A robust man with a buzz cut and a very serious countenance, Metro Officer Dave Corbin listened to the sheriff recount before the crowd of family and fellow officers how a residence on Sloan Lane and Sahara Avenue went up in flames on March 5, 2006. He listened as Sheriff Doug Gillespie, who had not been present at the fire, spoke in a deliberate, epic tone about the way Corbin had evacuated the neighbors and entered the house, crawled through the black smoke, braved the orange flames and escorted the house’s lone remaining occupant—an endangered child—to safety.
“If that’s not an act of heroism, I don’t know what is,” the sheriff said. And then he called Corbin up, to receive what he deserved: recognition and honor: a medal.
Corbin, of course, obliged; and as he approached the sheriff—in front of his peers and the families and the many, many flashing cameras—the officer felt a loss of ease. An awkwardness.
Not that anything the sheriff had said was untrue. Corbin had indeed, in the last hour of his shift, 10:30 p.m. to 8 a.m., seen the house burning, controlled the situation, entered the nasty, nasty black smoke, flirted with the hellish flames and pulled the child out. It was only that Corbin had always considered it mere duty, what he’d done. And that’s why, after going home to sleep that March 5 and returning to work his next shift, 10:30 p.m. to 8 a.m., he didn’t think again of the incident. Nor would he until the department told him he was to be honored for his service.
And so now the spotlight was on him, for doing what he feels any other officer would have done.
“It’s a little uncomfortable,” he told me afterward. He seemed restive. “But I guess it gives people encouragement, and that’s good.”