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Management, Drop Your Tools: Military Metaphors for
Wildland Firefighting and Public Resistance to “Safety” Legacies of Tragedy Fires
“Drop your tools” is advice given to wildland firefighters for the moment when a fire rages
out of control and they must retreat to save their own lives (Dolan, 1996). This advice stems from
recent analyses of the legendary Mann Gulch fire that killed thirteen elite Smokejumpers in 1949
near Helena MT (MacLean, 1992; Weick, 1993), and the Storm King Mountain fire that killed
fourteen elite federal firefighters near Glenwood Springs CO in 1994 (USDA, 1999b). As one
retired Smokejumper stated in a documentary based on John MacLean’s (1999) Fire on the
Mountain, tools are to firefighters what weapons are to soldiers, and so to drop them is to
symbolically admit defeat: the firefighter is no longer battling the blaze but retreating from the
enemy. However, to drop tools also means to be able to move more quickly in order to save one’s
own life.
The Smokejumper quoted in the previous paragraph used a common metaphor associated
with wildland firefighting: the military metaphor, or firefighting as war. This metaphor was adopted
deliberately in the early 20
th
century, after a rash of devastating “mass fires” led the federal
government to “declare war” on wildfire. Its adoption also coincided with the creation of the Forest
Service itself. Mid way through century, the military metaphor was again deliberately applied to
firefighting, this time to firefighting safety, to try to “reduce the chances of men being killed while
fighting wild fire” (USDA, 1957).
Currently, the U.S. Forest Service is experiencing a public relations crisis that was initiated
by the Storm King Mountain tragedy and aggravated by the more recent “Thirtymile Fire” that
killed four firefighters who were “mopping up” a canyon blaze in Washington State in 2001. Recent
public criticism, outlined below, takes issue with the ability of the Forest Service to accurately
investigate its own tragedies, to develop workable plans for recovery, and even to appropriately
memorialize the dead. The analysis in this paper links the Forest Service’s current troubles to its
enduring root military metaphor, particularly as it applies to safety. The paper argues that it may be
time for management to “drop its tools” in terms of how it organizes safety and responds to tragedy,
because its discourse is overly constrained by its root military metaphor.
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Convention