The word “mantra” may not be part of your day-to-day vocabulary. In fact, the concept may be entirely boring to you. If the mention of a mantra conjures up Asian monks in saffron robes repeating a series of words in very monotonous tones, I can understand why it doesn't mean much to you.

However, a mantra also could describe a particular behavior of football fans, the semi-hysterical pattern of behavior demonstrated by those who feel compelled to stand up, gesture toward the sky and shout at the top of their lungs, “We're number one!” For you see, a mantra is a belief best manifested when spoken aloud and affirmed by the behavior of the person expressing it.

There's a mantra that's beginning to be repeated all over the fire service: “Everybody Goes Home.” It's the battle cry of firefighter safety. It is a mantra because if you truly believe in it, you will behave in a specific way to ensure that everybody does go home. If an organization repeats the mantra over and over and engages in counterproductive personal behaviors, then the mantra becomes empty and irrelevant.

As a supporter of National Fallen Firefighters Foundation Executive Director Ron Siarnicki's efforts to reduce the number of deaths on the fireground, I believe the mantra needs to be supported by a few additional expressions of personal belief on the part of fire officers.

I frequently read military literature to obtain insights on how officers successfully lead people in very stressful circumstances. Let's face it, a young second lieutenant preparing to take a squad into combat in Iraq today wants to come home, too. What is it about belief that allows a person to be a survivor under highly stressful sets of circumstances?

I found a clue in one of the articles. I have since lost track of exactly who coined this phrase, but I have seen it repeated on bulletin boards and in literature involving the U.S. Marine Corps. It's a simple statement: Every Marine who is going into combat deserves to be properly equipped, properly trained and properly led.

What a concept. All Marines — not just the lucky ones, not just the brave ones — have the right to have the necessary equipment, to know how to use it correctly, and to have somebody who is accountable and responsible for supervising their activities.

Could that same set of statements apply to us in the fire service? I believe so. If every fire company in this country was properly equipped, properly trained and properly led, how do you think that would affect the overall probability of a firefighter failing to go home?

Put yourself in the right seat of a piece of a fire apparatus and ask yourself this question: When the overhead door rattles to a stop and the driver/operator puts the vehicle into gear to begin the response to the scene of an emergency, are the firefighters always properly equipped, properly trained and properly led? Anything less than a yes answer in that trifecta is not adequate.

Of course, this is where some of the debate may soon rage. What do we mean by being properly equipped? I can make it pretty straightforward. Having the right tool for doing the job right expresses a fire department's need to have proper tools that are chosen based on the probability that they will be used in the context of that firefighting agency. Not having the proper tools is a severe limitation. Having some tools that are antiquated or improperly maintained is a liability. Equipment that's not up to the expectations of the job results in firefighters trying to do too much with too little and subsequently finding themselves under very unsafe conditions.

Now, what does it mean to be adequately trained? Is it actually possible to train every firefighter on everything every firefighter needs to know? After being in this business for as long as I have, I don't think that's even remotely possible. However, fire departments that don't invest in their training programs have no reason to expect their firefighters to know about everything they're expected to do. I'm not just talking about rookie training where we spend hundreds of hours teaching people how to roll hose and raise a 24-foot ladder. In our business, training is a lifetime activity. If someone were due to retire a year from today in your organization, he still has training needs. In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who has a 24-hour shift left in her fire career before retirement still has some degree of training need.

There are hallmarks of properly trained organizations. One of the first clues that an organization is adequately trained is that people use their tools appropriately, safely and effectively under highly stressful circumstances. Adequately trained individuals don't engage in redundant behavior. They don't engage in unsafe behavior. Adequately trained individuals express a unique balance between being open in communications with their fellow team members so that everybody knows what is going on and being aggressive enough to move forward in a task without waiting to be told what to do.

My visual image of what an adequately trained fire company looks like is very similar to what a NASCAR pit crew looks like when a highly celebrated vehicle comes to a screeching halt in the pits. Everybody who has a job goes to work, and within seconds that same vehicle heads back out on the track, safely racing at hundreds of miles an hour.

The concept of being properly led is somewhat more ambiguous, but it rests on the shoulders of every fire officer in this country. I can't remember the number of times I've had conversations with people about the lack of leadership skills in some of their company officers. Now, I have seen absolutely outstanding fireground officers and I have seen those who are downright dangerous. Sometimes those two groups are within the same firefighting agency. Sometimes they're in the same fire station but on different shifts. Being well-led isn't something that you can impose on an organization. It's created by the collective moral compass of those who fill the role of fire officer.

While working on a project associated with evaluating fireground operations, I recently witnessed a very large number of fire officers all performing the exact same skill. I was shocked to realize that being a good officer or a bad officer wasn't a function of experience; it was related to a person's willingness to take accountability for what was happening on the fireground. Good officers get it. Bad officers don't. Mediocre officers make it up as they go along. In other words, being well-led is based not on the presence of an officer but rather on the performance of that officer.

Again, put yourself in the role of an individual responsible for what happens on the fireground. Can you honestly say that your people are properly equipped, properly trained and properly led? If the answer is yes, I would hope that you would be able to support that answer by talking about specifics. Is your equipment not just available but well-maintained? Is your equipment not just available but appropriate for the task at hand? Is your equipment not just available but as close to state of the art as you can possibly get? Is your equipment properly being integrated with the training program?

As we ask the question of how well-trained our people are, can we honestly say everybody knows his or her job? Moreover, does everybody know enough about everybody else's job so that the team looks like a NASCAR pit crew?

The hardest question to answer is whether your people are being properly led. Returning to the military metaphor, I have read a lot of work by Col. David Hackworth, one of the most highly decorated heroes of the Vietnam War. His contention was that he wanted to make sure his troops were so well-trained that they performed in combat exactly as they were led to believe that they should perform in the training environment. His mantra was, “Don't practice to make perfect, practice to make permanent.”

However, I'm enough of a realist to know that the fire service and its capacity to perform are on a bell curve like everything else. If we took the total number of U.S. fire companies and placed them on a bell curve of being properly equipped, we would find some really state-of-the-art fire departments and some that are living in the dark ages. If we attempted to distribute information on how well-trained fire departments are, we would see a similar bell curve. Trying to determine whether a department is well-led might be very argumentative, but the reality is that there probably will be a bell curve nonetheless. In the context of a standard distribution curve, we should be most concerned about the middle ground. How well-equipped, how well-trained and how well-led is the average fire department going to the average emergency on the average day?

One of my first observations after looking at the IAFC's recently published information on near-misses was that one of the most significant contributing factors to a near-miss was decisions made by individuals. Well, duh! I wonder how long it's going to take for us to figure out that what makes for unsafe conditions is people doing unsafe things while thinking they're going to get away with it.

To bring this discussion home, I would like to return to the goals of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. We do want everybody to go home. We want everybody who enters this business to retire from it. We don't need to go to any more funerals. We don't need to lament the fact that we have lost “another one of our own.”

I have no doubt that we will continue to lose people. But I would submit that in those fire departments with a high degree of confidence that their members are properly equipped, properly trained and properly led, the probability of that happening is going to be very remote. You know who you are!

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.