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  To Mike and Flora,

  for the love, laughter, and support.

  To the Granite Mountain Hotshots,

  who strived to be better, always.

  He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.

  —JOSEPH HELLER, Catch-22

  Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.

  —JOHN 15:13

  Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  For generations

  we’ve sold these goods

  to young boys

  who burn for glory.

  Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  Indeed, how sweet,

  Pray tell

  Poppy covered warrior.

  Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  How sweet was the Somme?

  Such little ground

  was gained with

  half a generation gone.

  Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  When weapons

  far outpace the men

  what an empty word

  is glory.

  —JOHN F. MCCULLAGH, “Pro Patria Mori”

  PROLOGUE

  Page 88 of the Yarnell Hill Fire Serious Accident Investigation Report, the official account of the deadliest wildfire in the United States since 1933, offers a distanced, emotionless diagram of a fatal last stand against flames and heat. Coffinlike shapes represent nineteen firefighters killed in the Arizona wildfire on June 30, 2013, all members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. It’s an arresting chart—loyalty, death, and immeasurable grief, graphed in numbered geometric figures arranged in precise disarray:

  The chart depicts the firefighters’ bodies in the hollow where the wildfire trapped them—a steep mountain to their backs, a high wall of flames ahead. A list of names below it keys to the individuals who lost their lives:

  1. Eric Marsh; 2. Jesse Steed; 3. Clayton Whitted; 4. Robert Caldwell;

  5. Travis Carter; 6. Christopher MacKenzie; 7. Travis Turbyfill;

  8. Andrew Ashcraft; 10. Joe Thurston; 11. Wade Parker;

  12. Anthony Rose; 13. Garret Zuppiger; 14. Scott Norris;

  15. Dustin DeFord; 16. William Warneke; 17. Kevin Woyjeck;

  18. John Percin Jr.; 19. Grant McKee; 20. Sean Misner.

  Number 9, Brendan McDonough, is missing. He’d been assigned lookout duty a half mile away.

  On that hot and dry June day, the Granite Mountain Hotshots had risen with the sun, as usual. They’d taken their assigned seats in the crew’s four personnel carriers and traveled through forty-three winding miles, from their home base in Prescott, Arizona, to a speck of town—649 residents, barely 9 square miles—called Yarnell, a hideaway for hippies, artists, retirees, and others looking to forget and be forgotten. The men had parked near the end of a dirt road, on the edge of the wild, and sized up a fire that was chewing at a ridge west of town. They’d trudged uphill in single file for what should have been a usual day’s work—sawing off brush, tossing it aside, and scraping the ground down to mineral soil, to starve the approaching fire of the vegetation that would keep it burning. The task is called cutting fire line, and it’s how wildfires are fought.

  The sun pounded down upon the Hotshots. They marched upslope, bowed under the weight of fifty pounds of gear, their eyes on the rocky ground underfoot. Parched chaparral coated the majestic Weaver Mountains, highlands that rise from the Sonoran Desert’s leafy flatlands. It hadn’t rained in Yarnell since April. For the fourth consecutive day, temperatures had soared above one hundred degrees and lingered there, disrupting the usual easy summer in that cool mountainside retreat. In flame-resistant pants and long-sleeved shirts that some had folded up, others had closed by fastening a strap of Velcro around their wrists, the men lumbered past massive granite boulders that blasted waves of heat at them. In their gloved hands, they each lugged one of the tools of their trade: picks, axes, shovels, Stihl 440 chain saws.

  The fire hadn’t looked like much to them when they had rolled into town that morning—a swirl of saffron smoke against a boundless blue sky. Sparked two days earlier by lightning, the fire had crept north of its point of origin, a gnarled cluster of chaparral plants—catclaw acacia, scrub oak, and manzanita—near the tip of Yarnell Hill, seventy miles northwest of Phoenix.

  The Hotshots took positions on the fire’s slowest-spreading edge, its heel, an area close to its point of origin. Yarnell stood to their right, ringed by thick, tall brush, land that hadn’t burned in forty-seven years. To their left lay a charred patch of about two hundred acres—an area firefighters call the black, because the vegetation there had already burned. They marked it as a safe retreat if the fire turned on them.

  Their first task was to find a strategic starting point for the fire line they aimed to build as a barrier to the flame’s spread, and as an anchor to a hand-carved buffer zone clear of everything flammable. They settled on a gap on the fire’s southwest corner, along the dense wall of a steep, rocky slope facing toward the town of Congress, away from Yarnell. They swung their tools, pounding, digging, slicing, and clearing the ground around the fire’s southern perimeter—a line about a yard wide around a bent elbow—and onward along the fire’s eastern fringe, its right flank. The task is a sort of savage science, strategic in its planning, primitive in its execution, punishing bodies and minds. Stooped, the men attacked the hardened soil with furious precision, determined to take away the fuel that would otherwise feed the fire if it ran toward Yarnell.

  Then, everything changed. As forecasters had twice warned, a powerful thunderstorm blew in from the north. It crashed head-to-head with the fire, which was rolling toward Yarnell’s small neighbor Peeples Valley, a community of ranches and middling homes with about half of Yarnell’s population and twice the acreage. The collision was at once fearsome and spectacular. Winds gusted to forty, then fifty miles per hour, bending the northbound flames eastward and shoving them southward at a speed of a mile in four minutes, a hundred yards in fifteen seconds—faster than any gear-laden firefighter can sprint. Smoke cleaved a horseshoe in the air, stamping the fire’s changing orientation in gunmetal gray against the darkened sky.

  From her home in Yarnell, Adria Shayne gasped at the apocalyptic sight. She grabbed her pets and, stunned, drove away in her battered pickup truck, leaving her house and everything in it heating up behind her. Propane tanks hissed and exploded as she escaped. Glass windows shattered. Ammunition fired spontaneously. Flames rolled through the west side of town, then barged inside a neighborhood at its southern tip, Glen Ilah, burning homes at random, skipping some, as if in a drunken game of hopscotch. Pipes cracked and water gushed underfoot. Ash shrouded the sun, turning the day dark.

  From a knoll northeast of the rest of his crew, McDonough, the assigned lookout, swung a pocket-size psychrometer, an L-shaped
instrument that measured temperature and humidity on the fire line. Lookout is a physically easy task that requires intimate knowledge of fire, weather, and their wicked tricks. The easy part suited McDonough that day as it was his first back at work after two days at home nursing a cold, and a night out with friends.

  Facing north, McDonough felt the wind that had caressed his neck shift and slap his face. He saw the fire suddenly rolling toward him, no longer away from him. Over the radio, he warned the crew’s captain, Jesse Steed, that the flames had charged close to the knoll. Steed agreed when McDonough said he’d pull back to safety: “I’ve got eyes on you and the fire, and it’s making a good push,” Steed had said. McDonough had looked back over his shoulder as he left and saw flames devouring the perch where he had just stood.

  The nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots stayed in the burning wilderness.

  * * *

  Eric Tarr, a police officer–paramedic with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, was part of a three-men team assigned by the state to drop water on the fire from a collapsible bucket suspended from the belly of their Bell 407 helicopter, Ranger 58.

  The Hotshots had vanished and it had fallen upon Tarr to go looking.

  The helicopter circled the smoldering Weaver Mountains. Smoke nearly smothered its jet engine. Swirling winds kept shoving its nose down. The fuel gauge dropped perilously toward empty. With two minutes of flying time left, Tarr glimpsed a fleeting apparition through an opening in the haze—a cluster of scorched fire shelters.

  Fire shelters are portable cocoons, mandatory since 1977 for those on the fire line, a last-resort protection against heat and smoke. They’re made of layered fiberglass cloth, silica, and aluminum foil and are stuffed inside a hard-plastic case strapped at the base of each firefighter’s backpack. Firefighters grasp handles marked LEFT HAND and RIGHT HAND and shake the shelters, which unfurl like rounded pup tents. They then step into the shelters, drop to the ground, and roll on their bellies, wedging the shelters’ openings underneath. They keep their faces turned to the ground, their legs spread, and their feet to the fire, protecting their airways and torsos. Within, they slip their arms through straps on each side, lessening the chance of the shelters’ blowing away. The shelters are not supposed to hug the bodies inside like blankets, but to wrap them loosely, like sacks. Deployed, they look like giant silver bullets.

  The shelters Tarr saw at the bottom of the canyon that day looked like burned ash logs, tightly arranged on ground the Hotshots had half-cleared and brush they’d half-sawed.

  The aircraft looped twice, counterclockwise, over them. Tarr clung to the hope that someone might have survived, even though none of the shelters had stirred during the helicopter’s transits. The firefighters’ radios had gone silent since their superintendent, Eric Marsh, had tautly announced, “Our escape route has been cut off. We are preparing a deployment site and we are burning out around ourselves in the brush, and I’ll give you a call when we are under the sh—the shelters.”

  The pilot, Clifford Bursting, circled the helicopter closer to the ground, worried whether the carbon-composite rotor blades would withstand the heat radiating from the land.

  Tarr spotted an opening. Trees burned on one side. A picnic bench burned on the other. It would have to do.

  Bursting lowered the helo farther. Tarr stepped out and inhaled. The roof of his mouth throbbed. Scorching air seared his nostrils and then his windpipe. His throat burned. His eyes stung. He grabbed his medical kit. It had a pulse oximeter, which measured the level of oxygen in the blood, a stethoscope, and some basic bandages, moist and sterile, for wrapping burned skin.

  Tarr began a lonely hike uphill, toward the shelters.

  The fire had scorched the dusty ground black and turned the high desert’s golden soil to charcoal. The sand crackled under the soles of his insulated boots, as though he were treading on eggshells. Ahead, thick smoke caressed the granite boulders the fire had seared. To his left, flames still danced against the pale-gray sky. Tarr saw planes above, but couldn’t hear them. The air didn’t stir.

  As usual on the job, he carried a pistol in his holster. His vest held handcuffs and a canister of pepper spray. A rectangular case latched to his backpack contained his own fire shelter, in case the flames menaced him. He knew they could.

  From upslope, past a ranch spared by the blaze, a muffled voice pierced the desolate stillness, startling him.

  “Hey! Hey!” Tarr bellowed. “Can anybody hear me?”

  He picked up his pace. His heart pounded. He heard that voice again.

  “Is anybody out there?”

  At the crest of the rise, he halted.

  His search ended.

  The Hotshots had collapsed in the jagged circle. Eleven of them had their feet to the fire, as they’d practiced. Billy Warneke lay between Marsh and Clayton Whitted, the crossbar of an H linking lines of bodies—one at right angles to his feet, the other to his head, where the flames must have first touched the men.

  Tarr looked at his wristwatch, noting the time—six thirty-five in the evening. He moved deliberately from east to west, stopping at each shelter, tallying the magnitude of the disaster.

  The bodies lay in a lonely hollow. Together, they represented the greatest single loss of firefighters since the 9/11 attacks, and the largest death toll of professional wildland firefighters in more than a century.

  “We have nineteen fatalities,” Tarr said, and heard that muffled voice again. This time he recognized it as his own, echoing from a firefighter’s scorched radio.

  PART I

  THE GUYS

  The man flashed a broad, gap-toothed grin and introduced himself: “I’m Darrell Willis,” chief of the Prescott Fire Department Wildland Division. Willis felt at ease and proud as he looked upon the select group of young men facing him on the inaugural day of the 2013 fire season. The Granite Mountain Hotshots, the only municipal Hotshot crew in the country, stood at attention in front of their chief. “Your life has changed today,” Willis told them. “You’re in a fishbowl, and people are going to judge you by your actions.” A lot of people, other skilled crews, a lot of fire brass, would watch and wait for them to falter, he said. They had to set an example, work hard and work right, prove the doubters wrong, on and off the fire line.

  Willis had broomstick posture and a trim physique for someone old enough to be their father. At fifty-eight, he still ran four or five miles a day, and still had what it took to fill in when injury or illness left a hole in the crew. He wore a snug, dark-blue shirt, tucked in khaki cargo pants. He kept his cell phone clipped to a black leather belt. His thick head of hair was parted crisply to the right, and when he spoke, he sounded firm and deliberate, locking eyes in turn with each of the men before him, as if individually addressing each. He oozed discipline.

  The men trained their eyes on Willis in obedient attention, a cast of wildland firefighters looking to impress. They’d settled on assorted chairs and behind rows of Formica desks in the ready room at Station 7, the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ base in Prescott, Arizona, a mountain city of thirty-nine thousand ringed by parched forestland that lightning often sparked. Seven of them were veterans, returning for another season of duty, seven months of stifling fires in the wild. Seven were newly hired. One of the rookies, Kevin Woyjeck, sat in the front row, a studious recruit drinking it all in on the crew’s first day at work, April 9, 2013. He had a faint dimple on his chin, freckles on his nose, and a trace of facial hair. He was twenty-one, a firefighter’s son, like Willis. And like Willis, he’d fulfilled a childhood dream when he’d joined the fire service.

  Willis glanced at Woyjeck and stifled a smile, smitten by the sight of a kid so purely happy to be accepted. Willis admired the kid’s earnest conviction that this was indeed the right place for him. Woyjeck’s innocence was refreshing in the macho world of Hotshots. In the opening of his résumé, he’d typed, “Objective: To be part of a hard working, professional, and well respected crew, while continui
ng to gain experience in my chosen career.”

  Woyjeck wanted to work for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, where his father, Joe, was a captain. Kevin had strategized, filling out his résumé with the most suitable experiences, ones that would make him maximally attractive before he applied. He’d got his EMT license right after high school and worked for a year for a private ambulance company. Then, he was hired by the Bear Mountain Hand Crew, a wildland team in South Dakota, after passing a drug test and answering a handful of questions over the phone. In 2013, he’d thought about going to Alaska, where wildfires burn across gorgeous landscape—and where he could also do a lot of fishing; Woyjeck loved fishing. But his father reasoned with him, saying that Alaska was too far and too difficult for his parents to get to. Woyjeck had asked, “Where, then?” Joe had heard good things about this crew from Prescott, Arizona, the Granite Mountain Hotshots. Woyjeck spent hours online, researching it, learning about its history, its mission. He liked what he saw. The location also made sense: his father had relatives in and near Phoenix, and Anna, his mom, had grown up in Tucson, a few hours’ drive away.

  Woyjeck joined the Granite Mountain Hotshots as a soldier, not a leader, embracing the crew’s strict hierarchy, and accepting the shut-up-and-buck-up attitude that went with his newbie post. He was there to learn.

  “Woyjeck! Give me the ten and the eighteen,” Willis, about to school him, said loudly and firmly. It was a joke, not a test. The returning crew members knew that. In their world, pranks and ribbings equaled affection.

  To graduate from the fire academy, Woyjeck had had to memorize the Ten Standard Firefighting Orders and the Eighteen Watchout Situations—basic rules, steps that everyone on the fire line is expected to take to keep himself and one another alive and safe. Fire Order No. 2: “Know what your fire is doing at all times.” Watchout Situation No. 12: “Cannot see the main fire, not in contact with anyone who can.” The US Forest Service, by far the country’s largest employer of Hotshot crews, had developed the guidelines in the 1950s in response to fire-line fatalities. They’re lessons learned in the hardest possible ways.