Young Men And Fire  July 8, 2013 Current Commentary Comments Off
on Young Men And Fire Company Email Subscribe Button    Company
RSS Subscribe Button  The moment I heard about the Arizona
wildfire that killed 19 elite firefighters last week, I had an
odd and awful flashback to a similar tragedy that I did not even
witness, which happened years before I was born.  On a hot,
breezy August afternoon in 1949, 16 men parachuted into a wooded
canyon 20 miles north of Helena, Mont., to fight a small fire.
Less than two hours later, 11 of those 16 men were dead. Two
more perished the next day of injuries they received from the
inferno in Mann Gulch.  Like the Arizona team, which went by the
name Hotshots, the men who jumped from that DC-3 in Montana were
hand-picked and highly trained, the best and bravest of a
courageous breed of young men who fought fire on the nation’s
forests and grasslands. (Women did not do this work at all in
those days and do not do much of it today.) They were
Smokejumpers, employed by the U