Think Again

Think Again

On the afternoon of August 5, 1949, thirteen men died on a hillside in Montana because they could not abandon what they knew.

They were smokejumpers -- elite wildfire fighters who parachuted into remote blazes when no road crew could reach them in time. The fire at Mann Gulch had started from a lightning strike the day before, and by the time the crew dropped in, the conditions had shifted in ways nobody had accounted for. Wagner Dodge, their foreman, led the team across the gulch and toward a ridge. Then the wind changed. The fire jumped the gulch behind them and began racing uphill faster than a person can run on flat ground. On a slope, with dry grass, it was moving at about thirty miles per hour. The men had maybe ninety seconds.

Dodge did something nobody in his crew had ever seen. He stopped running. He struck a match and lit the grass in front of him, creating a small oval of burned ground. Then he lay down in the ash and called for his men to do the same. His idea was simple but alien: burn away the fuel ahead of the fire, then shelter inside the burned patch. The coming wall of flame would have nothing to consume where he lay.

Not one of his men followed him. They ran. Thirteen of them died on that hillside. Dodge survived.

The official inquiry afterward struggled to explain why the crew didn't follow their leader. The men weren't cowards. They were experienced. But in the heat and the terror of the moment, the instruction to lie down in a burning field and set fire to the ground in front of you was not something their brains could process as a survival strategy. It contradicted everything they had been trained to do. Running was what you did. Running was what firefighters knew. And so they ran, even when running was certain death.