I saw a documentary on hazing at fraternities on college campuses recently. The hazing was said to give pledges something in common w/their frat brothers, a common adverse situation they all endured to show they were capable of being a brother. During the pledge period the prospective members must endure a series of mental & physical tests. To me it just looked like sadism & on occasion it led to death & jail time for the “elders” who did the hazing.

Couldn’t they come up w/ something constructive for the pledges to do? How about a fund raiser for the local fire department? (A little self-serving, but you get the point.) Then I thought about the concept of enduring adversity to bind pledges to the group. Are there similarities between these young men & women & a “red ass” on the NFD? I did call the first series of books The Firehouse Fraternity for a reason.

We don’t do it the same way. In all the interviews I did there was only one instance of hazing mentioned & that was quickly squashed when the BC heard about it. The vast majority of firefighters were welcomed into the firehouse & ended up under the wing of a senior firefighter. Some had to prove they could do the job before that, but once they showed they were up to it there was at least acceptance.

How does the fire department bind its “pledges” to the group? The way I see it, our “pledges” (red asses) go through what is basically a three-stage process to become full-fledged members of the Firehouse Fraternity. Just as these fraternity pledges do, all members must go through a difficult trial to even be considered. It’s called a civil service test. First you must prove you are smart enough to be trained as a firefighter. That’s the written portion. If you pass that, you move onto the physical where the candidate (pledge) has to demonstrate the physical attributes DOP has decided are needed to do the job of firefighter.

Often this is where you separate the men from the boys (and now the women from the girls).

Back in the day, the physical portion of the test was calisthenics & the one exercise that bound those taking the test was the kazatskies. In more recent tests, it was the obstacle course. Preparation for the kazatskies required physical training. Only those in the best physical shape made it. The obstacle course took practice. It was timed & a tenth of a second could be the difference between being appointed or trying again on the next test.

After proving you were worthy of consideration, you raised your right hand, took the pledge to the protect lives, property, and the constitution, and started training either at the Academy or (back in the day) in the firehouse until they had enough newly appointed men to run an academy class. The rigor of training at the Academy varied depending on the era you were appointed. When the Academy was on 18th Avenue, it was more of a pencil & paper exercise w/companies coming to demonstrate how to throw ladders or stretch hose. When the use of masks became accepted, mask training was added. Then there was the jump into the net for some classes. After the opening of the Academy on Jersey Street in 1974, live burns were added to the curriculum & things got a little “hotter”. The length of time training varied. By the modern era, the State had established standards for firefighter training & the curriculum had been expanded to include Haz-mat, terrorism, Incident Command, and assorted other topics not even dreamed of back in the day. All of this rendered the recruits “trainable.” Now they had to move onto the last stage of being a fire department “pledge”, the probationary period.

This is where you earn your seat at the table. Where you learn to be a firefighter. Where you become part of the greatest brotherhood in the world. As I said, most guys walked into the firehouse & were welcomed. Some really had to earn it, but after proving themselves, were accepted. Just as fraternity brothers are said to remain frat brothers for life, so once a firefighter, always a firefighter.

What struck me about this documentary was the number of deaths among pledges & how unnecessary they are. The fire service is by definition dangerous. We are the only service that fights a force of nature. You can’t call in a negotiating team to talk a fire out of a hostage situation. If the fire is holding people as “hostages”, it is our job to fight to release those people. Even though the number of firefighter deaths during training does normally exceed the number of deaths among frat pledges, in 1984 the number of hazing deaths equaled the number of firefighter deaths. The firefighter deaths occurred while training for a higher purpose. The frat pledge deaths? What a waste.