Some people choose public service. Some of us were never given the chance to choose anything else.
The group photo in this piece was taken April 2014 — my first Team Rubicon deployment. Operation Silversides, Muskegon, MI. Bill Rushford, center with that smile, passed just weeks ago in 2026. The man who took that photo — Chris Doing, fellow greyshirt and professional photographer — passed in December 2025. Two brothers. One frame. Both gone too soon. Rest in Peace, Brothers. We’ll take it from here.
I’ve been trying to remember the exact moment I understood what it meant to serve.
I can’t find it. It doesn’t exist as a single moment because it never was one. It was always just the thing I was doing — the thing I was built to do, before I had the vocabulary to describe it.
I was an altar boy in the sixth grade at a Catholic school in Syracuse, N.Y. That was my first uniform. My first structured role in something larger than myself. You showed up. You performed your function. You served the community gathered in that space, and then you went home, and it was enough. You didn’t need a reason beyond the doing of it.
I’ve been doing some version of that ever since. I’m in my seventies now. I’ve been in emergency services for over 50 years. The uniform has changed. The stakes got considerably higher. But the fundamental architecture of the thing — show up, do your function, serve the people in front of you, go home — that has never changed.
This week is Public Service Recognition Week. It’s a good week to stop and say what usually goes unsaid.
Public service has existed, in one form or another, for at least 4,000 years. The earliest forms were military — people standing between their community and whatever was trying to destroy it. Over time, the definition expanded. Roads. Courts. Public health. Education. Emergency response. The work changed, but the covenant stayed the same: some people give a portion of their lives — sometimes all of it — so that the rest of the community can live theirs in relative safety and order.
I’ve lived inside that covenant my entire adult life.
Four years in the United States Coast Guard as a TT2 — Telephone Technician — during the Vietnam Era. You don’t get to choose what era you serve in. You serve in the one you’re handed. I was handed that one. I showed up.
From there, a career in fire and emergency services that I never really retired from, because chiefs don’t retire so much as they shift their weight to a different part of the floor. I’m still the Fire Chief of Stronach Township Fire Department in Manistee County, Michigan. I’m still running calls. I’m still signing board reports, sourcing equipment, managing mutual aid agreements, writing letters to trustees who question the chain of command, and making sure the people on my department have what they need to do the job safely.
I married Sue in 2008 — the great gift of my later life — and she runs a home daycare, twelve children, and families who depend on her consistency and care every single day. She is a public servant too, in every way that matters, even without the title.
And somewhere in between the fire department and the family, I found Team Rubicon.
Over 30 deployments to disasters. Mozambique after Cyclone Idai. Honduras. The Bahamas after Dorian. Mexico. Domestic deployments I couldn’t count easily — floods, fires, tornadoes, structural collapses, humanitarian crises. I’ve served as a medic, a heavy equipment operator, a team leader. I’ve sat in an ICS command post at 0200 trying to figure out how to get resources to a cut-off community, and I’ve been the one with the chainsaw clearing the road so we could get there.
Every single one of those deployments is the same at its core. Someone’s life came apart. You show up. You do your function. You try to leave the place a little better than you found it. You go home.
That’s it. That’s the whole job.
I want to say something to the people out there right now who are doing this work — the firefighters, the paramedics, the dispatchers, the cops, the Coast Guard crews, the public health nurses, the teachers, the social workers, the veterans’ service officers, the weather forecasters, all of it:
What you do matters. It has always mattered. And the fact that it frequently goes unrecognized — that budget cycles treat your gear as a line item and your training as optional and your department as expendable — doesn’t change the fundamental truth of it. The call still comes in. You still answer it.
That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
Public service, at its best, is not transactional. You don’t do it because the pay is great, because it isn’t. You don’t do it because the hours are reasonable, because they aren’t. You do it because somewhere early in your life — maybe in a fire station, maybe in a church, maybe on the deck of a cutter in open water — you understood that some people have to stand in the gap, and you decided you were going to be one of them.
I made that decision in sixth grade without knowing I was making it. An altar boy in a small Catholic school, learning that showing up and performing your function in service to something larger than yourself was its own reward.
Fifty-some years later, I still believe that. More than ever.
To every public servant reading this: thank you. Not just this week. Always.
You are the reason the lights stay on.
Fred R. LaPoint is the Fire Chief and Paramedic of the Stronach Township Fire Department in Manistee County, Michigan. A U.S. Coast Guard veteran (TT2, Vietnam Era) and disaster responder with Team Rubicon with over 30 deployments, he has spent more than 50 years in emergency services. He publishes Behind The Alarm and Guardians of Truth on Substack
This article first appeared in Behind The Alarm, the newsletter of Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic of the Stronach Township Fire Department, on May 3, 2026. Read the original.