Word: men
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...trained firefighters was nearly exhausted. Besides local volunteers, firefighters from Montana, Idaho, and other Western states and laborers from the local prison were pressed into service on the fires, but the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (the BLM is the largest landowner in the country) needed still more men...
Shortly after midnight on August 14th, the BLM sent a call over the radio for 125 emergency firefighters to bolster the 2000 men already out on the lines...
...Fairbanks employment office next morning resembled an army recruiting post during World War I. A ragtag army of bums, miners, Eskimos, fishermen, Athabascans, acidheads, and students had assembled in the building to defend civilization from an enemy that most of them had never seen. Many of the men were simply drifters whose luck had run out in Fairbanks and who wanted to earn enough money for the next month's grubstake. The government clerks passed any high school kid who could lie about his age with a straight face and any drunk who could look sober enough for a three...
...hours of training and shipped off to the nearest fire, but the BLM designated 50 of that morning's volunteers as a special "Hotshot" unit with the hope that a little more formal schooling would turn them into an elite outfit like the trained crews from native villages. The men were paid $45 a day and allowed to vegetate for a week at the smokejumper base under the guise of intensive training...
...TYPICAL training day, the local junkdealer would wake the men up at 7 a.m. with a shrill fife sounded in each tent. After breakfast in an army field kitchen, the men would line up for roll call, and the junkdealer and a Montana ranger who had neven seen an Alaskan fire would give them a little pep talk and a lecture of old wives' tales on the chemistry of fire...