Defending the Tribe by Conor Hogan

Conor Hogan argues that smokejumper rookie training offers a compelling model for how society might prepare itself for the inevitable environmental disasters of future decades.

Palisades Fire in Los Angeles by CAL FIRE_Official, January 2025. Public Domain.

The scale of destruction inflicted by the wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles last month is unprecedented. 16,000 buildings incinerated. Nearly 200,000 people evacuated. An estimated economic loss of $250 billion. Typically, in the midst of a novel catastrophe like this, part of our panic stems from an inability to articulate what we are witnessing. Take COVID: until we all learned specialized vocabulary like “asymptomatic” and “incubation period,” simply comprehending the shape of the pandemic felt impossible, to say nothing of organizing a collective response. Now, however, confronted with images of neighborhoods erupting in flames and city blocks reduced to rubble, our anxiety is magnified precisely because the language to describe what we see seems so obvious: since the Palisades Fire ignited on January 7th, LA has resembled a warzone. And in America, we have long understood that wars do not happen here.

But even as Angelenos pick through scorched debris and try to make sense of the trauma they’ve endured, preparations are already underway for the next battle in what has become a decades-long siege. Because summer is coming, and with it, the promise of more drought, more windstorms, more out-of-control wildfires. Right now, all across the western United States, firefighting bases are gearing up to train their newest batch of recruits. If they’re smart, those recruits are getting ready, too.

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On March 28th, 2021, I drove to Redding, California for the first day of smokejumper rookie training. Smokejumpers parachute into mountains to suppress remote wildfires, and the six-week entry program is notoriously difficult: a typical rookie class will see an attrition rate of about forty percent. There are nine smokejumper bases in the United States, and each has devised its own methods for testing applicants. Missoula is famous for forcing candidates to dig fire-line for twenty-four hours straight. Grangeville rookies are welcomed with the Prairie Run, an interminable marathon across the Idahoan steppe, punctuated with rounds of endless pushups and sit-ups. In Redding, we spent so much time hiking through poison oak that by the end of training, it looked as though I had contracted a bad case of leprosy. Regardless of each base’s particular initiation rites, however, smokejumper rookie candidates can expect certain universals: a vertiginous learning curve, the omnipresent threat of failure, and an impatient, aggressive cadre of trainers. After getting yelled at yet again for some minor mistake, a rookie candidate inevitably asks himself: what is the point of all this hostility?

Smokejumpers prepare to land on a steep hillside

It’s a fair question. There’s no subsection in the Smokejumper Training Guide that states: Trainers must treat all rookies with contempt, constantly question their commitment, and punish every error with calisthenics. Yet it is taken as a given that rookie training will be brutal: mentally, physically, and emotionally. Why?

The standard reasoning is this: first, smokejumping is an extremely difficult job, and candidates must prove that they can shoulder the workload required to extinguish a wildfire raging in the middle of August. Second, flying a parachute into rugged, mountainous terrain is stressful, and the trainers’ severity pressure-tests each candidate’s stress response. If you can recite your jump-count fourteen miles into a run, while someone screams in your face, then you will always be able to recite your jump-count. Or so the theory goes.

It becomes clear, however, which candidates are objectively fit enough for the job after the first few days of training. Beyond that, workouts test a candidate’s mental fortitude. But if the exclusive aim of rookie training is to teach neophytes how to fly a parachute, then trainers constantly berating them is not a self-evidently optimal training technique. As Dr. Judy Willis writes in her article “The Neuroscience Behind Stress and Learning”: “The neuro-scientific research about learning has revealed the negative impact of stress . . . and the qualitative improvement of the brain circuitry involved in memory and executive function that accompanies positive motivation and engagement.” If the sole value of smokejumper rookie training is to produce as many competent parachutists as possible, it might be worth reevaluating the tradition of trainers acting like drill sergeants.

However, that is not the sole value of the training. Particularly in our strange, uncertain age, with its attendant crises of war, alienation, and environmental devastation, smokejumper rookie training serves as a singular model for promoting human flourishing in the twenty-first century. It offers a glimpse of how we might thrive, rather than simply survive.

Two smokejumpers hike towards a fire in northern Washington state

Humans are obsessed with the narrative of the battlefield as the birthplace of heroes. Ancient stories like The Iliad, The Bhagavad Gita, and The Epic of Gilgamesh all tell of great warriors winning glory after slaying their people’s enemies. Movies like American Sniper, Inglorious Basterds, and Top Gun: Maverick dominate at the box office. In cultures around the world, young men are conditioned to equate aggression with masculinity, and many boys dream of the opportunity to demonstrate their mettle by singlehandedly turning the tide against some marauding foe.

But if battles ever depended on individual courage, those days are gone. Now, conflicts are determined by the sheer weight of machinery. In his book War, Sebastian Junger writes: “The idea that there are rules in warfare and that combatants kill each other according to basic concepts of fairness probably ended for good with the machine gun.” Inventions like the Tomahawk missile and the Reaper drone have drained warfare of whatever melodrama it might have contained back in the days of horse-mounted cavalry. Today, most military exploits can be distilled to Junger’s description of U.S. infantrymen launching $80,000 Javelin rounds at Afghan soldiers a half mile away: artillery “fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime.” Yet despite the mechanized brutality of modern combat, many Americans still view committing violence on behalf of the wealthiest state in the world, against some of the poorest, as the highest manifestation of male bravery.

Given the relentless advance of weapons technology, any world where humans continue to fight en masse makes our collective suicide overwhelmingly likely. But for all its horror, warfare is often addictive. The bonds forged in battle can make civilian relationships seem like cheap facsimiles. Having an enemy shoot at your friends infuses life with a prima facie sense of purpose: don’t let them get shot. Junger writes: “Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they’re looking for. Not killing . . . but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing you’d rather do.”

Revering those who “defend the tribe” is a social universal, and rightly so. We should celebrate those who protect others. But unless we graduate beyond our current, impoverished notions of “defend” and “tribe,” the human experiment will end in agony. To relinquish all that gore and adrenaline and fraternity, we must replace war with a new tradition. Cristina Rivera Garza writes in her book Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country: “Only when societies can invent something more exciting, riskier, more adventurous, more revolutionary, will we be able to say, truthfully, that we are against war.”