L.A.'S SWAT FRATERNITY HELD TO HIGHER CALLING.

Byline: ROBERT C.J. PARRY

THE first time I set eyes on Los Angeles Police Department Officer Randy Simmons, he was lifting a 200-pound man off the ground. In an enthusiastic bear hug.

Simmons, a large, gregarious rock of a man, was warmly embracing a longtime friend and fellow LAPD SWAT officer who had graciously invited me to take a peek inside their fraternity at the annual SWAT dinner. That was barely 10 days ago. No one in that room at the Police Academy, no matter how tactically cynical, could anticipate that less than two weeks later, Simmons would be the first man from the Metropolitan Division's "D Platoon" (as SWAT is officially known) to die in a gunfight.

Simmons, with more than 20 years on the team, was hardly the picture of a SWAT cop the media tend to project. While he looked every part the former football player he was -- a rock-solid athletic physique that, though nearly two decades my senior, put mine to shame -- he was warm, tender even, to those around him.

As he and my host spoke, I looked around the room and noticed 20 feet away a graying man of Asian descent at a table of mostly Hispanic officers. That Asian cop, Jim Veenstra, now lies in the same hospital where Randy Simmons succumbed, a bullet having felled him in the same fusillade.

The men of SWAT -- it is an all-male organization by happenstance, not regulation -- are highly, highly professional. Their work is not a matter of bravado or testosterone, but of excellent performance focused on saving lives of innocents. Their standards are as inflexible as the laws of physics and ballistics that have the potential to decide the success -- or length -- of their service.

That's truly their only commonality. They are of all colors and backgrounds, educations and diversions. But within their unique fraternity, they are one.

It is a fraternity in the truest sense. Men bound by tacit agreement to give their lives not only for each other, but for complete strangers in the most volatile peril.

There is little place for those who do not know the terror that is incumbent upon crossing a threshold to enter a room occupied not only by a killer whose dispatch will require brutal force, but by an innocent whose only hope for life is you. Those who do not know that fear -- nor the professional dedication required to master it -- would not have fit in that room. Which is perhaps why the highest-ranking of the guests mingled strictly with other brass and departed within barely 30 minutes.

Randy Simmons, you could easily see, was every bit that professional. Humble and genuinely caring, yet obviously physically honed the same way his knowledge and skill were over two decades. If you met him on the street, you'd have no idea he was in SWAT, or even a cop.

But you'd know for sure he was damned good at whatever it was he did in life.

The conversation last Monday night was not of weapons and shootouts and brute toughness. It was of victims saved and intrusive politics that threatens their standards and close calls. When two retirees talked knowingly about there being "four of us," I was informed upon inquiring, "We're two of the only four SWAT officers ever to be shot."

Now, that number is six. And that which was previously zero became one.

I wish you could have met him, if only for the moments that I did.