Knowing When

Unlike some bad cop movie, there wasn’t one epic moment when I knew I was done with the job. As much as I longed for it, there wasn’t a montage set to classic rock ending in me throwing my badge into a large body of water. There were a whole bunch of smaller incidents of varying magnitude that added up over time. Much less dramatic and cool, I know. But if I had to narrow it down to one event that would have made a sweet movie(or a really shitty one), there was this one:

No shit, there I was. It was a little after midnight, summer hot. I had my back up against the target house, just around the corner from the front door. Some fed task force had told us a hardened criminal, wanted on multiple violent crimes, was holding his ex-girlfriend hostage inside along with her young daughter. There’d been no contact with the man after a brief “fuck you” he yelled at the negotiator before hanging up. Everyone assumed the worst. It was our time to go. In one hand I held an explosive charge that I had custom built, in the other was the firing device along with coil of shock tube leading from the initiator to the charge. I was clad in black, covered in heavy armor, and strapped up with my glock, ammo, and flash bang grenades. Behind me was the entry team; a half dozen guys equally loaded down with guns and armor. In a few moments I would sneak up to the door, gently tape the charge to the door frame, and creep back a safe distance. On the signal I would blast the door open and the entry crew would go in. We had multiple other smaller teams going in various other doors and windows, but based on the intel of the house, the team stacked behind me was most likely to rescue the hostages first.

Innocent lives depended on our plan going off without a hitch; sure we had multiple contingency plans and fail safes, but we knew the stakes were high. We’d done this before, many times. We knew what happened when something hit a snag-the likelihood of the hostages surviving dropped with each extra second it took us to get in. And a lot of that was riding on my charge going off perfectly; just enough to open the door but not too much to hurt anyone, no misfire, and going off at the exact right moment. I was drenched in sweat, peering into the black night. I’d been on jobs like this before, but usually as an entry guy or a different type of explosive breacher. Never the guy that everything rode upon. This night just happened to be my turn in the rotation. This should have been one of the most professionally satisfying in my career, the culmination of years of experience and training. Instead, as I leaned against that house, I felt numb, pissed I was missing out on yet another night of sleep, and even more pissed my plans for mountain biking the next day were now scrubbed. Also, I was getting bored.

Yeah yeah, I’m not some soulless dickhead. I actually did care about the outcome of our hostage rescue. Of course I wanted to save the lady and her kid, the last thing I wanted was for anyone to get hurt. But I was more than a little pissed at the universe for placing this whole situation in my lap, thus screwing up one of the few nights I had off in months.

Explosive breaching is a specialty in the SWAT world, but also a crucial skill set needed to successfully pull off a hostage rescue. I was lucky to learn the ins and outs of it back in the army. Years ago my unit prepped for a mission overseas where our duties included in extremis hostage rescue for the region. We were sent to this weeks long school taught by former military jedi knights on how to perform such a mission if shit went sideways and we were the only show in town. We got lots of fun training in clearing rooms using live rounds, learned how to shoot open doors with shotguns, use plasma torches and circular saws to get through concrete walls, but there was a disappointing lack of instruction on zip lines or ninja rolls. We also spent half the time learning explosive breaching.

What the fuck is breaching you ask? It’s a fancy word for opening stuff so you can get through it. Door, window, skylight. The explosive part of explosive breaching means you’re using an (you guessed it) explosive charge to make whatever open. Why use explosives? Well, when dickhead bad guys hold other people hostage, they generally are not entirely stupid. They know that at some point, some black clad goons with guns are going to come barging in trying to rescue their hostage. They’ve seen that movie too. Being dickheads, the bad guys don’t want to give up the hostage, and want to take as many people with them as possible. So to slow down the goons from getting inside, bad guys will pile up as much shit against doors and windows as possible. Couches, fridge, ottomans, etc….shit, give them enough time and they’ll start boarding stuff up with nails. So your standard method of either kicking the door or hitting it with a battering ram ain’t gonna cut it. Enter explosives.

There’s a whole bunch of math that goes into building explosive charges. It’s not complex, mostly algebra and stuff, but still…math. This is because when you’re slapping an explosive charge on a door, and there’s a bad guy with a gun to the head of an innocent person on the other side, you’ve got to balance two things.

One- you want to make absolutely sure you put enough explosives on that door that it opens immediately, hopefully with enough force to make the bad guy think “what the fuck..”, so you can quickly get inside and take control of the bad guy half way between them thinking the “a” and “t” part of “what the fuck…”

Two-you don’t want to put so much explosives on the door that you turn it into a projectile and injure/maim/kill the hostage. Kind of pointless to go that route. I mean if you’re OK with seriously hurting the hostage, then why are you there in the first place? The whole point of hostage rescue kind of hinges on that rescue part.

This balancing act can get complex, as you start accounting for different door materials, house construction, the amount of stuff behind the door, blah blah blah. More math. And that’s just doors. Things get a bit simpler with windows, but can get super weird when trying to cut a perfect hole in a solid wall. Since every explosive charge is trying to open something unique, that means every charge is unique. This means the use of a cookie cutter charge is rare; usually you have to make each charge custom by hand. It’s like a science. Luckily, I got some awesome training from some of the best in the world. It was challenging. It was nerve racking(did you read the part about making explosive charges by hand?). But it was also a lot of fun. I never want anyone to get taken hostage. But after that training…man, back then I hoped I’d get to use those skills to save someone’s life someday.

I went to that training, and the mission for our unit never materialized. Then I became a cop. Then I got on the SWAT team. If you didn’t know, one of the primary reasons SWAT teams exist is to resolve hostage situations. Some consider everything else they do to be mission creep. I show up to my first training session after making it through the try out process, and one of the explosive breachers says something about building a door charge. I ask if he’s using firehose, water, or something else to tamp. He realizes I might know something about something. Next thing you know I’m one of the few guys on the team building stuff that goes bang.

I got pretty decent at it. Built lots of interesting things, then blew them up. Got to do lots of fun training where we blew up even more weird stuff, and got to see a few hostages get saved by the precise application of explosives.

Having a specialty on a team whose first letter of its designation also stands for “special” doesn’t mean special squared though. At least not in a good way. On the team everyone is on call constantly, but knew we could take a few nights off here and there. Maybe every month or so. Yeah, the team was cool with us bouncing out of town for a vacation for a few weeks a year. If you’re in town though, better be showing up. In the explosive breaching element, we had to make sure there were always a minimum of us in town, sober and ready to go if a hostage situation popped off. And we also had to rotate through our normal duties of being a regular SWAT guy; being a goon with a gun and going through doors and stuff. So that whole being off call once every month or so? As an explosive breacher, that got stretched further. Fun at first. Stopped being fun about five years in.

I was on year seven during the night in question. As I leaned against that house, I knew I was done. We rotated duties on the explosive breaching element, where certain guys in the group would do various prep work, recon, and planning, and certain guys would be the one placing and initiating the charge. Though I’d been on the team for years, for whatever reason whenever it had been my turn to place and blow a charge, we ended up not needing to. Hostage taker gave up right before we went, or the hostages came running out. One time I was steps away from getting a charge on, when my buddy on the team ended the incident by literally kool-aid maning himself through a sliding glass door just before the bad guy could stab some chick.

This night, everything lined up, and it looked like I was actually going to blow this thing.

As I said above, this should have been one of the most professionally satisfying nights of my career. Years in the making. High stakes. Hell, one of the few times where the job lived up to the stupid BS you see in all those bad cop movies. And I just didn’t give a shit. I wanted to go home. I wanted to go to sleep. I was done.

Had it been one of those stupid cop movies, I would have driven my ferraii to the ocean right after saving the hostages, then thrown my badge into the ocean to the sweet melodies of Ron James Dio.

But alas, this was not that movie. I did my job. Crept up to the door, quietly placed the charge on the door. Backed away, slowly coiling out the little tubing that led from my initiator to the door charge. No contact from the bad guy, time ticked by. Finally we were given the go ahead. I blew the door. It was perfect. Well orchestrated mayhem hit every side of the house, I followed the first six entry guys in. We cleared the whole house in seconds.

Didn’t seem to be anyone here.

Yup, right address. Hmmmmm. WTF?

Well, what happened was the bad guy had spoofed his phone to the house, and had led the fed task force there while he was states away. The lady and her kid were safely sleeping over somewhere else, possibly in cahoots while bad guy gave the feds the slip.

Good for him, I guess. Kind of a let down.

A lot of the guys on the team were pissed at the feds, the bad guy, and life itself for all of us wasting time and resources to damage and clear an empty house. At that point I didn’t even care that we just had wasted hours of our life for nothing. I just wanted to go back to sleep and pretend I was never there. My transition to apathy should have been a big sign that I was burnt out. But then I’m pretty good at ignoring what’s right in front of me.

I stuck around the team for another year or so, dragging out the inevitable due to hard headness. Finally called it quits after they kept promoting me and my job became more management and less door kickey. Went on to do even less fun cop stuff, mostly, until I bounced from the job for good.

There it is. A moment where I knew I was done. And it almost met 80’s cop movie standards for ridiculousness.

Looking back, honestly I wish I just wrapped up the whole cop thing after that and left years earlier than I did. Deep down I knew I was done, it just took more years of clocking in without any fulfillment before I accepted that. I had to accumulate more moments like this one before it finally added up in my head that I needed to leave.

It’s not all bad though, I ground it out to FI, and had some laughs along the way. And though not as exciting, I’m proud of the work I did towards the end. Plus all of it led to me writing this blog post, which like my career, drug on longer than it should. We get to listen to some Dio though.

So there’s that. 🙂