A Career at Home, Then a Call Abroad

42 Years in Firefighting Pay Off in Iraq Mission

"Do you like sand?"

It was 7:30 the morning of July 28, 2003, and Monte Fitch was three years into retirement from Montgomery County's fire department when his friend and colleague Scott Graham posed the question over the telephone.

"Yeah, I like sand," Fitch recalls responding, not sure whether Graham was joking. "We got a place at the beach . . . "

"No, not that kind of sand," Graham said.

Seven weeks later, Fitch was overseas for the first time in his life.

A six-month tour of duty as a civilian fire administrator transformed Fitch's calm life as a retiree into a perilous and heady brush with the forces that shape history. Working for the Coalition Provisional Authority to restore Iraq's fire service brought Fitch back into the fray of rescue work, back into the close contact with unexpected injury and death that he knew from fighting fires for more than four decades.

Reconstructing Iraq's gutted fire service proved a task, still unfinished, that would tax Fitch's 42 years of experience in Montgomery. Six months of wearing a flak jacket and helmet to work would turn a retired assistant chief of a suburban jurisdiction of 925,000 into an administrator in a war-ravaged nation of 24.6 million.

After three years away from firefighting, Fitch, 60, was eager to get back -- especially after seeing news footage of Iraqi rescuers, wearing insufficient gear, picking through the wreckage following the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Iraq weeks before he departed for the Middle East.

"You want to be there right now when you see something like that," Fitch said. "You want to be there on the scene."

It was just after 6 in the morning on Oct. 26, 20 days into Fitch's tour in Baghdad, when a barrage of rockets ripped through the 14-story al-Rashid Hotel, where he was living.

The blasts jarred him out of bed. He stumbled over shattered glass, put on a Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service T-shirt and headed out the door.

It took a little while for the training to kick in, Fitch said, but after descending a couple of flights of stairs, he remembered his job.

"I can't leave," he remembers thinking.

He raced back up the marble stairs, which were splattered with blood, and helped pull several people to safety. In the end, 17 were injured and one U.S. Army colonel was killed.