Young Men and Fire (3 page)

One might assume that most Smokejumpers come from the woods and after they are finished as jumpers join up for good with the United States Forest Service or some state agency supervising public lands or some private logging company—the Smokejumper base in Missoula is a magnet for tough young guys pointed toward the woods for life. Besides being the headquarters for Region One of the Forest Service, Missoula is also the home of the University of Montana, which has a powerful school of forestry. Any summer a highly select number of forestry school students are Smokejumpers—of the thirteen firefighters who died in Mann Gulch, five were forestry students at the University of Montana and two were forestry students at the University of Minnesota. Two of the three survivors had just finished high school and were also University of Montana students. Select, very good students, trained in the woods.

At best, though, there is very little chance of a longtime future in smokejumping. To start with, you are through jumping at forty, and for those who think of lasting that long there are only a few openings ahead, administrative or maintenance. But one thing that remains with Smokejumpers, no matter where they ultimately land, is the sense of being highly select for life and of belonging for life to a highly select outfit, somewhat like the Marines, who know what they are talking about when they speak of themselves as the proud and the few. Although many Smokejumpers never see each other after they leave the outfit, they remain members of a kind of fraternal organization that also has some dim ties seemingly with religion. Just being a first-class woodsman admits you almost anywhere into an international fraternity of sorts, and although you will meet only a few of your worldwide brotherhood, you will recognize any one of them when you see him swing an ax. Going a little up the fraternal ladder is being admitted to the Forest Service, and that is like belonging to the Masons or the Knights of Columbus; making the
next step is becoming a Smokejumper, and that is like being a Shriner or Knight Templar. This kind of talk is going too far but not altogether in the wrong direction. It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that many Smokejumpers never intend to remain Smokejumpers or even to work in the woods for the rest of their lives. A good number of them are students working for M.A.’s or Ph.D.’s—even more go on to be lawyers and doctors, and even more to be dentists. These young men are first class, both as students and jumpers. They tend to hang out together but don’t talk much about their university life, at least not when other jumpers are around. Later, though, when they are far away and far up the professional ladder, they get a remote look in their eyes when they talk about the tap on the calf of the left leg telling them it’s only a step to the sky.

For many former Smokejumpers, then, smokejumping is not closely tied up with their way of life, but is more something that is necessary for them to pass through and not around and, once it is unmistakably done, does not have to be done again. The “it” is within, and is the need to settle some things with the universe and ourselves before taking on the “business of the world,” which isn’t all that special or hard but takes time. This “it” is the something special within that demands we do something special, and “it” could be within a lot of us.

On the bottom line, this is the story of an “outfit,” as men call themselves when they take on the same tough job, have to be thought a little bit crazy to try it, have to stick together and share the same training to get it done, and shortly afterwards have to go to town together and stick together if one of them starts losing a fight in a bar. They back each other and they imitate each other. It should be clear that this tragedy is not a
classical tragedy of a monumental individual crossing the sword of his will with the sword of destiny. It is a tragedy of a crew, its flaws and grandeurs largely those of Smokejumpers near the beginning of their history. Their collective character counts, and being young counts, it especially counts, but only certain individuals emerge out of the smoke and roar that took in everything. Eldon Diettert counts; he was the fine research student who was called from his birthday dinner to make this flight and told some of the crew that he almost said no—only recently a scholarship in the forestry school at the University of Montana has been named in his honor. David Navon was already something of a four-dimensional adventurer; he had been first lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division and had parachuted into Bastogne and in about an hour would be taking snapshots on his way to death. William Hell-man, squad leader and second-in-command, was handsome and important and only a month before had made a parachute landing on the Ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument. At the end he wished he had been a better Catholic, and men wept when they saw him still alive. Then there were the three survivors. R. Wagner (“Wag”) Dodge, the foreman, gifted with his hands, silent on principle, and fastidious, who invented a fire and lay down in its ashes, lived only a few years more. Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee, the other two who survived, spent years trying to forget the fire. Part of our story will be to find them and to bring them back to Mann Gulch with us to discover how well they remembered and forgot. In this part of the story there are living ghosts as characters, and the story doesn’t come out quite the way either the ghosts or the non-ghosts expected.

But even in the memories of those who knew them, the dead Smokejumpers have a collective character. When you ask any one of them what he knew of any one of the dead, you always get the same answer, which is undoubtedly true: “He was a great guy.” And when parents can bring themselves to speak of a son, they always say, “He was a wonderful boy.” Of the fifteen who jumped on the fire, thirteen were between seventeen
and twenty-three, and were still so young they didn’t like the taste of hard liquor but drank beer, gallons of beer. Being that young, they were in good part what their training made them, and maybe with their girls—maybe especially with their girls—they acted mostly like Smokejumpers. Important in becoming a Smokejumper is learning how to act like one.

First-year Smokejumpers believed women were largely what second- or third-year Smokejumpers told them women were, and, having few chances to see women of the world while they were on the job in the woods, they had a very small body of fact to correct what they were told. Probably the “woman of the world” they knew best was at the nearest bar, about a four-and-a-half-mile walk down the road from their training base at Nine Mile, and sometimes, especially after returning from a jump, they wouldn’t get to the bar until nearly 1:30 at night, which was closing time, but they would make the owner stay open until dawn. No matter the time, there was always this same tall dame on a stool waiting to accommodate herself to their beer. She was tall and silent, but after a couple of hours her trunk would begin to sway, and, as she finally toppled like a tree from her stool, the Smokejumpers would all stand and yell, “Timber.” Then they would walk four and a half miles back to the base and be ready to jump.

A few such glimpses of women when mixed with verbal images of them drawn by experienced jumpers must have left first-year jumpers picturing “women of the world” as part tree, probably part sheep, and certainly part deer, because almost without doubt they had branches and antlers.

What most first-year jumpers really knew about women was only one girl, the girl back home. She had been a junior in high school when he had been a senior. He took time off in the summer to be with her at the creamery picnic back home, and he took at least another weekend off during the summer just to be with her. Then they went on a long packtrip together. She always carried at least forty pounds in her packsack, and they would stay out overnight. Like him and other great walkers,
she walked slightly stoop-shouldered. At night after he returned to his job of smokejumping he would float into her dreams from the sky looking for a fire, and as he floated by always he stopped for a look at her. If he had to go on before he found her, she would wake up deeply disturbed, but, believe it or not, she never thought of him as tough.

It is hard to realize that these young men would be dead within two hours after they landed from parachutes no longer made of silk but of nylon, so they would not be eaten by grasshoppers.

S
O IT WAS A YOUNG OUTFIT
, of necessity young as individuals and barely started as an organization. As individuals, they would soon go the way of prizefighters—all washed up when their reflexes began to slow by fractions of a second and when they no longer could absorb a beating and come back to win. Few have ever made it to the age limit of forty. As an organization, the outfit also was young, only nine years old in 1949, and some of those nine years were war years when the development of the Smokejumpers was slowed down. The war, though, had positive after-effects on the history of the Smokejumpers. For instance, of the fifteen who jumped on the Mann Gulch fire, twelve had been in the armed services and the other three had been too young to enlist.

In 1949, then, this was an outfit of great power and to us, but not to them, of some apparent weaknesses. Although modern graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the Smokejumpers in carrying out their major purpose of putting out fires so fast they don’t have time to become big ones, nothing initially—at least not before the Mann Gulch fire—made visible any weakness in adhering too exclusively to this purpose even when it would have made sense to enlarge it.

One danger of making almost a sole specialty of dropping on fires as soon as possible is that nearly all such fires will be
small fires, and a tragic corollary is that not much about fighting big fires can be learned by fighting small ones. Small fires, remember, most frequently are put out with a shovel and an ax, to which, for the sake of the record, a Pulaski should be added, a Pulaski being a double-bitted ax with one of the bits made into a little hoe. As for big fires in the early history of the Forest Service, a young ranger made himself famous by answering the big question on an exam, “What would you do to control a crown fire?” with the one-liner, “Get out of the way and pray like hell for rain.” Another weakness that might show up from a specialization of dropping on small fires in otherwise inaccessible country is that there aren’t enough of them in a usual season to make them into a profession. In 1949, when there were big critical fires that could be approached on the ground, the Forest Service continued its original practice, as it was to do with the Mann Gulch fire, of going to the big towns—Spokane, Butte, Missoula, or Helena—and picking up what they could find sitting at bars or lined up outside employment agencies, maybe with one good pair of walking shoes among the whole bunch which one barfly passed to the other in the alley when it came his turn to be interviewed. In these early times, when Smokejumpers were not actually on fires, most of which were small, they were either at their base picking dandelions out of the lawn while waiting for their names to come to the head of the jump list or out in the woods on what were called “projects,” building trail, stringing telephone wire, or thinning dense timber and not learning much if anything about what to do when a fire gets big enough to jump from one side of a canyon to the other.

The Smokejumpers are now the crack firefighters of the Forest Service, the shock troops. Whenever fires are critical, which practically always means big, that’s where they are, from Missoula, Montana, to Minnesota to New Mexico to Alaska, and they don’t care how they get there—by plane, bus, horse, or on foot, just so it is the fastest way. They are professional firefighters, for a living taking on fires of all sizes and shapes.

A Class C fire (10 to 99 acres) has a special place in this
story, although as forest fires go it is no great fire. But many of this crew had never been on a fire as big as a Class C fire. Wag Dodge, the foreman of the crew and a Smokejumper foreman since 1945, had led one crew of Smokejumpers to one Class C fire in 1948 and to one Class D fire (100 to 299 acres) the year before but to no fire larger than that.

When the crew landed on the Mann Gulch fire, it was a C. Then suddenly it blew, and probably no one there had ever been on a “blowup” before. A blowup to a forest fire is something like a hurricane to an ocean storm. When 450 men finally got the Mann Gulch fire under control, it had burned forty-five hundred acres, between seven and eight square miles.

T
HE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF THE FIRST
Smokejumpers, then, was still primary to the Smokejumpers of 1949—to land on a forest fire in difficult or otherwise inaccessible country before suddenly the universe tried to reduce its own frame of things to ashes and charred grouse. When the Mann Gulch fire was first spotted from the plane, the pilot, the crew foreman, and the spotter sized it up as a fairly ordinary fire—they reported it was just a “ground fire” that had “crowned” in one place where it had already burned out. None of the three saw any “spot fires” around its edges, and that meant the fire had been advancing slowly on the ground and was not playing leapfrog by throwing small fires ahead of the fire’s main front.

The words in quotation marks above and undoubtedly some that are not are those of firefighters, and we had better be sure of the meaning of these key words in the Basic English of firefighters so that when the tragic race between the firefighters and the fire begins it won’t have to be stopped for definitions. It is not enough to know the word for this or that kind of fire; to know one fire is to see how what was dropping
live ashes from a dead tree at the end of one afternoon by next afternoon had become one kind of fire after another kind of fire until it had become a monster in flames from which there was no escape.