On the Burning Edge (27 page)

He carried with him only his fire shelter and a small medical bag. Each footstep broke through the crust of the blackened soil, which had a texture like frozen-over snow. The pilot, running perilously low on fuel, returned to base, and Tarr was left alone in the basin.

The world existed only in absolutes of black and white. Faint white smoke hung in the air. Like the shells on boiled eggs, the fire’s extreme heat had cracked the massive granite boulders scattered about the basin floor. Tarr breathed through his CamelBak tube, using the water stored in the plastic bladder to cool the remnant heat of the basin.

He passed a chainsaw, the plastic gone, and a Pulaski head but no handle. He saw the melted remnants of a pack. Frayed fabric encased batteries and files, and the chains and wire-mesh goggles once stored inside. He saw exploded fuel bottles that had been tossed aside just moments before the men deployed, and, twenty yards from them, he saw the site.

The still-intact shelters were nothing but pale silica cloth sacks completely stripped of their aluminum. Tarr yelled.

Hello! My name is Eric Tarr. I am a medic. I’m here to help
.

He couldn’t yet bring himself to go into the site. He was either alone in a box canyon with nineteen dead men or alone in a box canyon with a few critically burned survivors. At first, the only response to his calls was the echo from the granite walls, but then he heard a quiet click and a perplexing murmur of voices. Tarr moved closer.

The shelters told the story of rushed but organized deployment. Nobody had tried to flee the deployment. To Tarr’s right, one group of five hotshots still lay beneath their intact shelters. But most of Granite Mountain’s men lay in the open.

The first body Tarr came upon had deployed closest to the flames. The man lay facedown outside of his shelter, which lay contorted and twisted along his left side. Beside him was a puddle of red plastic. It had been Marsh’s helmet. Tarr checked for a pulse and found none. He stepped farther into the deployment site.

Five more firefighters lay in similar or worse condition to his left. Tarr would later note that “each of them appeared similar with obvious rigor and no breathing or signs of life.”

But the crew member with the most severe burns lay the farthest from the flames. His body was faceup on the remnants of his pack. All that remained of his clothing was a small triangle of yellow Nomex on his back, a strip of his leather belt, and the rear pocket of his pants. Because he checked all the men’s pulses, Tarr checked this man’s, but he didn’t need to.

If there were survivors, they’d be in the group of five tightly deployed shelters that were still partially intact. Somewhere from this group had emanated the strange clicking noise followed by a murmur of voices. It was the hotshots’ radios. They were still functioning. Tarr couldn’t see the firefighters beneath the shelters. He spoke again.

Hello. I’m Eric. I’m here to help. Hello
.

No response. On the two-track above the basin, four firefighters appeared. One was Trew. He was now scrambling down the hill toward the site. Tarr bent down and raised the intact cloth. The man inside lay on his stomach within a perfectly deployed shelter that had been all but destroyed. His hands were severely burned, but his clothes were intact, and below the body was the yellow plastic handle of a tool. Tarr gently rolled him over. He placed his finger on the wrist. The fire had been far too hot.

Tarr again counted the bodies and stepped reverently outside the circle.

“I have nineteen confirmed fatalities,” he radioed out. It was 6:35
P.M
.

W
ord of the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ deployment was spreading fastest via social media. Already, some of the families had heard rumors of firefighters injured on Yarnell Hill. Up in the basin, a phone buzzed underneath Scott’s shelter. His mom was texting.

“Many people praying for you and crew. We heard you were trapped. We love you.”

At 7:30
P.M.
, a cell phone in the center console of Alpha’s buggy vibrated. Donut watched it shake in the cupholder. Clayton had sat in Alpha’s passenger seat that morning. Then the phones that had been left in the back of the buggy started. Vibrations, rings, jingles—Donut couldn’t take it. He stepped outside.

Upon Tarr’s confirmation of nineteen fatalities, Donut had gone from a seasonal hotshot on a crew of twenty—in a field of fifty-six thousand wildland firefighters—to the lone survivor of a tragedy that was fast becoming a national story. Just hours after the deployment, the Prescott Fire Department’s public information officer was getting calls from as far away as Ireland and New York to confirm what Facebook was telling reporters and the world: nineteen confirmed dead. “The one guy they found is doing fine,” a local reporter tweeted.

The media coverage was just the start. Not since the 1930s had so many wildland firefighters been killed in a single incident. Even more striking, nineteen was the greatest number of firefighter deaths since 9/11, when 343 perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center and, if it wasn’t already, “firefighter” became synonymous with “hero.” Even if most Americans didn’t know exactly who hotshots were or what they did, the country was highly sensitized to the fate of its first responders.

While Yarnell was still burning, every national media agency in the country—CNN,
The New York Times
, Fox News,
The Wall Street Journal
—was making arrangements to send reporters to the tiny gold-mining town in the Arizona foothills. Donut was the one source every reporter assumed knew what had happened to his crew and why. He was the story.

Brendan “Donut” McDonough. A tall-tale-spinning, hard-partying third-year hotshot with the crew’s longest rap sheet and foulest mouth. A twenty-two-year-old with a high school education, a small arsenal of firearms, an outsize pickup, and a rocky relationship with the mother of his young daughter. A recent convert to Christianity. A young man subject to a blindingly complex mix of emotions.

Of course, Donut didn’t know everything that had happened to his crew. He couldn’t. At that moment, all he knew for certain was that nineteen of his closest friends had been burned to death and the only thing separating him from the same nightmarish fate was Marsh’s off-the-cuff decision to make him the lookout rather than any of the other qualified hotshots on the crew. By this tragedy, Donut was made famous:
the one
who had lived when nineteen died. June 30, 2013, Yarnell, Arizona. The fire would define his life as much as theirs.

That twisted reality was still ahead of him. Donut had a pressing issue to deal with first. The manifest he’d given to some firefighter hours earlier had only eighteen names on it. The number didn’t agree with the nineteen firefighters confirmed dead in the bottom of the basin. Not long after hearing the news, another firefighter came to the buggy with the list.

Who was on the crew today? Who was with Granite Mountain?
they asked Donut.

Donut couldn’t process anything. His thoughts kept returning to the phones. Rings. Senseless jingles. Vibrations.

The firefighter asked Donut again, “We need you to help identify the names of your crew members.”

Donut went to the back of the Alpha buggy and pointed to each hotshot’s seat: Clayton, Chris, Tony, Wade, Garret, Grant, Sean.
Seven men total
.

Then Donut went to Bravo: Bob, Turby, Joe, Scott, Dustin, Woyjeck, Warneke.
Another seven
.

Then the supe truck—Marsh, Ashcraft.
Two
. And the chase truck—Steed, Carter.
Two more
.

Eighteen. The numbers still didn’t add up. Donut’s math was wrong. Somebody was missing. Then he remembered John Percin. He’d only started fighting fire with the crew two days earlier. Percin wasn’t on the manifest. He didn’t have a seat in the buggy yet.

Heather Kennedy was home
alone, making dinner. At about 6:00, she got a text from her best friend.

“Is your man okay?”

Then another: “Have you heard from him?”

Heather replied, “Yeah, he’s on a fire in Yarnell. They’re hot and tired.”…“I talked to him earlier today.”…

“Why did something happen?”

Jessica: “No, just making sure. I care about him.”

Heather: “Aw, thanks. He’s good. Getting lots of hours. I feel bad cuz I didn’t let him sleep last night. LOL! He’s prolly really tired.”

At 8:00, Heather texted her friend back.

“OK, so 22 firefighters injured in Yarnell Hill Fire. Fuck.”

And then: “TV said they’re dead.”

Heather was a cop. She’d stood on people’s doorsteps many times before and told them their world was destroyed—that somebody they
loved was gone. Police call it notifications. It’s the force’s worst job. A knock came on Heather’s door.

The dogs barked. Heather pushed them into the bedroom. The next thing she would remember was that she was lying on the ground with three colleagues standing over her. Then she was on the couch.

“The whole crew?” she asked.

They nodded their heads. She wept but had to keep moving.

“What do you wear to tell your loved one’s family that he’s dead?” she asked. Heather wore jeans.

She went to his sister’s first. She was living with her husband in a house that Scott had bought with money he earned hotshotting. It was three minutes away. Heather locked up the tears, hid the emotion the same way she did at work, and knocked on the door. Warrior mode, she called it.

His sister answered with a delighted smile.

“Scotty’s gone, Jo,” Heather said.

It took a moment to comprehend. “What?”

“Scottie’s gone.”

His sister fell. Heather lifted her up, and together they walked toward the living room. Scott’s three-week-old nephew, born while he was on Thompson Ridge, lay on the couch. Jo stumbled toward him.

Heather jumped over the coffee table. She pulled the baby away as Jo collapsed onto the couch. Heather watched the baby, his small hands grasping at empty air.

This can’t be real
, she thought.

Brandon Bunch had watched
the column rise over the Bradshaws most of the afternoon. He’d noticed the wind shift when a small American flag in his backyard that had been blowing in one direction turned and blew in the other. But he didn’t think much of it.

He and his family had just gotten back that morning from a weekend trip to Lake Mead. It was Jacob’s third birthday, and they’d spent the afternoon celebrating in the backyard. Bunch’s dad and family
had come over. Between the kids on the swing set and meat on the grill, leaving the hotshots had never felt like a better decision.

The family had just left. Bunch was out front watering the plants when his pastor from the Heights Church called, sobbing. The pastor was a close friend of Clayton’s and had been asked by the fire department to counsel the families. “Clay didn’t make it,” he told Bunch. It was all the pastor knew for certain.

Janae stayed at home with the kids, and Bunch left immediately. Families, friends, and fire personnel were meeting at Mile High Middle School. He met Renan and Phillip Maldonado, the squad boss who had quit that spring, and they went over together.

Mile High is a thirties-era brick building that sits a block from Whiskey Row on Granite Creek. The air was damp, and the creek was flowing for the first time that year when the three former hotshots pulled in.

Most people milled around outside by the row of ancient junipers and a wooden carving of a badger pup, the school mascot. Some people were inside, sitting in silence in the school’s band room, where children’s clarinets and tubas were stuffed into cubbies beneath a poster of Miles Davis. A few, like Bunch, had heard rumors that their loved ones were dead, but the only news the City of Prescott had made official was that Granite Mountain had deployed.

It was dark by the time the city decided that enough people had arrived to break the news. The auditorium’s entryway and the nine hundred tattered yellow cloth seats were nearly full, and Kleenex and cases of bottled water had been placed at the doors. A police officer, followed by a small man named Dan Bates, the vice president of the United Yavapai Firefighters Association, walked down the long aisle between the chairs. Few people cried. Most sat wide-eyed and scared.

Bates took his place on the stage between a pair of oversize vases stuffed with plastic flowers. He didn’t explain what had happened, because he didn’t know. The analog clock behind him read 8:45
P.M.
, the red second hand sweeping continuously.

“I’m going to read off the names of the deceased,” Bates said. He
didn’t mince words. “Nineteen are gone. Brendan McDonough is the only survivor.”

The tears and wailing began at the reading of the first name and rose again at the next. Bates didn’t pause.

ERIC MARSH

JESSE STEED

CLAYTON WHITTED

ROBERT CALDWELL

TRAVIS CARTER

CHRISTOPHER MACKENZIE

TRAVIS TURBYFILL

ANDREW ASHCRAFT

JOE THURSTON

WADE PARKER

ANTHONY ROSE

GARRET ZUPPIGER

SCOTT NORRIS

DUSTIN DEFORD

WILLIAM WARNEKE

KEVIN WOYJECK

JOHN PERCIN, JR.

SEAN MISNER

GRANT MCKEE

“Guess we’ve been here before,” Tony Sciacca, the safety officer on Yarnell Hill and the Type 1 incident commander on the Doce, said to Steve Emery. Emery had worked under Sciacca when the incident commander was in charge of the Prescott Hotshots in 1990. They’d worked together on the Dude Fire in Emery’s rookie year.

What Emery saw on the Dude Fire triggered what became a decades-long battle with post-traumatic stress disorder. After hotshotting, he joined the Central Yavapai Fire District, and as a paramedic he continued to see trauma that he couldn’t remove from his mind’s eye. He turned to alcohol to cope, and in his darkest moments
had thoughts of death. Eventually, Emery sought help and learned to live with PTSD, even helping organize a program to help other firefighters deal with the disorder.

Emery was now the second-in-command of a Central Yavapai Fire District engine that had come to Yarnell Hill that morning to help with structure protection in Yarnell. Abel and the incident management team no longer needed firefighters. They needed paramedics.

Emery volunteered for the recovery immediately. He knew the horrors he’d find in the field, but he barely stopped to consider the consequences. He’d deal with the memories later. The men needed his help. After Tarr confirmed the fatalities, Emery called his wife. “The Granite Mountain Hotshots, they’re all dead,” he told her.

She wept. Her tears were for their marriage as much as the men. She couldn’t weather another resurgence of PTSD—it had nearly destroyed their marriage, and the thought of watching her husband suffer again was too much.

“We’re dealing with this up front this time,” he told her. “We’re going to do this right. But I have to go.”

Then Emery joined Abel, Willis, and a small clutch of other local firefighters and headed into the basin. Unable to remove the bodies that night, Emery and nine other men spent the night at the Helms’ place.

At 1:30
A.M
., a dust storm born south of Phoenix passed over the area, spinning small dust devils of ash through the black, while a bulldozer worked through the night to build a hasty road from the Helms’ place to the deployment site.

Except for Tarr’s cursory evaluation, the men’s bodies remained undisturbed. An official investigation needed to take place before they could be removed. At first light, the Yavapai County sheriff and a small forensics team arrived. They mapped the location of the bodies and photographed their equipment and personal effects: Chris MacKenzie’s disfigured radio, a Swiss Army knife, a keychain. The bodies were placed inside orange bags and laid together in three rows.

Meanwhile, five more firefighters met Emery, Abel, and the others at the Helms’ place. Among them was Wade Parker’s father, Danny, a
firefighter with the Chino Valley Fire District. He’d asked to be there when his son was transported off the hill.

There was no protocol for retrieving nineteen dead from the side of a mountain. One of the firefighters had been to the World Trade Center after the towers collapsed, so the small group that had volunteered for the grim task arranged a respectful and ceremonious retrieval based on the procedure used in New York. They drove to the site with three pickups. The nineteen lay in orange body bags that were numbered but not named.

The retrieval team took a moment at the site. Some stood over each bag and said a few words, while others walked the basin, aghast. Danny Parker wept. In the long history of fire-line deaths, there had never been a worse place to be than that basin outside of Yarnell.

The sheriff had brought nineteen American flags for the men, and each flag was ceremoniously draped over one of the bodies. Four men, two on each side, lifted a fallen firefighter and cautiously passed the body to three others who stood at attention in the truck’s beds. Two fallen hotshots were placed in the back of each truck.

As they returned to the Helms’ place, one man rode along in the back of each pickup. He sat on the pickup’s rails, his hand placed gently on the bodies to keep the men still and the flags from fluttering as the truck bounced slowly down the track to the safety zone Granite Mountain had never reached.