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On the gray Friday after Thanksgiving, 24 hours before standing in formation in the Fort Bragg rain with his 82nd Airborne company bound for Iraq, Pfc. Clay Hartsook dangled his cowhide boots from the counter of the firehouse kitchen and took a last look around.

Other than his mother’s house in “The Ridge,” this is the only place Hartsook, 22, ever called home. A junior firefighter in training at 15, he went on his first fire call at 18, and became a volunteer fireman in exchange for room and board at Station 51, across from Northwest High.

Since the war started, three of his Northwest classmates have been killed in Iraq: his friends Andrew Russoli and Adam Lucas, and Nicholas Gibbs, who he didn’t know as well.

With that said, and with Hartsook’s pregnant wife spending the few dwindling hours left with him in the big TV room at the firehouse, why volunteer for the Army? And why the 82nd?

Hartsook has three reasons, spelled out clearly as a 911 call piped through the firehouse speakers in the phonetic alphabet of an emergency dispatch.

Andrew. Adam. Nicholas.

Some fires, in the end, must be left to burn. The 96-year-old house on Haw River Road was such a fire.

The fine, hand-built wooden home was one of those disappearing throwbacks to an Oak Ridge that predated subdivisions and highway cloverleafs, and even predated the Oak Ridge Fire Department itself.

In 1954, after too many houses and general stores burned down here in the sticks, a group of businessmen, farmers and textile workers banded together to form the volunteer fire company, passing the hat to buy a ’53 Chevrolet truck, which a local welder worked late nights to convert.

But there was a joke about volunteer RFDs of the era, an era in which Clay Hartsook’s grandfathers on both sides were volunteer firemen. The joke contained a kernel of truth: “Save the chimneys!” the motto went.

“The population was so sparse that fires didn’t get called in until they were fully involved,” recalls Oak Ridge Fire Chief Bill Newman, whose father, was a founding member. “So by the time you got there, about all that was left was the chimneys.”

Now, the house on Haw River Road was a whole different ball game, a different century in fire fighting.

This was, after all, 2006. Firefighters today wear oxygen bottles and go to school for 18 months to be certified as EMTs. Gone are the days of jumping on the fire truck’s tailboard and hanging on for dear life — thanks to OSHA — a memory almost as distant as bucket brigades and trampolines used to catch survivors leaping from upstairs windows.

In hindsight, however, Hartsook, his Uncle Steve Simmons and the other firefighters of Stations 51 and 15 could have used a trampoline on the gusty February night when they were the first engine companies at the six-alarm fire on Haw River Road.

The house was billowing smoke, engulfed in flames by the time the firefighters went in, put the first-floor blaze out and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Inexplicably, the first floor then reignited with a roar, trapping two teams of firemen upstairs.

The fire was now behind them, cutting them off in a wall of backdraft. Hartsook’s job that night was to keep checking the hose — for firefighters, the lifeline — and Hartsook waited on the ground, in case backup was needed.

The man who had disappeared leading the teams inside the house was Hartsook’s mentor, Assistant Chief Sam Anders. When Hartsook’s parents divorced, Anders had taken the teen under his wing, driven him to the junior firefighter meetings, taken charge of his training, was best man at his wedding.

So as Hartsook stood below and felt the wind picking up, stoking the blaze like a bellows, he pulled the water hose as a signal to Anders.The hose was slack and he realized: The fire was so hot inside the house that it had melted the double-jacketed polymer hose in two. Hartsook was holding a severed lifeline in his hands.

Sam!

Instinctively, Hartsook craned his neck to the second floor, nothing but black soot. Out a side window tumbled seven of the eight trapped firemen. All but Sam Anders. Hartsook and a rescue team raced into the collapsing house. There was no trace of Anders.

Meanwhile, there was commotion outside. Through the oily black smoke from burning shingles, Colfax engine company had spotted a flashlight shining through the soot.

It was attached to a fireman — Anders, who had fled through an upstairs front window, fallen spread-eagle on his back and was now dangling on the steep tin roof, looking back at the burning house.

Colfax company raised a ladder and picked Anders off the roof before it caved in. Chief Newman made a command decision. Let this one burn.

It is hard to say, exactly, what goes through a firefighter’s brain when that distinctive high radio frequency, followed by a low tone, comes over the scanner, then opens the channel.

“Station 15, for a 10-50 at Linville Road and Highway 150...”

Whatever the transformation those tones from the scanner brought about, Clay Hartsook wanted in. One minute his grandfathers, his uncles and their friends would be shooting pool or grilling hot dogs, then everything would change with a call.

“Seeing the trucks leave, lights and sirens going, seeing people go from a calm everyday thing to 110 percent,” he says, “that was for me.”

Even older firemen such as Roger Howerton, who joined Oak Ridge in 1958 and answered calls for 40 years, still confess to a tingle of adrenaline when they hear the station’s call over the scanner, or see a company engine go by.

But what captivates a child in a toy helmet or excites a teenager craving adventure is not what makes a man join the 82nd Airborne, following three classmates killed in battle.

At age 21, Hartsook, an only child, announced to his mother that he was joining the Army, wanting to “kick it up a notch.” His mother, having been a Special Forces wife, knew the questions to ask.

What did he sign up for?

“Infantry.”

Direct or indirect?

“Direct.”

Clay, why?

“Somebody’s gotta do it.”

So off he went to Fort Benning, Ga., where he was a Distinguished Honor Graduate in boot camp, put in for airborne, and is, at this writing, en route to Iraq, to be security detail for the Third Brigade Command.

And like climbing the stairs of a 96-year-old house engulfed in flames, it sounds like a dangerous job.

But that’s where the training comes in. Pfc. Clay Hartsook knows the emergency dispatch by heart, from the alpha to the omega.
And once the call for backup comes in, there is not a hose man in the world who has ever been able to roll over and go back to sleep.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com