PERU — The piercing distress signal of a firefighter's Personal Alert Safety System (PASS) cannot be replicated here.

But its distinctive and ominous sound is known to Thomas A. Middleton, an assistant fire marshal and public information officer for the Burlington Fire Department.

On Sept. 10, 2001, he was on shift at Engine 3, the best engine company in Vermont. The next morning, he was upstairs at home, catching some ZZZ's, when his wife, Lisa, called him downstairs.

She said, "We are being attacked."

"We watched the second tower fall," said Middleton, who spoke recently at a Veterans Day event sponsored by Peru Free Library.

While watching the news coverage, he heard PASSes cutting through the background noise.

"It was firefighters in distress. A lot of firefighters were down. It was the largest loss of life in the history of the American fire service. It was also the greatest single rescue. Three-hundred-and-forty-three firefighters gave their lives so others could live. To see so many firefighters struck down in a single blow, I wanted to go after (the terrorists) and get revenge."

ACTIVATED
The Vermont National Guardsman writes about his trials of payback and faith in his memoir, "Saber's Edge: A Combat Medic in Ramadi, Iraq" published by University Press of New England.

As a combat medic, he served with Task Force Saber from 2004 to 2005. His Swanton tank brigade — HHC 1st Battalion, 172nd Armor — was activated Jan. 19, 2005. The troops trained at Camp Shelby, Miss., before shipping out to Ramadi, Iraq, where they became part of 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 28th Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard.

In his book, Middleton writes:

"My father was a World War II Navy veteran, and my uncle began as a naval corpsman before Pearl Harbor, and served about the USS New York in the North Atlantic, and was later a lieutenant during the Korean War. Both students of history and political science in high school, my brother Frank and I enlisted as medics in the Army Reserve during the Cold War, never dreaming in a million years that one of us might someday be called up."

Middleton's foundation as a combat medic was forged in Chazy, where he grew up.

On his 17th birthday, he walked into a Plattsburgh recruiter's office and joined the Army Reserve. At 18, he was a member of Chazy Fire Volunteer Department and became an emergency medical technician (EMT). In 1986, he graduated from Chazy Central Rural School.

Before he crossed the lake to join the Burlington Fire Department in 1992, Middleton had studied nursing at Clinton Community College, switched programs to earn an associate degree in humanities and attended Plattsburgh State.

In Vermont, he married an emergency-room nurse, started a family and finished his nursing degree in 1999. God was great. Life was good until Sept. 11, 2001. The next several years, he struggled to balance righteous indignation with a desire for revenge.

"In the rules of war, you take a life to save a life."

RELIEF MEDIC
He would do so. Twenty years of deer hunting made him an excellent shot.

"In 2004, Ramadi wasn't that bad. Fallujah was the worst place on Earth," he said. "The Marines and Army pushed a lot of bad guys out of Fallujah. They fled to the west and settled in Ramadi."

Initially, he was assigned to the main battalion aid station before he asked to be transferred to the line as a relief medic.

He writes:

"Sometimes I stayed with the same platoon for several weeks while their medic was on leave. For the most part, though, I walked alone. I made many casual acquaintances in the troops I worked with, but only a few close friends. It was a lonely existence, but this was a blessing in many ways. I felt their losses less when our men were killed or maimed. I remember reading about troops in Vietnam, and how they would avoid friends so they would not suffer as much when their buddies died. I guess it worked for me, too."

Six days a week he was in combat and on the Sabbath, he attended chapel — an air-conditioned tent with a pallet-and-plywood floor. Middleton served as a eucharistic minister. His parents, Dr. John and Claire Middleton, conservative Catholics, had instilled in their children a great respect for the sanctity of human life.

He writes:

"Some of my fellow soldiers would wonder how a religious medic with strong moral principles could be so comfortable with killing another. After all, I was supposed to save lives, not take them. How could I profess a faith that seemed incompatible with my actions? Some of them failed to grasp the distinctions between murder and combat."

SIMPLE PRAYER
Iraq tested him and his faith to his core.

"I always clung to our faith. I prayed a lot for the soldiers. I made it a habit to pray before I went out. I prayed the Act of Contrition."

In Tameem, two Iraqis, possibly insurgents, were shot by "Crazy Abdullah." Platoon B had given him an old camper, and the two men wanted it. After shooting the men, Crazy Abdullah fired flares to summon help. When Middleton arrived, one man was dead. He tried to save the second.

He writes:

"Our ambulance was still at least ten minutes away when he lost his pulse. I knew there was no saving him, so I cancelled the ambulance and said a simple prayer for him. It was not unusual for me to say a brief prayer for the dying, but our Iraqi interpreter was very impressed. He thought it was especially generous for a Christian to pray for a Muslim, and later told me how much it meant to him that we would work so hard to save this man who might be an insurgent, and we would even pray for him when he died."

"One day, we were playing sacred music at Catholic and Protestant services, and the next day I was back in the fighting," Middleton said. "It's an interesting collision of the saving of souls and the taking of lives."

E-mail Robin Caudell at: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com