So I definitely take great pride in wearing both uniforms.

I didn't think I would still be in the Marine Corps after 24 years.

There aren't very many of us on the fire department that are still actively in the reserves.

In the Marine Corps, I'm master gunnery sergeant, Nicholas Darcy.

I've been in the Marines for 24 years now.

Did five years active duty, been in the reserves ever since, and then on the fire department, it's firefighter paramedic, and I've been on the fire department since 2007, so about almost going on 19 years.

My name's David Arriano, an inspector with the Los Angeles City Fire Department.

I've been on the fire department for 22 years.

I'm also in the United States of Marines Reserves.

I hold the rank of master gunnery sergeant.

I've been faithfully serving for the past 28 years.

I was born in East LA.

My dad was LAPD, so kind of a hard individual.

His dad, my grandpa was a World War II Marine who was a Purple Heart recipient during the Battle of the Pacific and specifically on the island of Guadalcanal.

So he was brought up by a Marine, and he pretty much volunt my brother and I that we were going to be going to the Marine Corps after we graduated from high school.

My name is Jason Knoll.

I'm a master gunnery sergeant retired in the United States Marine Corps.

I did 29 years of service with the Marine Corps.

I've been with the Los Angeles Fire Department for about 17 years at this point.

I was born in Torrance, raised in Hermosa Beach.

When I was in high school, there was a Marine Corps ROTC program.

I found out I wanted to join the Marine Corps, mostly because I got to see the Marines that were running the program there.

I grew up in Castag, a little town outside of Santa Cruz, and being outside as much as I did kind of gave me the reason why I wanted to become a Marine.

So I default to Operation Iraqi Freedom because that's most um memorable of my deployments, obviously going to Iraq.

In Iraq, we were doing convoys, a lot of convoys.

We were doing a lot of protection of diplomats, the ambassador, you know, generals, stuff like that.

Through Iraqi freedom, enduring freedom, our other missions that we did was shipboarding.

We probably boarded a dozen ships that were suspected Al-Qaeda ships, and we would search them with other branches of the military and team who was a terrorist and who wasn't, and then just escorting ships through very dangerous waters.

As far as how it impacted me, I would say it gave me a great appreciation and deeper love for our nation, our military, and deep down pride of what I was doing and you know helping people.

When I was in Iraq, we were uh in Kuwait.

We were like living in a large tent city, and there was an electrical fire, and it burned down all of our tents, all of our equipment burned down, all of our personal belongings burned down.

We all tried to put it out with the fire extinguishers, but none of us had any like formal training on how to like extinguish a fire.

At that point, I started to have the desire to know what to do in that situation.

So then I started pursuing fire tech classes, and uh that's what kind of sent me on the path to end up being a firefighter.

While I was in the Marine Corps, um the decision to look towards the LAFD was not really a decision that I made.

Growing up in the in the 90s, everyone wanted to be a firefighter, and I didn't think that it was something that that was really possible for me to do.

Not because I wasn't strong enough, but I just didn't know anything about it.

And so I went to the Marine Corps, kind of found my voice, but I still didn't have any direction towards the fire department.

My mom, God bless her soul, she worked in the city, and she was like, come downtown with me to a fire and police expo, and hesitantly I I just honored her and um went downtown and filled out one of those green interest cards, and from that from that interest card came this job.

It's a wonderful testament to the dedication that my mom had to raise her son and to put me in a position that can provide for my family in the future.

It means a lot to have fellow firefighters in the Los Angeles City Fire Department.

There are also fellow master gunnery sergeants in the Marine Corps reserves to get to that level of rank in the Marine Corps.

It's not an easy task.

In fact, the percentage of Marines that do attain that rank are less than one percent.

It's an incredible feat.

When you're the rank of gunnery sergeant, you choose which path you want to go with in the Marine Corps.

You can either become a first sergeant, sergeant major, which is in charge of the administrations of the Marine Corps, or you can choose to be a technical expert, which is the Master Sergeant, Master Gunnery Sergeant.

So it's a pretty difficult to obtain the rank.

There's not that many of them within the Marine Corps reserves, and then to have two other ones just within our own departments, pretty remarkable.

We each have separate jobs, so we're all master gunnery sergeants, but each one of us has a different discipline that we handle.

So master gunnery sergeants are unique amongst their MOS or their uh job.

So with myself, I'm infantry.

So as a master gunnery sergeant in the infantry, my role is what's called an operations chief.

So I am basically in charge of a command working for a commanding officer, their tactics and their operations.

So anything on a tactical level, I am setting up, I am orchestrating, I'm organizing, and you know, also when units are deployed, I'm tracking where they're at, when they're coming back, where they're gonna be, how they're gonna get there, and stuff like that.

With my position, I get to directly work with hundreds of Marines and sailors.

So the joy I get is just helping with guys' proficiency, you know, in the military, just like the fire department, what we do is a matter of life and death.

So the better you are at your job, the safer you're gonna be.

And to have men and women over the last 20 years that I run into to tell me I appreciate everything you did, and this is years later, and they're like, you know, you set me up for successful future and you know deployments.

So just being able to be that person that helps somebody be so proficient that when they do deploy, they feel safe.