Nature

(Image of the Mann Gulch Monument)

I am breaking containment to one additional post today. Do not get used to it.

Today is the seventy-sixth anniversary of the Mann Gulch fire and I think it is deserving of a post. The primary source material for this is Norman McLean’s excellent Young Men and Fire. I also ran down some of the after action reports (AARs) that McLean references, as well as some much later reporting regarding maintenance of the monuments

This one is for Raven as he’s the one that got me hooked on this history. It’s all his fault!

(Image of the Mann Gulch Fire sign)

In August 1949 the US Forest Service and its smoke jumpers found themselves completely stretched to the breaking point. And something did actually break. On 5 AUG the remaining 15 available smoke jumpers were mobilized as a result of a wild fire that had resulted from a lightning strike in what is now the Gates of the Mountains. They took the last available C-47 and were led by Wag Dodge. With the exception of the two youngest smoke jumpers, they were all WW II paratrooper vets. One of the smoke jumpers got sick/got the vapors on the flight onto the objective and did not jump. There was also a former smoke jumper, who was now working as a ranger and fire guard because his mother was worried being a smoke jumper was too dangerous, who was already on site working the fire as he’d deployed from his ground station.

This tragedy is an example of small team operations breakdown. At the time of the Mann Gulch fire, smoke jumping teams were not formalized units where every team was made up of a specific set of members. Rather, each team was formed ad hoc with the senior person available on the roster as the foreman and jump master and however many fire fighters were needed simply selected in order on the available list. The available list were the smoke jumpers that had not just come off working a fire and were considered “fresh” and available to work a fire. The team that jumped into Mann Gulch had never worked together as a team, they’d never worked with Dodge, one of the most experienced smoke jumpers in the service at the time. Only two – the two youngest – actually knew each other well as they’d been assigned to do work together around the smoke jumper’s headquarters and camp. In short, there was no team or unit cohesion because the teams were all ad hoc. This is the first critical failure leading to the tragedy.

When they jumped in, their equipment pallet’s parachute didn’t open, it crashed, and the radio, among other things, was destroyed. So they had no way to call for help. This meant that the fire guard had to hike back off the objective to his station to radio in. It also meant there was no way for anyone outside Mann Gulch to reach the team on the ground. After reviewing McLean’s book and the AARs, my professional opinion, with full hindsight as someone who led a small team in OIF 2008, is this was the point where Dodge should have immediately hiked his men out of Mann Gulch. Their comms were down and could not be restored. They were isolated. They already knew there were no other available assets to assist even if they could get a message out. At that point the first priority is to protect your people. This was the second critical failure.

After landing Dodge assessed the fire, decided it was not to serious, but also was bothered by something he couldn’t articulate. He brought his deputy and the fire guard to take a second look, they didn’t see anything out of order, and, as a result, Dodge determined they could fight it. He declared it a 24 hour fire, meaning they’d work it in bits over a 24 hour period, which would qualify them for overtime. Dodge was, by all accounts including that of his widow, an exceedingly self contained and taciturn individual. He didn’t bounce what he found off about the fire off of his deputy or the fire guard, he just compartmentalized it, and moved forward. Dodge deciding to ignore what his experience and expertise were telling him – that something was off with the fire – was the third critical mistake leading to mission failure.

At the same time all of this was happening, the Forestry Service was actually trying to reach Dodge and his team as they were out of contact/couldn’t be raised on the radio. Which was because the radio broke when the parachute for the pallet it was on didn’t open.When they couldn’t be raised, someone hiked in to the fire guard’s station and left a note on his door that he never got because he was in Mann Gulch fighting the fire. The Forest Service then tried to pull in additional resources through memorandums of understanding (MOUs) and memorandums of agreement (MOAs) with other agencies. However, they were rebuffed on the basis that the MOUs and MOAs didn’t allow for ad hoc support. They then started going bar by bar in Helena trying to recruit anyone willing and semi-sober enough to provide support. Eventually they wound up with a group of volunteers, but by then it was too late as they had to be transported by truck and then boat. This was the fourth critical mission failure. Ad hoc agreements and unclear MOUs/MOAs and interagency disputes are not a problem until they are!

As Dodge and his team started working the fire they had their backs to the Missouri River working side hill. The fire eventually blew up/flashed over and got behind them and then roared up slope picking up speed and strength. At this point it was a foot race: “200 yards to safety, death was 50 yards behind.” Dodge, acting on what McLean and the AAR concluded was instinct, lit an escape fire. He ignited a circular patch of the dry cheatgrass and as soon as it burned out, he called to the team to join him in it. They ignored him, either because they couldn’t hear him or thought he was nuts, and kept sprinting for the crest above the gulch. Dodge lied down on the now fuel free, but still hot ground and the fire passed right over him leaving him singed, but otherwise unharmed. The two youngest smoke jumpers made not just the crest, but, according to both McLean’s assessment and the AARs, did so at the only place where they could actually escape over the crest to safety based on the geography. The other thirteen – twelve smoke jumpers and the ranger/fire guard – all perished in the fire. This is the fifth critical mission failure, but it proceeds from the first. Because the team, like all the smoke jumping teams, was put together from the remaining available jumpers, there was no team cohesion. While everyone knew who Dodge was and respected him, they’d never worked with him before. As a result, when he gave the unconventional order to get into the escape fire, there was no trust between team and team leader. His men scattered and all but two died as a result.

I’m not convinced it was instinct to light the escape fire. McLean wrote in Young Men and Fire that lighting escape fires had been a well documented long term practice of the northern plains tribes. I expect that Dodge had read about the practice somewhere, it had stuck with him, and in his desperation he tried the technique. I can’t prove that, but it makes more sense than just re-inventing it on the spot with the adrenaline pumping and his and his team’s lives on the line.

The Forest Service & the smoke jumpers took the painful lessons of everything that could go wrong going wrong at Mann Gulch to heart & made a number of positive changes to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. Including how the teams are formed, trained, clarifying MOUs & MOAs with other agencies, etc. There have been other tragedies, other very bad days for the smoke jumpers, but not because of a repeat of what went wrong for the team at Mann Gulch.

There are two interesting epilogues to the tragedy and both involve David Navon.

Professional baseball player, Jack Lucky Lohrke, had been a friend of David Navon, one of the WW II vets and smoke jumpers that died at Mann Gulch. Years after the fire and after he retired, Lohrke took his son hiking there as a sort of memorialization of his dead friend. While there his son was digging around in the dirt around where Navon’s marker was. He found Navon’s rank bars from WW II and Lohrke was able to return them to his parents.

Despite Navon being Jewish, when they put the markers up for each of the fallen smoke jumpers where the AARs indicated they had perished in the fire, they put up crosses for all of them including Navon. Over the years the markers have all been replaced with more durable ones. The Smoke Jumpers actually jump the markers in to replace them. When they had to replace Navon’s they jumped in a star of David marker rather than a cross. There are now twelve crosses and one star of David high above the cold Missouri Waters.

To finish, here’s James Keelaghan, who wrote & originally performed Cold Missouri Waters.

Open thread!