We did another pack-out test, this one with a four-hour time limit, over terrain that got steeper and rougher as the course went on. Luckily our packs were lighter: only ninety-five pounds.
Trainers stood along the course to track our progress and offer commentary. “You can give up any time,” one said. “We’ll carry your pack for you. We’ll even help you pack and find you another job.”
“Just take a break,” said another, waving a psychedelic-looking drink. “Who wants a milkshake?” The word made my mouth water. I couldn’t stop thinking about the malted shakes my dad used to make.
Then I passed another trainee writhing in the dirt with the worst leg cramps I had ever seen. That got milkshakes off my mind for a little while. He ended up washing out that week.
The instructors were expert at finding that fine line between maximum effort and putting someone in the hospital. But it wasn’t just suffering for its own sake. The physical side of jumper training shows who can keep going and going and going, long past the point you thought was your limit back in the normal world.
Can you keep pushing through even though you’re hurt, sleep deprived, hungry, dehydrated, in the middle of nowhere, with a wall of flames or a Sasquatch on your ass? Those who can’t—often up to half of each class—wash out. Sometimes they give up and quit the program, wash out due to medical or physical issues, or they’re thanked for their efforts and advised to try out another year.
Nearly half the group was gone by the first Thursday. It happened quickly. There wasn’t any ritual, like in fire academies or the military. The person just disappeared. You’d just notice someone’s gear piled in a corner, or an empty seat, or someone’s name missing on the list at roll call one morning.
Sometimes you saw it coming, if someone was lagging behind the pack on runs or just doing stupid shit. Those were the ones the trainers focused their attention on, and they usually didn’t last long.
I learned never to categorize or underestimate someone. Some of the biggest, fittest athletes alive have keeled over on the first day or week of training. Others who just squeak in at either end of the size limits—five feet to six feet five inches tall, 120 to 200 pounds—end up jumping successfully for years.
Dropping out of something you put so much effort into can be mentally crushing. Many candidates who wash out end up pulling out of the fire service completely.
One afternoon near the end of the first week, I entered the bunkhouse to find one of my classmates, a stocky guy, sitting on the floor in the hall with his back against the wall. His head was down and he was clearly upset. He had just failed one of the PT tests.
All of us were at our limits. No one had time or energy left over for sympathy, no late-night bonding sessions or hand-holding. At that point it was still every person for him- or herself.
I just walked past him to my room and closed the door.
As they put us through the paces, our trainers would offer occasional reminders to keep things in perspective. “Give yourself a round of applause at the end of the day,” they said. “You finished today, but you might be gone tomorrow. Have a good night, ladies and gentlemen.”
Not exactly encouraging. But it was the truth.
To keep the pain and swelling down in my leg I was popping Advil and Relafen, a prescription anti-inflammatory, like they were candy.
To make things worse, the entire arch on my right foot turned into one big blister by the first weekend, the result of a poor choice of socks on one of the pack tests. One morning before a PT run, a trainer pointed at my shoe.
“Ramos!” he barked. “What’s up with your foot?”
A faint red stain was seeping through the white material. I wished I’d had the foresight to buy some damned red shoes.
A few days later my foot started sprouting white lumps like alien pods. The blister had become infected. I called my pops for advice, and I could hear the concern in his voice.
“Son, if that gets any worse, you’re going to have to get some assistance right away,” he said. Meaning see a doctor.
“No way,” I said. “If I do that, I’m out.”
“Well, then you’re going to have to clean it out yourself,” he said.
I knew he was right. After I hung up, I closed my door and sat on the edge of my bed with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
I stuck a toothbrush between my teeth, silently cursing those shitty socks. I was so mad I wanted to howl, but I didn’t want anyone to hear me. I held my breath and dumped the peroxide under the infected flap of skin.
Leaning back on the bed, I wished I could punch something nice and satisfying but all I could do was bite on my toothbrush. Holy shit, that stung. After a few more pours, the pain ebbed and I scrubbed the blisters out as best I could.
I wished I had a few bottles of saline to wash the wound out. But if I had asked for any, or gotten caught trying to sneak some out, it would have meant a first-class ride to the doctor—and a ticket home.
Irrigation was the key. It took a few more days, but the alien pod infestation finally cleared up.
BY THE SECOND WEEK of training the days settled into a carefully structured pattern. After roll call and morning PT, the rest of the time was divided between classroom instruction and field exercises where we put our new knowledge to the test.
You learned damn quick to stay awake in class, which was especially hard right after lunch. If the instructors caught you dozing off, they’d reward you with long wall sits or some other punishing exercise.
The day typically ended with still more PT, anything from trail running to tree climbing, maybe with a few dozen push-ups and lunges thrown in for good measure. We always brought our running clothes on field exercises, since the trainers could always decide to drop us off in the middle of the woods with nothing more than a direction to go and a loose promise to pick us up again in the vehicle. Eventually.
We learned about the standard Forest Service smokejumper parachute, the FS-14. The simple, round design goes back to before World War II and has been perfected over decades of use. It does exactly what it is meant to: get a jumper safely to the ground in some of the roughest terrain anywhere.
Imagine a huge radio tower chopped off about forty feet from the ground. That’s what the exit tower looked like, and we spent most of the second week of training either climbing it or jumping off it.
The top level had a mock-up of an airplane door for practicing our exits. A good exit is critical. If you don’t leave the plane correctly, it can cause a chute malfunction, make you miss your jump spot, or worse.
The trainers watched as we double-timed it up the stairs in full jump gear, clipped in our static lines, and assumed the correct prejump position. When you jumped through the fake door, everything else was as close to real as possible, from the few brief seconds of free fall to the shock that followed, hard enough to make my neck and jaw hurt for days.
Instead of a parachute, you ended up dangling from a long cable that slid you down to the ground like a zipline. After landing and unclipping, you hoofed it back to the tower, trotted up two flights of stairs, and did it again, over and over, dozens of times a day.
The middle tower level was for practicing tree letdowns. Smokejumpers often don’t have the luxury of nice, open landing zones—especially in the Pacific Northwest, where steep mountainsides and old-growth forests are the norm.
If you end up landing in a tree, your next job is get to the ground safely. I already knew how to rappel, but doing it from a parachute stuck in the top of a hundred-foot Douglas fir was another story.
Every jumper carries a 150-foot letdown rope coiled in a leg pocket. On the tower we learned how to anchor the rope to the tightest side of our parachute riser, the webbing that connects the harness to the parachute.
The next step is to detach from the canopy by pulling on two metal releases called Capewells, one on each side. Then all you have to do is rappel down. In a tree that means navigating branches and foliage.
&
nbsp; Everything has to be smooth and easy. If your canopy isn’t hung up securely—ideally over the very top of the tree like a pillowcase on a pole—you have to anchor the letdown rope to the tree itself. The last thing you want is to Capewell too early and end up with a parachute shroud wrapped around your neck, which resulted in a fatality in 1966.
Sometimes you can do everything right and still find yourself dangling. In 1970, an NCSB rookie ended his third jump in the crown of an old-growth monster in the Olympic National Park. When he rappelled, he found the end of his 240-foot letdown rope was still 30 feet off the ground. A buddy had to help him swing over to a nearby tree.
We also practiced climbing trees to retrieve parachutes and cargo. Our instructors showed us how to strap on metal heel spurs and wrap a steel-cored flipline around the trunk. By flipping it upward, you climb the trunk like a telephone lineman.
As with everything, the instructors gave us a quick explanation and demonstration, then stepped back to watch us work it out for ourselves. They critiqued our technique and timed us up and down.
Tick tock, tick tock.
Of all the tower exercises, the one that almost did me in was at the very bottom.
Most jumper injuries come from bad landings. Even if you hit your landing spot, with an FS-14 on a normal day, you are still moving up to eight to ten miles an hour forward with a descent rate of approximately ten feet per second. To absorb the shock with your whole body, you do a controlled tumble called a parachute landing fall, or PLF.
The lowest level of the tower had a pair of platforms, five and seven feet off the ground. We used them to practice PLFs by jumping off and rolling in the dirt.
It’s hard enough remembering everything you’re supposed to do as the ground rushes up: first and foremost, face into the wind. Don’t forget to keep your legs together, bend your knees, tuck your elbows in, and rotate your body to spread the impact across your thigh, your butt, and the side of your back.
It’s even harder when you know one wrong move could break your tibia. I couldn’t help favoring my left leg when I hit the ground. It got so bad an instructor pulled me aside for some one-on-one training.
“Like this, Ramos!” he said, demonstrating how to do it correctly.
Up to this point I had somehow kept my condition a secret. But now I was clearly falling behind. Next week we would start jumping for real, and doing a good PLF was one of the mandatory requirements for moving on.
One day after yet another shit show, one of the instructors from NCSB came to my van and asked what was up. I came clean about my injury. “I’m pushing as hard as I can,” I said.
His answer was brutal in its honesty. “I don’t care,” he said. “You better pick it up. On a fire it doesn’t matter if you’re hurt. You need to perform. I want all NCSB up front on every PT!”
A few days later, the NCSB base manager asked me what was going on. I told him the truth and held my breath.
“Well, Ramos, maybe you should try next year,” he said. My heart lurched.
“No sir,” I muttered. “I’m not leaving.”
He didn’t waste words. “Then get your ass out there and fix it.”
I didn’t know if I left that talk with extra brownie points for hanging in there, or one step closer to going home. They could easily have chosen to wash me out, if only for the liability. All it would have taken was one order to get an x-ray and it would be adiós Ramos.
I just knew the only way I was leaving was on a backboard. I wanted to provide extraordinary service to my country, and this was the path I had chosen to do my part.
When I get stressed, it’s hard for me to eat or sleep. The night before the practical tests we had to pass to move on to jump operations, I managed to cram down some Gardenburgers. I still can’t stand veggie burgers to this day.
We all passed our practicals on the second Friday. “If you have questions, ask them now,” the instructors said by way of congratulations. “Because come Monday morning, you will be on your own, folks.”
CHAPTER 7
THE MORNING OF OUR first fire jump, one of the trainers rolled a TV and a VCR into the training room and hit play. Up popped a scene of a scruffy guy scribbling on a blackboard, babbling nonsense about planes and parachutes.
Wait—was that Kevin Costner? I knew this movie: Fandango. This was where the dude pulls his rip cord in midair and finds his pack is full of dirty laundry.
We trainees glanced at one another. It was funny and a little crazy. This couldn’t be the whole briefing, I thought. But when the movie clip was over, the order came to suit up—for real this time.
Ten minutes later we were taxiing down the runway. The plane’s cabin filled with the fumes of jet-A and the earsplitting waa-waa-waa of the Sherpa’s engine.
Originally designed as a small military transport, the twin-engined Shorts C-23 Sherpa has flown with the U.S. Army and Air Force in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It isn’t a pretty plane, and it’s not especially powerful or maneuverable. But its boxy body is roomy inside. Some people call it a “Flying Winnebago.”
As the wheels left the ground, it hit me that this was a one-way trip. For the first time in my life, I was taking off in a plane that I wouldn’t land in.
I looked around the cabin at the other trainees. On every face, half hidden behind a metal mesh face mask, was a look of solemn concentration.
After the first wave of washouts, we had slowly started to bond as a group. Two weeks of eating, sleeping, showering, and suffering side by side will do that. We were learning how we each responded to stress, who was good in the classroom or the tower, who was willing to circle back around after a run to make sure everyone else was in. People could still wash out—and they would—but we had done well to have made it this far together.
I looked at Hillbilly, another NCSB trainee whose absurd sense of humor was a lot like mine. He had experience as a hotshot and helitack. Usually he was a regular Mel Blanc, cracking us up with his many impressions. Right now he was quiet, though. His eyes were wide with anticipation.
It only took a few minutes to reach the jump spot, a large open meadow in south-central Oregon. The pilot started circling at twenty-five hundred feet, a thousand feet higher than the standard fire jump altitude.
Wind howled through the open door as the spotter threw out a set of streamers. The twenty-foot strips of colored crepe paper are weighted with sand at one end to fall at the same speed as a jumper under a parachute. They mark the landing zone and show the descent rate, critical info for a safe landing. Most important, they indicate which way the wind is blowing, both up high and near the ground.
From the back of the lineup I watched my classmates leave the plane one by one in a whoosh and a cloud of dust. We were doing our first jumps alone for safety.
Everyone’s exit seemed to go smoothly. Even if you made it out safely, though, there were still plenty of ways a parachute could malfunction. In class we had gone over every one in detail.
Your main canopy could not deploy at all—say, if you forgot to clip your static line, which has happened. Or it could deploy but not inflate, leaving you plummeting under a “full streamer.” In both cases your best option was to pull the handle that deployed your reserve chute, a smaller canopy packed in a case on your chest.
A main chute that only partly inflated gave you more options and a little more time. A line wrapped over the top of the canopy—called a “Mae West” for the twin-peaked shape it made—might come free with a good yank. An inside-out canopy, an inversion, was rare, but sometimes you could still steer one to a safe landing. A broken steering line meant you’d have to do riser turns, pulling on your riser instead of the line itself, which works but much more slowly.
For other problems, like a torn canopy, it was your call, depending on your rate of descent, whether to ride it out or deploy your reserve.
The spotter’s voice yanked my mind back to the present. I was next in line.
The jump door chec
klist passed in a blur, so familiar from all the endless training, and before I knew it I was airborne.
THE NEXT FOUR SECONDS were pure controlled excitement. Back in 1999 we still jumped in the pike position with our bodies straight and at a slight angle, like paratroopers still are trained to do to this day.
I watched my feet rise toward the horizon as I counted out loud: “Jump thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, check my canopy, check my jump partner, check my jump spot.”
The parachute deployed with a snap, right on time. I’ll never forget the sudden, total silence and clarity, seeing the canopy against the blue sky overhead.
My canopy looked in good shape. I looked down for the streamers that marked the jump spot. The voice of an instructor crackled over my radio. “Left toggle. Ok, now right toggle. Half brakes.” I worked the high-tech wooden handles that steered the parachute and controlled my speed.
Before I knew it I was coming in face into the wind and my feet touched the grass. I had made my first jump.
My classmates were waiting. We traded hoots and a few high fives—I stuck with my old-school low fives—but not for long. We gathered up our gear and hustled over to where the instructors were waiting to evaluate our first qualifying jumps in excruciating detail.
Fourteen more to go.
The jumps gradually increased in difficulty. We started jumping in pairs, in the standard two-person stick. (Smokejumpers leave the plane in “sticks,” usually two people [a double stick] who jump one after the other, occasionally three [triple stick] or one [single stick].)
We also started jumping from only fifteen hundred feet AGL (above ground level) and into steeper and rougher terrain, aiming at landing spots that grew progressively smaller.
Every jump was analyzed from exit to descent to landing, as strictly as if we were pilots learning to land on an aircraft carrier. First you gave your account of what you thought happened, and then the trainers would say what they saw. When the accounts didn’t match up, there were cameras on the ground recording everything.
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