Leg lost, but not his will to be a firefighter

Story and photo by Erik Holmes in The Air Force Times
Tech. Sgt. Mike Gambill has 19 years with the Air Force as a firefighter. He wants to make it 20. Whether the Air Force lets Gambill mark two decades of service, though, depends on whether he can still do the job after losing his left leg in a motorcycle crash.

But the 40-year-old husband and father of three has a new artificial limb — so high-tech that it costs $60,000 and is one of only 60 like it in the country — and faith that the service he loves will let him support it the way it has supported him, first when he donated a kidney to his father and now through the loss of his leg.

Gambill said he thinks of the Air Force — particularly the firefighting community — as his second family, and he wants nothing more than to go back to duty, even if it’s as a firefighting instructor or supervisor.

“My goal is to go back somehow, some way as a firefighter,” he said. “Hopefully I’ll be able to stay with the Air Force and do it that way.”

A son’s act of love
Gambill has firefighting in his blood. His father, Jerry Gambill, spent 21 years in the Navy as a P-3 and C-130 flight engineer, then racked up 23 years with the Bakersfield Fire Department. His uncle retired from the fire department, too.

Gambill worked for the city as a reservist firefighter before he joined the Air Force in 1991. In basic training, a personnelist handed out a form that asked the recruits what they wanted to do in the service.

“I listed firefighting, firefighting, firefighting, firefighting and gave it back,” Gambill said.

Two years ago, on leave from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Gambill saved a life that had nothing to do with firefighting. He gave one of his kidneys to his dad, whose kidneys were destroyed by diabetes and high blood pressure.

Before his kidney transplant, the older Gambill was hooked up to a dialysis machine for 12 hours a week.

“Michael came home and he went to dialysis with me a couple of times, and he didn’t like it any more than I did,” said Jerry Gambill, 62. “So he stepped up to the plate and volunteered to donate a kidney. … I’m doing really good, thanks to him.”

Despite a painful two-month recovery and the reality that he now has only one kidney, Gambill said he doesn’t regret his decision.

“I would do it again tomorrow morning if they asked me to,” he said. “Never a second thought.”

Another life-changing moment
Almost six months ago, while serving a special assignment as an unaccompanied housing manager at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., Gambill learned he and his family would be moving to Kadena Air Base, Japan.

He didn’t want to take his beloved Harley-Davidson Road King overseas so he decided to drive it back to his parents’ house in Bakersfield. He left Colorado on June 26 and — after a brief stop at the casino tables in Las Vegas — rejoined his wife, Michele, in California on June 29. Michele Gambill and their three daughters had traveled to Bakersfield a few days earlier to get ready for the move.

About 10 p.m. that Monday night, on his way to his parents’ house, Gambill was hit by a GMC Yukon making an illegal U-turn. The force of the crash threw him about 60 feet, the bike 120 feet.
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