HADDONFIELD, N.J. -- You look at yourself in the mirror and wonder why you do this for a living. The pay is bad, barely livable for a family of seven. The hours are atrocious, you work around the clock or else you're 36 hours on and 12 off -- a stupid arrangement by any man's reckoning.

You see your kids as they pass on the way to school, as you direct traffic in the middle of an intersection or as you wave to them from the back of a ladder truck, riding tillerman and praying to God that you don't roll the big engine into the curb as the driver way up front barrels through red light intersections as if they were meant for only the fools of the world to follow.

Cop's sons and fireman's daughters -- that's the strangeness of our beginnings, my wife and I.

We awoke listening to shortwave in the kitchen at 5 a.m. as our dads tried to catch what was going on at the precinct or the firehouse before the day started.

Then we straggled into the bedroom to watch as they put on their blues, some with holsters carrying speed-loaders or stray bullets that wink bronze to us in our preschool reveries.

We are of a special tribe, we sons and daughters of the uniformed civil servants, men and women who step out into the worlds of flame and gunfire every morning. Other kids are waving goodbye to Daddy as we welcome ours home from a midnight-to-8 shift.

We let them in the front door, set a place for them at the table. Breakfast is our family meal, when Dad comes home and tells about the mayhem at midnight, the ladders falling over as roofs collapsed past them; chases through garbage-strewn alleys to tackle petty thieves with automatic weapons in the harsh darkness, when we are asleep.

We sing the song of America, as Walt Whitman said, but a separate song of special men and women, those who labor for the common good in the dark alleys of our sleep -- the police officers and firefighters, the paramedics and emergency responders.

Their struggles are hidden to most, except us, their children who awake in the evenings to see our mothers chain-smoking by the phone, listening to the police bands, following the squad cars and fire engines though the streets of our dreams, waiting each morning for their reappearance like Lazarus from the tomb.

We are a special breed. We know the price of watchfulness, of justice and wanton destruction. Let each bell in the nation toll for the uniformed fathers and mothers who don't come home this night, now and into the future. The quiet soldiers, who don't brag of their accomplishments, but protect us in our beds.

Thomas Belton is a free-lance writer who lives in Haddonfield, N.J.