I wanna be a fireman! Published Oct. 9, 2008 By By Col. Bill Malec AMC HQ Airspace and Airfield Operations chief SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. -- Long before 9-11, firemen were heroes in the young eyes of many of America's youth. An adventure my older brother had in my youth made me one of them. My brother Joe was a rather adventurous type, always pushing the envelope on the edge somewhere between safety and insanity. I remember thinking something like that when one hot sunny summer day he declared that he was going to climb the tallest pine tree in the woods. I was only a single-digit midget back then but I wasn't too young to know that the great pine tree that towered over the rest was too big and too tall for anyone, and surely not a pre-teen, to climb. That didn't stop Joe. He led his friend Jerry Hunter, with me in tow, deep into the woods toward what seemed to us to be the granddaddy of all trees. As we approached its base we found it to be so big around that even if the three of us had joined hands and stretched around it we would not have completely encircled it. Adding to its challenge was the lack of low hanging branches with which to begin the ascent. Not to worry. Joe found another pine tree, felled by lightning or old age, propped up against Old Granddaddy around twenty feet above the ground. It looked from our vantage point below that it would be clear sailing to the top once the crossover was made. Off Joe went, as Jerry and I watched with growing lumps in our throats. He first scurried up the smaller tree like a monkey, quickly gaining contact with the larger and then gingerly beginning his climb towards the top. Up Joe went until we all but lost visual contact as he worked through the canopy high above. We could barely make him out as he approached the underside a very rudimentary tree house built by the neighborhood archrivals, the McCracken boys. The tree house was little more than a platform and as he began to make his way up and over it we heard a loud "snap" even from our position far below. Well my brother Joe was always the clown so when he yelled down that he was "caught in a trap" high above us we first thought, "What a joker"! As the shadows in the woods lengthened, Joe held fast to his "trapped" story, we began to worry. Finally largely convinced, we left Joe hanging, no pun intended, and raced through the woods to get help. We arrived at Jerry's house to find our mothers, both heavy with child, sitting in the swing on Hunter's porch. What do two pregnant women do when they're without their men in an emergency? They just called the telephone operator and asked for help to come quick! Well, I grew up in small town America so our fire department was an all-volunteer force. What they didn't possess in the way of formal training they made up for with sheer gusto and we soon heard the sirens in the distance coming ever closer. The fire trucks took the dirt road past Tomcho's farm and got as close to the woods as they could. Then they unloaded their tallest ladder and headed into the thicket on foot, led by fire chief, Francis "Poke" Wojteny. They labored long and hard, dragging pieces of ladder across the creek and up the hill through the thick brush as darkness approached and spurred them on. Word of the rescue soon got out. On the front page of the next week's local paper there was my brother, toothy grin and short haired from his grade school picture, accompanied by an article covering the big event. The story said he'd been caught in a spring-loaded trap, which slammed down on his hand when he reached over the edge of the platform. The McCracken boys said they had put it there for protection from unwelcome "intruders" which I guess included my brother Joe. The paper said it was Poke himself who made that climb up Old Granddaddy in near-darkness to rescue Joe and bring him back to earth. Most people probably think of firemen fighting fires and making rescues from towering infernos. I just think of Poke and his fellow volunteers just being there to help, no matter the challenge.