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Usually, being a firefighter took precedence. But last summer, according to his father, Slutman began traveling overseas to train for deployment in Afghanistan. He arrived there in the fall.
He was scheduled to return home to his wife and three children by the end of April, his father, Fletcher Slutman, said Tuesday. Instead, on Monday at about 8:30 p.m., two Marines in brown uniforms arrived on Fletcher Slutman’s doorstep in York, Pennsylvania.
“Would you like to invite your wife in?” one asked him, after they had settled around the kitchen table. Slutman shook his head no. The Marine shook his head yes.
Slutman was told that his son was one of three Marines killed Monday in Afghanistan when a roadside bomb exploded near their military convoy. An Afghan contractor and several civilians were injured.
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The death of Christopher Slutman, 43, highlighted a tradition of firefighters serving also in the military. Currently, 73 New York Fire Department personnel are on extended military orders in branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, serving around the world. The department said 1,425 of its members are military reservists or veterans.
A 15-year veteran in the New York City Fire Department, Slutman served at Ladder Company 27 in the South Bronx before his recent deployment, and had won a Fire Chief’s Association Memorial Medal in 2014 for rescuing a woman from a burning apartment.
On Tuesday, he was remembered by Mayor Bill de Blasio as an “American hero, a New York hero.”
His friends said they knew other firefighters who, like Slutman, felt the need to serve more, particularly after Sept. 11.
“Our job already is pretty dangerous, so for anybody to take on kind of a second career that would be as dangerous, or even more, is slightly mind-boggling,” said Michael Seilhamer, who said he worked with Slutman as a volunteer firefighter in Maryland and rented a beach house with him in Delaware for years.
“But that’s the kind of person Chris was,” he said. “He didn’t shy away from anything like that.”
Slutman is survived by his wife, Shannon, and three daughters — McKenna, Kenley and Weslynn — who live in Delaware. Slutman stayed in New York when he had his shifts, and returned to his family during his off days, according to his father. He also volunteered as a firefighter at the Kentland Volunteer Fire Department in Prince George’s County, Maryland, near where he grew up.
Oleg Pelekhaty, a chief of the Kentland Volunteer Fire Department, said in a statement that Slutman had joined his department in February 2000 and had risen to the rank of captain.
“Through this trying time, we will remember Chris for the father, husband, brother, son, and friend that he was, the moral character he displayed daily, and the courage and conviction to serve his fellow Americans, both at home and abroad,” Pelekhaty wrote on Facebook.
Fletcher Slutman said his son joined the reserves about 14 years ago, and had deployed to Afghanistan last fall after having been deployed in Iraq about five years ago.
Christopher Slutman, who was a staff sergeant in a Marines reserve unit based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is the fourth New York firefighter to die while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan since the United States began military action in the region in 2003.
U.S. military officials said Slutman and the two other Marines killed Monday had been in a convoy near Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, when it was struck by the roadside bomb. A U.S. military official told The New York Times that the Taliban was believed to be behind the attack. The fallen service members had not yet been publicly identified, in accordance with Department of Defense policy.
At the Engine 46, Ladder 27 firehouse on Washington Avenue and the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Claremont section of the Bronx on Tuesday, an American flag waved at half-staff under a gray sky.
At around 5 p.m., firefighters, dressed in yellow and black jackets, spilled out of the firehouse doors.
Three firefighters in full gear, who had been raised in the bucket of a fire engine, hung a banner in Slutman’s honor on the top of the front of the firehouse. A bright red Marine Corps flag waved just behind them.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.