One year on my birthday, my bride almost burned down the huge beach house that I designed and built most of with my own hands... still-hot coals in a cheap Weber grill burned through the bottom,. hot coals blown by the wind up against the cypus siding, fire inside the wall... all at 2am... VFD showed up, *asked my permission* to put their axes through that wall (which I encouraged them to do), and put it out. On-site fire chief said another 10-15 minutes the fire would have been up in the enclosed eves, and that would have been all she wrote...
Get this: when they were done, they went to a lot of trouble to clean up the mess they made... including mopping the dang floor to get the footprints up from their ashy boots... which I could not believe...
Anyway, each year they sent out a SASE envelope with a letter in which they'd ask everybody to donate something like $25 or whatever we decided. We'd always give them $75. But when the letter came that year, we gave them $1200, along with a letter recounting what a HUGE diff they made in our lives... In that letter, I explained how they're just better people than I am...breathing smoke and shit to save a house that meant everything to me but meant absolutely nothing to them... except they were our neighbors and members of the VFD.
I never really thought about what firemen do until that happened... they *are* better people than I am...