The Woods. A Man Missing. A Short Search.

All of these calls are the same. Names, details, and actions have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

I had been stationed in Germany for around four months when I first started to heed the words a flight chief told me when I arrived.

“You’re gonna see some stuff out here. We deal with real things in this squadron. On a long enough time scale you’re gonna bear witness to about as much as regular beat cops in the city”

Griffith was an advisor of sorts that kept me on a straight path during my entire tenure working under him. He saw that I was dedicated to the job and wanted to do well. In the short time I had been in that unit, I had already responded to multiple assaults, attempted homicides and solved one or two fraud cases. Compared to the rest of the Squadron this was slight work and nothing to be too proud of.

The pride is earned.

After about a month on the job you start to get into a flow. You get a call. You go to that call. You do your best not to mess up. You do your best not to get killed. For the most part it’s an exercise in every single life skill. I had dealt with wife-beaters who claim their wife “deserved it” because she brought home the wrong Cheerios from the Commissary.

Every call is the same after a while. You dread hearing a dispatch from the radio because you know it’s interrupting whatever you were doing and you hate that the next few hours of your life are going to be you solving somebody else’s problems. Things are a bit different when it’s a suicide call though.

These calls come with a familiar sense of calm that borders on apathy for those with a penchant for black humor. When you show up, the victim is either dead or alive. There’s the nerve racking possibility that you may have to talk somebody off a ledge, and even worse, the possibility of calling for EMT’s. Either sucks but thinking about it too hard doesn’t do anything but spin the wheels in your head.

I was rolling with someone I had partnered with many times. For privacy’s sake we’ll call him Winfield. Winfield was my acting supervisor as at the time I didn’t have one assigned to me. A tall, talkative and tense type that had been in the unit for four years and couldn’t help reminding me of it. He had done two tours in Iraq back when Iraq when was still a war we were fighting in, and had mastered the art of making an entire eight hour shift the most nerve wracking event one could imagine. For Winfield danger was around every corner, becoming complacent meant instant death, and making small errors on paperwork was tantamount to taking a spray can to the Constitution.

The dusty, garbled call came in around 1900 hours. Five whole hours into shift. Nothing else had happened that day so we were both understandably worried.

“Metro 5, this is Metro, stand-by for dispatch”

We pulled over on some tree lined road next to a village I can’t recall or pronounce. We waited a few seconds to hear what the next part of the message would be. With the length of time that was passing we were assuming there was a homicide in progress; something our dispatcher would have to keep gathering details on as he organized patrols to respond. Instead we were told to call the office.

“There’s a wife on the line — says her husband said some pretty strange things and wrote a note. He took the car and drove off about thirty minutes ago. She doesn’t know where he went.”

What are we supposed to do with that? Our patrol area is the size of Rhode Island and Germany is roughly the size of Texas. Where are we even supposed to start?

We got as many details off the call as possible. I’ll tell you this right now: talking to a distraught wife whose husband is gesturing suicide creates emotions that can’t be replicated under any circumstances.

he goal simply becomes saving a life. We start with relevant details. What the man is wearing, whether he’s on any drugs or substances, what he’s driving. Wife didn’t see what direction he went in when he drove off base so that’s a dead end. Dispatch activates all patrols to start looking, they aren’t doing anything anyway. We start in the areas immediately North of our base. It’s a typically German hilly and heavily forested expanse of land flecked with medium sized villages that break up the landscape.

In the absence of a lead, you have to start consolidating your resources. What they don’t tell you on the travel guides is that Europe has one of the most intricate traffic cam systems in the world. They can track a car the entire length of the Autobahn down to within a few kilometers. You’re out of luck if the car takes to the country backroads but if they board a major roadway there’s a record somewhere. A quick call to the authorities allowed us to flag the guys license plate which at minimum would give us a direction of travel. Once the plate stops coming back in the records we’d know a general area of where he stopped or at least had yet to reach.

Turns out we were close.

You can’t get far on windy roads. His car was parked on a hiking trailhead about one hundred yards from the roadway. Engine still warm. Keys on the drivers seat. Lights still on. We started calling his name into the now dark, lightly fogged woods. Calling for a needle in a sea of square kilometer haystacks.

We walked up the trail for what seemed like an hour. Aware that every passing minute without picking up on where he might be meant we would not be finding him alive. Or at all. We had done as much detective work as we could. We found the car in a never ending rural expanse. Even then we worried together that we wouldn’t find him living.

In a small clearing near the top of a hill, we found the man himself. We found a man who had earlier intended to take his own life this night. Who drove his car home from work, kissed the kids, wrote a note, and disappeared never intending to return home. Consciously making the selfish decision to leave this world behind for whatever legitimate reasons he might have decided on.

We found that man and we found him alive. Standing on a rock leaned against the bark of twisted old oak. Still in uniform. Still breathing. I don’t think at that moment what I felt could be described as relief. It fluctuates between that feeling of a hunter with only thirty minutes left before nightfall to catch his prey, and a doctor with only minutes to perform a lifesaving operation. We talked him down after a few brief minutes and I don’t remember specifically what I said but it worked. How he was going to do it we didn’t know. We didn’t care. That’s not something you ask.

After the stress and elation was finished we returned to station. It was already forty-five minutes past the end of our shift and oncoming was calling for us. The man was okay after we got him up to a hospital to have him looked at. After that night I never saw him again.

Around six months later I was shopping at the commissary and a child came up to me and pulled my pant leg, thanked me for saving his dads life, then ran away.