into the rarified world of professional or volunteer firefighting where paths tend to cross and re-cross. Chief Keith Hoyle '75 of Franklin called in fellow alumnus Ed Comeau to investigate dormitory fires at Dean College, which falls within his bailiwick. Comeau keeps in touch via e-mail and phone with alumni like Jack Watts '73, who started the not-for-profit Fire Safety Institute in Vermont.
"It's almost like a fraternity," says Comeau, who also organized last October's third reunion of Engine Company 3, a well-attended gala that drew about 150 alumni and spouses back to UMass. "You never know when someone can help you."
