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Imagine

  • Published
  • By Stu Wyatt
  • 628th Air Base Wing safety office
JOINT BASE CHARLESTON, S.C. --  Just imagine you are in a different country, with different laws and customs. You are with a group, out late at night. Collectively you decide to go to an all-hours club across the street from your hotel. In order to reach your destination you have to cross a wide, six-lane roadway. There are barriers on both sides to keep pedestrians off the road, however, there is a pedestrian tunnel under the roadway. The pedestrian tunnel is unlit and you suspect it may be unsafe. What do you do? Take the pedestrian tunnel, jump the fence, call a cab or possibly just go to your room?

Imagine you grew up in a town only three hours from your current work location. You are released from duty early and decide to ride your motorcycle home. When you get home you go to a friend's house and start to party. At midnight you stop drinking and try to call for someone to pick you up. Your friend can't come right then, so you just hang out with your friends. At around 2 a.m. you get a call from your significant other. Your friends notice that you appear upset. At 3:30 a.m. you get another call from her and she asks you to come over. It has been three-and-a-half hours since you quit drinking. Do you ride your bike or stay put?

Imagine you are at home for the Fourth of July. You regularly go home to visit and you are intimately familiar with the roads. You have been drinking at your cousin's house most of the day. It is near dusk and you plan to shoot fireworks off at a nearby location, 10 miles away. Do you drive, wait for a ride or just stay there?

Imagine you were having drinks at a nearby tavern. Your girlfriend works at the establishment. You have not been getting along well lately. While having drinks you find pictures posted on the Web of your girlfriend with someone else. You are both angry and a bit drunk; you want to confront your girlfriend. While you have a place at the dorms, you have also been living together off and on. You go to the dorms and can stay the night, but you really want to confront her when she gets off work. What do you do? Stay at the dorms and sleep it off, then confront her when sober or get in your car and try to follow her home?

All of these are real life scenarios resulting in the death of a military member. In each of these situations the member made the wrong choice and it cost them their lives. Their death devastated family and friends. Some families may never recover from these events. None of these people were bad in anyway, they just made a bad decision. Every decision, no matter how small, has consequences.

If you try to walk across a high-speed motorway you may make it, or you may be ran over and killed by car. If you get on a bike after being up all day and having a few drinks, you may make your destination, but that is not very likely. If you drive after drinking you may not get caught; you may get a DUI; or you may kill someone else or kill yourself.

Imagine if you made the right choice and lived another day.