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Chris Fields, the firefighter in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, spent thirty-one years with the Oklahoma City Fire Department and now speaks nationally about trauma and recovery.

Short

Chris Fields served thirty-one years with the Oklahoma City Fire Department, retiring as a major in 2017. He was the firefighter photographed carrying one-year-old Baylee Almon from the rubble of the April 19, 1995 bombing, an image that ran in more than two hundred newspapers across thirty countries. What it did not show was the twenty years of PTSD, anxiety and cumulative trauma that followed, a near-fatal overdose, and the long road back. Today he is a peer support team member with the Oklahoma First Responder Wellness Division, co-hosts the podcast Trauma Behind the Badge, and speaks to roughly five thousand responders, families and clinicians each year.

Full

Chris Fields is a retired thirty-one-year veteran of the Oklahoma City Fire Department and the firefighter photographed carrying baby Baylee Almon from the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph went worldwide overnight and was published in more than two hundred newspapers across thirty countries. What the photograph, and the hundreds of interviews that followed, never showed was what came after: twenty years of cumulative trauma, a near-fatal overdose, a seventeen-month separation from his family, and a long road back to wholeness.

Since retiring in 2017 he has dedicated his life to helping first responders, and anyone carrying trauma, avoid the mistakes he made. As a peer team member for the Oklahoma First Responder Wellness Division he provides peer support and critical incident stress management to firefighters and other first responders across the state. He speaks at about a dozen events a year, reaching roughly five thousand first responders, their families and mental health professionals. From 2018 to 2021 he spoke at twenty-four to thirty events a year, reaching fifteen to twenty thousand people annually, before scaling back to focus on deeper work.

Fields serves on the advisory boards of the Survive First Foundation and the Quell Foundation, whose award-winning documentary Lift the Mask: Sound the Alarm features him as one of its subjects. He co-hosts the podcast Trauma Behind the Badge. He lives in Oklahoma City with his wife Cheryl. They have two sons. He does not call himself a hero. He calls himself a survivor who wants anyone carrying trauma to know they do not have to wait until the wheels fall off to ask for help.