Smokejumper

by Jason A. Ramos

  By the 1960s and 1970s, however, scientists and forest managers were starting to rethink the practice. Total fire suppression wasn’t healthy for forest ecosystems, it turned out, and it didn’t always make economic sense, either. Prescribed fires started to be used more often, and some natural fires were allowed to burn, provided lives and property weren’t at risk.

  The era of the career smokejumper had begun. Early jumpers were often recent vets or college students working for a summer or two. Now they were sticking around longer and moving on to permanent jobs in the Forest Service. Some eventually took on positions of authority, which was good because no one knows how to use a specialized resource like smokejumpers better than a former jumper.

  The program was still small, selective, and highly effective, so maybe it was inevitable that it acquired a reputation that was part real, part folklore. At the same time, a pervasive anti-jumper attitude was hard to shake. Local forest managers didn’t always appreciate how smokejumpers literally dropped in, worked circles around local crews, and then disappeared.

  During the Vietnam War, there was one group who was grateful for the smokejumpers’ unusual roster of talents. Vietnam was the first war that saw the widespread use of helicopters for tactical and rescue missions. Paratroopers—many of whom were former jumpers—only made one official combat jump during the entire conflict, in 1967.

  But over the border in Laos, the CIA had been busily (and secretly) helping Hmong tribes fight communist forces for years. That meant dropping thousands of tons of supplies from planes flown by Air America, the agency’s clandestine airline. They needed people who knew how to drop cargo from low-flying planes, accurately, in rough terrain, under urgent and less-than-ideal conditions.

  Who else would you call? Jumpers were physically fit, didn’t get airsick, and were trained to work without much supervision and improvise when necessary. Plus they were civilians, so nothing they did could be considered an official act of war.

  More than fifty smokejumpers eventually ended up doing covert paramilitary missions for the CIA or Air America in Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. The work paid well, and it wasn’t exactly a secret in jumper circles. There was a lot of wink-wink-nudge-nudge in the spring, when guys would come back from a season in “Alaska” or “Maine” with sunburns and jungle rot between their toes.

  The CIA work turned out to be even more dangerous than fighting wildfire: nine jumpers died on duty with the agency.

  Another former NCSB jumper, George (Ken) Sisler, went to Southeast Asia as a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant with the Studies and Observations Group (SOG), a top-secret special ops unit. (A few years earlier, Sisler had won the won the National Collegiate Skydiving Championship with one leg in a cast.)

  In February 1967, Sisler was in Laos on an intelligence mission when over one hundred North Vietnamese soldiers attacked his platoon on three sides. Sisler ran through enemy fire to rescue two wounded men. In the process he shot and killed three enemy soldiers and destroyed a machine gun with a grenade.

  As more of his companions fell wounded, he counterattacked alone, firing and throwing grenades, forcing the enemy back. He was directing air strikes when he was shot and killed. Sisler was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor, the first given to a military intelligence officer. In addition, a U.S. Navy supply ship, the USNS Sisler (T-AKR-311), was named after him in 1997.

  Back home, a more public event drew official attention to smokejumpers, at least briefly. On Thanksgiving Eve, 1971, a man who identified himself as Dan Cooper (later misnamed “D. B. Cooper” by the press) bought a plane ticket from Portland to Seattle.

  This was a time when airline security was notoriously lax. So when Cooper told a flight attendant he had a bomb in his briefcase, nobody was that surprised—this kind of thing happened surprisingly often back then.

  Cooper politely demanded $200,000 cash and four parachutes. He paid for two bourbons and insisted the stewardess keep the change. He let most of the crew disembark in Seattle and had the Boeing 727 take off again heading south. Somewhere over southwest Washington, Cooper cranked down the rear stairs and leaped into the stormy darkness carrying twenty-one pounds of cash.

  One of the biggest manhunts in Northwest history followed. FBI agents visited the North Cascades base twice, looking for anyone who had the nerve and know-how to pull off a stunt like Cooper’s. Base manager Francis Lufkin didn’t think the guy was a jumper. Cooper had chosen an older parachute over a professional sport chute and had picked a reserve chute that was clearly marked as nonfunctional, for demonstrations only.

  And not even a smokejumper was crazy enough to jump at night, in the rain, into rugged timber country, wearing loafers and a trench coat. The general consensus was, whoever Cooper was, he probably killed himself jumping out of that plane.

  The only clue anyone ever found was a $5,800 bundle of the ransom money that washed out of a sandbar in the Columbia River in 1980. Despite numerous alleged sightings, Cooper’s true fate remained a mystery. His crime is still the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.

  At the height of the Cold War, smokejumping briefly opened a door between the United States and the Soviet Union. Russia has more forests than any other country, a fifth of the world’s total, and the Soviets had started their own jump program back in 1936.

  In 1976, jumpers Bill Moody and Doug Bird traveled to the USSR for a month on a technical exchange program to test the Soviet parachute system. The Forest Service’s FS-10 canopy was due for an upgrade. The Russian system used a small drogue chute to deploy the canopy instead of a static line, and it was more maneuverable and descended more slowly.

  Moody had become the base manager of NCSB four years earlier, fifteen years into his thirty-three year jump career. The Russians were very friendly, he told me, genuinely interested in the Americans and their training and equipment. Nightly vodka toasts helped break down the cultural barriers.

  During their monthlong visit, Moody made two jumps over eastern Siberia, both with a Russian jump partner. The first was with all American gear and the second was with the Russian system. Doug Bird watched from the plane, a historic (by our standards) Antonov An-2 biplane.

  The jumps went well, and the next year Nikolai Andreev, chief of aerial fire operations for the USSR, visited NCSB to make a formal presentation of a Soviet chute system and jumpsuit and to make a jump of his own. After the visit they gave us their parachute system. The main round parachute, the “Lesnik” Forester, was adapted by the MTDC (at that time called MEDC) into the FS-12 chute that the Forest Service used through the 1990s. Bill Moody sent the drogue portion of their system up to Alaska, where the BLM adopted the Forester drogue for their ram-air systems.

  Budget cuts and an objective of centralization in the late 1970s and early 1980s led the Forest Service to close the jump base in Cave Junction, Oregon, one of the four original jump bases. The bases in Boise, Idaho, and LaGrande, Oregon, were also shuttered. Boise was later reopened as a BLM base. The Forest Service came near to closing the NCSB, even to the point of carting away the sewing machines used to make harnesses and other gear. Nevertheless, the birthplace of American smokejumping stayed open. In the end, jumper numbers were reduced by close to one hundred.

  Other changes were happening too. In 1981, Deanne Shulman, a former hotshot, finished rookie training at McCall and became the country’s first female smokejumper.

  Like any major change, opening the ranks to women caused some debate. Some people felt some bases compromised their standards to get women through training—things like relaxing the minimum height requirement and, eventually by the early 90s, adding two more sizes of canopies and changing how the PT test was administered.

  If you’re a jumper, it doesn’t matter to me who you are, what your gender is, what race you are, what you look like. If you can pass the rookie training, get your shit on and let’s go.

  The same year Shulman made her first fire jump, Charlotte Larson became the first femal
e smokejumper pilot.

  SINCE MANN GULCH, SMOKEJUMPING had changed. In the early days, each base was fairly independent, free to test different strategies and develop their own gear. But in the 1960s, base managers and the Missoula Equipment Development Center (now known as the Missoula Technology Development Center, or MTDC) began having annual workshops which resulted in a more national approach to equipment development, smokejumper-related policy and standardization of training and jump procedures. Some bases continued to operate “independently” when they were not satisfied with the slow pace or course that MEDC and the national office were taking—especially true in regards to main parachute development.

  Jumpers had proved they could do things no one else could, and fire managers had learned how to use their unique skills to the best advantage. Jumper training was standardized, safety systems were refined, and for half a century there were no burnover fatalities.

  That changed in 1994 when the Storm King fire killed fourteen firefighters, including three smokejumpers.

  Everyone in the wildland firefighting world remembers where they were when they heard the news. At the time I was with the Kernville crew and didn’t know any jumpers personally, but I would in the years to come. Five years after Storm King, I was more determined than ever to become a smokejumper—cracked leg or not.

  CHAPTER 6

  AFTER THE DOCTOR SHOWED me the x-ray, my next medical appointment was with a specialist in the same building.

  I cursed myself the whole way over. How could I get this close and screw it up?

  In the specialist’s office I told him I was about to start training to be a smokejumper. He gave my leg a quick exam and shook his head.

  “You cannot go,” he said in a heavy Asian accent. He explained that if I landed on the leg wrong, the bone could snap completely.

  “I have to do this,” I said, almost pleading.

  He thought for a moment, then told me to roll up my pant leg. He started to probe around the injury with his fingers. Before I could react, he dug a thumb right into the most tender spot.

  I clutched my fists and gritted my teeth and fought the crazy urge to rabbit-punch him right on the top of his head. My eyes watered like I had just gotten punched in the nose.

  He looked up at me and nodded like I had passed some kind of test.

  “Okay,” he said. “You go, but it will hurt.”

  I left the office with a slight limp, a customized training plan, instructions to take strong anti-inflammatories, and a soft cast to keep my leg from getting worse.

  The next hurdle was the mandatory government physical. My leg would have gotten me instantly disqualified, so I kept my mouth shut.

  In the months before training started, I tried to learn as much about smokejumping as I could. I found a few writeups here and there in books at the fire station, and there was one documentary I found and watched, over and over. (This was back before everything was on Google or YouTube.)

  Anything to give me a leg up, so to speak. There wasn’t much.

  Every day I had to face down a little voice of self-doubt in the back of my head, the one that wouldn’t stop asking: Are you good enough? Strong enough? Brave enough? Smart enough?

  I’d heard stories about firefighters I knew, guys who were tough as hell, washing out of jumper training in the first week. Even on their first day.

  It dawned on me that making the cut wasn’t just about being in top physical shape. The mental component was just as important, if not more. Having some common sense and luck didn’t hurt. But you had to be tough and sharp enough to pass.

  Was I? I asked myself this question a lot in the run-up to rookie training.

  Finally I reached what you might call a mental point of no return. I will pass this program, I promised myself, because the only way I’m leaving is in the back of an ambulance.

  Two more calls came in with offers to join rookie classes at other bases. One was from Redding, in Northern California, which I politely turned down since I had already committed to NCSB.

  The other offer really pissed me off. After the usual chitchat, the base manager asked something that caught me by surprise. “Where does your last name come from?” he said.

  Having worked for the government for over ten years, I knew about affirmative action. I understood the thinking behind it, but in practice I thought it was bullshit.

  I had seen too many people given jobs they weren’t qualified for. Sometimes this led to situations that put people’s lives at risk.

  The only thing that should matter is having the skills and experience to be a good firefighter—period.

  “I’m Puerto Rican,” I said mildly.

  “I’d like to offer you a job,” he said. Nothing about my training, or if I was in good shape, any of the normal smokejumper questions. Not even whether I could cook a decent plate of black beans and rice.

  I didn’t have to think twice.

  “No thank you, sir.” There was a moment of silence.

  I explained I had already committed to NCSB. But I think he got the message that I wasn’t going to take a job just because of my nationality or the color of my skin.

  The call ended with a simple, “Thank you.”

  IT WAS A LONG, slow drive to Redmond, Oregon, in my 1974 Econoline van, with its top speed of sixty miles per hour (downhill, when aided by a tailwind).

  Jumper training can last for five or six weeks, and this year—1999—the rookie classes from NCSB and Redmond were training together. Part of the instruction would be held at each base. Redmond was first.

  I got there on a Saturday, a day early. The first jumper I met as I stepped out of my van was a big, serious-looking Native American guy with a chest that looked as wide as my one-ton camper van. He showed me the barracks and told me where to go for the first meeting the following afternoon.

  Other candidates drifted in throughout the day, close to two dozen men and women in all. We made small talk and sized each other up. Everyone was between their midtwenties and early thirties. Each had at least two seasons of wildland firefighting experience, just to be here. Most had five to ten. There were more hotshots than anything else.

  All clearly badasses, just to make it this far. Beyond that, my fellow trainees were a mystery.

  None of us had any idea what we were in for.

  AT A QUICK BRIEFING on Sunday afternoon, the lead instructor took roll call. There were six candidates from NCSB and another half dozen or more from Redmond. When he got to my name, he looked up. “I heard about you,” he said.

  Great, I thought. We haven’t even started yet, and I’m already on the head trainer’s Christmas list.

  This was going to be an interesting month.

  After going over the basic rules for training—when and where to show up, what to wear—he told us to go get a good night’s sleep. We’d need it.

  The next morning was the minimum physical standards test, the one I’d been preparing myself for for so long I’d almost forgotten what life was like before. If you don’t pass, you can’t even start training.

  First came the calisthenics: at least seven chin-ups, twenty-five push-ups and forty-five sit-ups in a row. The trainers watched us like hawks to make sure there was no cheating: pull-ups with palms forward, no kipping, push-ups all the way down to the ground.

  That was the easy part.

  Next we had to run a mile and a half in eleven minutes or less. My leg throbbed as we jogged over the flat course. Even so I made the cutoff with time to spare. Remember, these are the bare minimums. Some guys are known to have run a mile and a half in 7:25.

  Last was the infamous pack-out test: a three-mile hike, carrying 110 pounds, in under ninety minutes. They called it an “easy” pack test, since it was on level ground. Like the rest, it was pass or fail. No second chance.

  I crammed my pack full to bursting with random gear until it weighed enough. I tried not to think about what happened back in my parents’ workout room the first time I h
ad tried to pick up a pack that big.

  All those years of effort came down to the next hour and a half. The timer started and we took off. The straps dug into my shoulders as I tried to hit the perfect pace: fast enough to finish in time, slow enough not to flame out too soon.

  Aside from some aches in my leg, I actually felt pretty good as we plodded along. I crossed the finish line in a little over an hour. Not the fastest in the group, but not the slowest, either.

  One guy didn’t make the ninety-minute cutoff. Just like that, he was gone.

  A little over a month isn’t very long to absorb even the basics of something as complex as smokejumping. In a way that was the point. The brief intensity of the training reflected the job itself.

  On a fire, there’s no time to putz around. Since 1939 jumper training has been designed to show who can think on their feet, act quickly and decisively, without having every little thing explained to death.

  Our instructors were all experienced jumpers in senior positions that are collectively known as “overhead” at jump bases. Five or six of them shepherded us through the whole program, with other trainers coming and going as the weeks went by.

  That first day, after the minimum standards test, each trainer gave a short briefing that was part introduction, part pep talk. Most of it boiled down to three simple things: listen to what your trainers say, do what you’re told, and give one hundred and ten percent.

  As one trainer told us, “You need to be heads-up from the minute you pour milk on your cereal every morning. Smell your milk, guys!”

  When they were done, the air felt charged, like before a storm.

  “Training has now started!” one trainer shouted. “You have two minutes to get your PT clothes on. Move it, rooks!”

  We scrambled for the door, pushing and shoving, as the instructors shouted, “Go, go, go!”

  The first week consisted mostly of fitness tests designed to push us to our limits. Every day included at least two PT sessions. There were endless calisthenics and runs.