October 16, 2025
SEOUL – Walking down the street, you wouldn’t notice Lee Hak-min in a crowd.
He doesn’t look like a man who spends his days racing into life-and-death situations. But when the alarm sounds, it is his hands that pull people back from the edge.
For nine years, the 38-year-old has stepped into burning buildings, rivers and crushed cars, wherever someone’s life hangs in balance. Lee serves on the rescue squad at Gwangju Fire Station in Gyeonggi Province.
But his first rescue came two decades ago, long before he first put on his firefighter’s uniform.
As a teenager on a beach trip, he saw a woman being swept away by a riptide and dove in to pull her to safety.
“She said thank you,” he recalled. “I liked that feeling — helping someone and feeling good in return. That feeling stayed with me. Maybe it started there.”
Today, his work ranges from rope rescues and searching for victims of fires, to prying open jammed doors and capturing stray animals.
And then there are the calls that sit closest to the edge: suicide attempts.
“People do not realize how often they happen,” Lee said. “Compared to what the public imagines, there are many attempts. Some end up as just an attempt, others don’t.”
One of Lee’s recent life-or-death encounters was with a teenage girl who was drowning. The crew was close and deployed quickly. They hauled her out; she had no pulse.
“We started CPR and she started breathing again,” he said. “We were lucky. Everything is a race against time.”
Lee chooses not to track what happens after the handoff to the hospital.
“We do everything we can in that moment,” he said. “Beyond that, following the story can become its own trauma — for us and maybe for them. We focus on the scene.”
What, then, does a firefighter bring to someone on a railing or a riverbank?
“People at that moment are alone,” he said. “They need someone to listen. So I try to listen, really listen, to what they say. I try to acknowledge it, to offer comfort. If you keep them talking, keep them feeling heard, the chance of action goes down. It’s simple, but it matters.”
He has watched the job shape his mind.
“When you meet death often, you become a little detached,” he said, choosing the word carefully. “Not cold, but detached. You learn that death can come through disease, an accident, or a choice. It is always near. But our work is to keep people alive. That doesn’t change. Life has dignity. That’s the purpose.”
If anyone asks him why a single life is worth such risk, he turns the question around.
“If it were your family on that ledge, would you not want us to try?” he said. “We do it because they are someone’s family, because they are themselves.”
Lee Sang-yong, a firefighter of the 119 Command & Control Center Information at Sejong City Fire Headquarters, takes calls at his desk. PHOTO: THE KOREA HERALD
If Lee Hak-min’s hands are the ones that reach out, Fire Lt. Lee Sang-yong’s voice is often the first one to reach out.
In the control room of Sejong Fire Headquarters, Lee sits in front of a wall of screens and blinking lines — the invisible front line where every 119 call is answered.
“People think the hardest part of firefighting is running into flames,” he said. “But sometimes, it’s talking someone back from a ledge with nothing but your voice.”
Earlier on in his career, Lee was an emergency room nurse at a university hospital, and it was working there that inspired him to become a firefighter.
“I saw the firefighters who brought patients in,” he said. “I wanted to help from the start, not after.”
He joined the fire service in 2019, serving three years in an ambulance before being assigned to the control room — where he now answers calls that range from bee stings to burning buildings. And too often, to the sound of someone ready to end their life.
His team receives 30 or more suicide-related calls each month, many in the still hours past midnight.
“At least one or two every day,” he said. “And lately, I feel the callers are getting younger.”
The challenge is immediate — locating someone from a frantic call or a friend’s text.
“We start with the address,” he said. “If they send a photo, we identify landmarks. If not, we trace their phone signal with police cooperation.”
But sometimes, the caller is the person themselves. One night around 3 a.m., the first words he heard were, “I want to die.”
“She was calm,” he recalled. “That gave me hope.”
He asked if he could switch to video. She accepted. On the screen, he saw a woman standing on a 12th-floor balcony.
“I didn’t tell her to get down. That can make things worse,” he recalled.
“I said, ‘Let’s talk for a bit. Can you step back a little?’ She did. Then I asked her to move to the living room, then to the elevator, then to the first floor.”
When the doors opened, paramedics and police were already there.
“We saved her,” he said quietly. “That’s the moment you can breathe again.”
But he’s also known the opposite. A teenage boy on a high-rise, already at the edge.
“We were talking,” he said. “And then he jumped.”
The silence that followed, he said, is something you never forget.
“You ask yourself, ‘What could I have said differently?’ But sometimes, it’s just one second too late.”
The emotional weight of the job takes a lasting toll.
“Saying you’re struggling still isn’t easy,” Lee Hak-min said. “Most of us don’t announce, ‘I have PTSD.’ But we know when a teammate is off. We don’t force talk therapy in the kitchen; we lace up,” he said.
“We work out together, crack a joke, eat something good. It’s a way of saying: I see you.”
For about a month after a particularly hard call, he drank too much and cried more than he expected.
“The team got me through. Routine got me through. Time got me through,” he said. “If someone needs professional help, they should get it fast.”
Inside the station, that solidarity runs deep.
“We’re a second family — sometimes the first,” Lee continued. “We live together for 24 hours: eat, train, respond, rest, and repeat. You share everything. It makes you protective of each other.”
The feeling is amplified at scenes that linger.
“On the ground, you block out personal emotion. Adrenaline pushes you to focus: Secure the scene, secure the person. Afterward, when the gear is stowed and the paperwork is done, that’s when the fatigue comes. You feel the weight. Then you sweat it out, you shower, you talk it through.”
The nobility of firefighting is easy to romanticize from afar. Lee Ha-min does not. He calls it a craft: repetition, improvement, showing up on bad days.
It’s a duty, he says, to “citizens’ lives and property.”
But it also serves as a reminder of what it is to be human: The way a room grows quiet when a life resumes breathing, the way a joke can hold a teammate together, the way a stranger’s pulse under your fingers becomes the most important thing in the world.
Firefighting gear is stored at the Gwangju Fire Station. PHOTO: THE KOREA HERALD
Working in the control room, Lee Sang-yong has come to see both death and life differently.
“Before this job, I didn’t realize how many people are in pain,” he said. “Now, I know there are so many who just need someone to listen.”
He believes that prevention begins not with institutions but with people.
“Everyone should have at least one person they can confide in,” he said. “When you talk, the pain lightens. If we paid a little more attention to each other — friends, families, and coworkers — it would make a difference.”
When asked what gives life meaning, Lee answered without hesitation.
“Family,” he said.
“After a hard shift, when I see my family waiting for me — that’s enough. For others, it could be a friend, a passion, or even a small goal. But everyone has someone or something worth staying for.”
To those who call in despair, his message is simple but sincere.
“Your pain is real,” he said. “You deserve to be understood. You’re not alone. If you hold on just a little longer, you can find a reason to live again.”