“Them sons-of-bitches,” he said, opening with his first subject, “was Mennonites and wouldn’t fight in the last war—said they wasn’t afraid to work or die for their country but wouldn’t kill anybody, so somebody, maybe for this somebody’s idea of a joke, had them sent to the Smokejumpers. It turned out them sons-of-bitches was farm boys and, what’s more, didn’t believe in using machines no way—working was just for their hands and their horses, and them sons-of-bitches took them shovels and saws and Pulaskis and put a hump in their backs and never straightened up until morning when they had a fire-line around the whole damn fire. Them sons-of-bitches was the world’s champion firefighters.”
His second grammatical subject he saved for the end. “The rest of us bastards,” he said, “was dead by midnight.”
Many days my many-purpose quest for the Mann Gulch fire never got me farther than one of Hal’s stories, but a storyteller should never look at a day as lost if he has learned something about how to tell stories, especially about how to make them shorter.
By the time I knew only where the crevice and the foreman’s fire were in the main story of Mann Gulch, I already knew most of another part of the story. I already knew there would be such a part, and I knew I would search for it when I first saw the fire itself and the black, burned ghost of a deer bleeding where its skin had melted. I knew I would write about this the moment I discovered we had not thrown a rifle into the cab of the truck and so could only hope the deer would die soon. It was at this moment that I knew my story of the Mann Gulch fire would have a part in it asking the question, Did any good, any good at all, come of this?
My father has a way of making his presence felt in any story I tell, even when he isn’t a character in it. He was a Presbyterian minister and kept me out of school and taught me himself until the juvenile officers caught up with me. In retrospect I think the experience of listening to me recite the Westminster Catechism influenced his own literary style, and perhaps even mine in later times. My guess is that my interest in this question of whether any good resulted from the Mann Gulch fire goes all the way back to a sentence of his, which sounds as if it comes out of the Westminster Catechism but doesn’t. It is enough, though, that it sounds like him: “One of the chief privileges of man is to speak up for the universe.”
It could be that we ask this big question almost the first thing of all because the question seems to ask itself without being asked. It has to be one of man’s first questions after he discovers he has personal connections with death, and I had asked it about the Mann Gulch fire long enough to have collected a fairly solid answer to a part of it. The Report of Board of Review had divided it into two subquestions, and I had accepted the division to make answering easier. The Report’s final recommendation was to “continue and intensify efforts in the study of fire behavior to furnish more dependable bases for anticipating blowups, and to intensify training of firefighting overhead in this respect.” So I had long been asking myself (1) Did this tragic fire help to increase the scientific knowledge about fire behavior in ways that help modern firefighters keep out of death traps? and (2) Did this tragic fire help to improve the training of firefighters in ways that would add to their safety? I had the additional, private hope that something would come out of the tragedy that could circle back and help to explain what had been inexplicable about it.
The old-timer in the Forest Service I feel closest to, Bud Moore, had been top man in firefighting in Region One of the Forest Service as director of fire control and aviation management. After Bud retired from the Forest Service, he built a beautiful log cabin on the side of a Mission Glacier only thirty-five miles from my cabin, and I often go up to see him. One morning I woke with the feeling that I was about ready to write an answer to one of the first questions my father would have asked about the Mann Gulch fire. This feeling, when generalized, is a feeling that you will be ready to write if first you can find the right friend to listen to your opening paragraph. I drove the thirty-five miles to Bud’s.
Before starting to talk, we took a pail down the mountainside to his spring bubbling with underground water melted from the glacier above, and I dug out a bottle of Ancient Age from the trunk of my car. When Ancient Age and ice water are sloshed around in a tin cup, the water is just as good as the whiskey.
Afterwards, I went back to my cabin to write on the effects the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire had on the know-how of firefighters. What I wrote comes next, and Bud Moore was the first to check it.
THE MANN GULCH FIRE IS the Smokejumpers’ lone tragedy on the fire-line. Two jumpers have since died while jumping, caught and hanged in the coils of their own jumping ropes. But the fact that the Smokejumpers have suffered no fatality from fire since Mann Gulch suggests they learned some things from it.
Those who knew something about the woods or about nature should soon have perceived an alarming gap between the almost sole purpose, clear but narrow, of the early Smokejumpers and the reality they were sure to confront, reality almost anywhere having inherent in it the principle that little things suddenly and literally can become big as hell, the ordinary can suddenly become monstrous, and the upgulch breeze suddenly can turn to murder. Since this principle comes about as close to being universal as a principle can, you might have thought someone in the early history and training of the Smokejumpers would have realized that something like the Mann Gulch fire would happen before long. But no one seems to have sensed this first principle because of a second principle inherent in the nature of man—namely, that generally a first principle can’t be seen until after it has been written up as a tragedy and becomes a second principle.
In their early days, the Smokejumpers were still cautious and were still primarily limited in aim to getting on fires as soon as possible while they were small and could be put out quickly. As we have seen, the crew on the Mann Gulch fire was practically devoid of experience on big fires. For instance, according to the Report of Board of Review, the second-in-command, Hellman, in 1947 had been on four Class A fires (less than one-fourth of an acre), two Class B fires (one-fourth to nine acres), and one Class C fire (ten to ninety-nine acres). In 1948, the year before Mann Gulch, he had been on two Class C fires. The almost total experience each crew member had had as a firefighter was being almost his own boss on almost his own fire where for most practical purposes he was the only one who was in a position to save his own life. One thing for sure, being almost boss of your own body and completely captain of your own soul makes you damn fast and certain of your own decisions.
Not long in coming, though, was the answer to the question, What might well happen to a bunch of early Smoke-jumpers when they take on a small fire that, for whatever reasons, suddenly becomes big? The answer to the question gets almost inevitable when it’s asked in this form: What might well happen to a bunch of early Smokejumpers who are dropped on a good-sized fire which looks ordinary when they land but suddenly blows up? The inevitable answer has to be something like the Mann Gulch tragedy. Before long, the thing out there in nature has a way of finding the heel of Achilles.
The Mann Gulch tragedy immediately became a flaming symbol to the Smokejumpers and to firefighters generally, especially those in the Northwest. Fortunately, there are a lot of able woodsmen in the Forest Service who don’t wait around for the Forest Service to do something, and it was some of these who said to me not long after the fire, “God damn it, no man of mine is ever going to die that way.” Small cracks were soon filled in, especially with technical improvements. For instance, there was widespread concern about breakdowns in the communications systems that had occurred during the fire—the failure of telephone or radio calls to be completed—and much was made of the fact that the crew’s radio had been shattered on the jump because its parachute had failed to open. As a result of these and similar failures, immediate and on the whole helpful changes were made, such as a simple requirement that crews must carry a backup radio. But there were deeper and more conscience-stricken impr
ovements. Among the overhead, there was an intense heightening of the realization that at all moments on a fire their primary responsibility is the safety of their crew and that controlling the fire is only secondary. Many Smokejumper foremen have told me that since the Mann Gulch tragedy they don’t make a move on a fire without first asking the question, If I go there, where can I escape with my crew if the thing blows up? And if they don’t like their own answer, they don’t go.
To carry out this commitment, the overhead have to do more than constantly pledge themselves to the safety of their crews. At all moments on a fire they must have a fully operational communications system to furnish them with the best information available on which to base decisions involving the safety of their men—insofar as the moment permits, there must be no failure in direct observation, scouting, or radio and telephone communications.
The training of the crews was also improved in many particulars. For instance, their physical conditioning was stiffened, and their knowledge of fire behavior, especially of large fires, was extended. Also broadened was their schooling in the differences between the behavior of fires burning in the dense forests west of the Continental Divide and the behavior of fires burning in the dry grass and shrubs east of the Divide, where little rain is left in the clouds that have been blown across mountain ranges from the Pacific Ocean.
All these things add up, but the greatest concern was to remove the contradiction between training men to act swiftly, surely, and on their own in the face of danger and, on the other hand, training men to take orders unhesitatingly when working under command. On a big fire there is no time and no tree under whose shade the boss and the crew can sit and have a Platonic dialogue about a blowup. If Socrates had been foreman on the Mann Gulch fire, he and his crew would have been cremated while they were sitting there considering it. Dialogue doesn’t work well when the temperature is approaching the lethal 140 degrees.
In this delicate job of picking and training Smokejumpers so they will have almost opposite qualities, it won’t do at all to pick men who accept orders without question just because they are reticent or even retarded. They have to be so smart that they know there are times when their lives depend on not asking questions. Picking and training such men is like trying to make Marines out of civilians, but the Smokejumpers have done it, and indeed the example of the Marines has helped them do it. In 1949 many of the jumpers were veterans of World War II, and twelve of those on the Mann Gulch fire had been in military service during the war. The live and the dead have joined together to make the Smokejumpers into a semi-military outfit. If a jumper now disregards the orders of his foreman on a fire, he has just made his last jump, fought his last fire, and started for camp to pick up his last paycheck.
It is worth repeating that in the nearly forty years since the Mann Gulch tragedy no Smokejumper has died on a fire-line. Some of the changes in safety procedures that helped to establish this proud record are concrete, objective safety measures, such as the addition to training courses of experience in fighting grass fires, especially on steep slopes. But the large underlying changes are more atmospheric, like being constantly aware that one risks one’s life in fighting fire for a livelihood and that sometimes saving one’s life depends entirely upon taking one’s life in one’s own hands and that at other times one’s life and the lives of others must be put entirely into the hands of one boss—old lessons that throughout time have to be learned and relearned, only to be forgotten again.
The one invention that came out of Mann Gulch and was immediately made a part of the training courses for firefighters is the escape fire. It was spectacular and had saved Dodge’s life and soon became a permanent part of the common knowledge of forest firefighters. One of those it has saved is Rod Mclver, now the dean of Smokejumpers at the Missoula base, whose story appears in Reader’s Digest (February 1976) under the title “Trapped in a Sea of Flame! Drama in Real Life.”
In 1957, after a succession of bad fire years, Richard E. McArdle, chief forester at the time, appointed a topflight task force to “recommend further action needed in both administration and research to materially reduce the chances of men being killed by burning while fighting fires.” For scientific data the task force took the sixteen tragic fires that had occurred in national forests since 1936 and looked “for threads that run through all, or most, of them.” For special study, the task force selected five classic examples, one of which was the Mann Gulch fire.
The task force itself was made up of five members, outstanding representatives of the Forest Service’s overhead, from regional forester, a region being the Forest Service’s largest administrative unit, to ranger, who is in charge of the Forest Service’s most basic unit in the field, the district. Bud Moore, then ranger of the famous Powell District on the Lochsa River in Idaho, was selected to represent the point of view of rangers about fatal fires.
The task force developed a practical set of recommendations, and at a meeting in Washington, D.C., it was decided these orders should be modeled on the military services’ General Orders. When nobody at the meeting had a copy of the General Orders, Bud Moore, who had been a Marine all over the Pacific in World War II, found a Marine standing outside at a bus stop, and together they quickly reconstructed the Marines’ General Orders, which became the model for the Forest Service’s ten Standard Fire Fighting Orders.
STANDARD FIRE FIGHTING ORDERS
1. FIRE WEATHER. Keep informed of fire weather conditions and predictions.
2. INSTRUCTIONS. Know exactly what my instructions are and follow them at all times.
3. RIGHT THINGS FIRST. Identify the key points of my assignment and take action in order of priority.
4. ESCAPE PLAN. Have an escape plan in mind and direct subordinates in event of a blow-up.
5. SCOUTING. Thoroughly scout the fire areas for which I am responsible.
6. COMMUNICATION. Establish and maintain regular communication with adjoining forces, subordinates, and superior officers.
7. ALERTNESS. Quickly recognize changed conditions and immediately revise plans to handle.
8. LOOKOUT. Post a lookout for every possible dangerous situation.
9. DISCIPLINE. Establish and maintain control of all men under my supervision and at all times know where they are and what they are doing.
10. SUPERVISION. Be sure men I commit to any fire job have clear instructions and adequate overhead.
These orders were issued to Forest Service personnel in the form of a training program supported by a case study of a classic fatal fire to illustrate each of the ten orders. The Mann Gulch fire was used to illustrate one of these orders, but actually all the orders could have grown out of the Mann Gulch fire except the one or two relevant only to commanding very large crews.
Their crosses are quiet and a long way off, and from this remove their influence is quiet and seemingly distant. But quietly they are present on every fire-line, even though those whose lives they are helping to protect know only the order and not the fatality it represents. For those who crave immortality by name, clearly this is not enough, but for many of us it would mean a great deal to know that, by our dying, we were often to be present in times of catastrophe helping to save the living from our deaths.
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AFTER SAYING WHAT I HAD BEEN building up to about the influence the Mann Gulch fire had on future firefighting, I went back to work. I felt better, though, for the interlude. It is a strange thing, picking up friendships with the neglected dead, especially when you never knew any of them and also stood pledged as a writer never to sentimentalize them or pretend to imagine they were still alive. The nearest I ever came to such fantasizing was when I would imagine all the crosses on the hillside floating together and becoming one cross and the one cross becoming only a barely audible voice asking when I was ever going to get around to telling them what had happened to them. The closest I have ever come to the outer limit of friendship with the dead is when I promised myself that at the end I
will use everything I know and feel to resurrect the thoughts and feelings of those about to die in a world that roared at them but obscured itself in smoke and flames.
This period in our struggling to discover the story of the Mann Gulch fire was a trying time for Laird and me. The story of the Mann Gulch fire was still mostly a concurrent set of stories, some of them leading on for a way before losing their own trails, others that had given out earlier but with luck might reveal a fresh clue with another try, and now and then a new one unexpectedly popping out of a hole almost between our feet as if we had been hunting rabbits with a ferret. “Trail jumping” would pretty much describe what Laird and I had been doing in the three years it had taken us to locate the crevice and the origin of the escape fire.
In this process, some of these separate trails little by little became longer, but strangely they also seemed to be getting a little closer together. It was something like the fire itself. The gulch at first was full of separate spot fires; it then began to fill with smoke that largely blacked out the fires and hid what was going on—as if what was coming might be a Convergence of fires Below and Above with fires Behind and Ahead. Then suddenly such a Convergence burst into view and became total in the head of the gulch; then total Conflagration rose up and swept out of the gulch. About all that has happened since is that Laird and I have occasionally returned. This is almost the way the story of the Mann Gulch fire must go if it is to follow the fire; it must all come together as it ends.
Young Men and Fire Page 22