I Almost Burned to Death, Twice, Fighting Wildfires in Idaho

Wildland Firefighting stories with Sawtooth Hotshots

Today I Watched a Young Girl Walk Through a Burning School

May 27, 2025

Today I watched the video of a young Palestinian girl as she attempted to escape the fiery inferno that would claim the lives of six members of her family and leave two in critical condition. Her name is Ward Al-Sheikh Khalil. In the video you can see her silhouette against a backdrop of flames. The flames reached the ceiling of the school that the five year old child and her family were using to shelter in. They’d been displaced from their homes due to Israel’s incessant bombing campaign. This campaign has systematically destroyed Gaza, house by house, block by block. According to an April 22nd, 2025 UN report, 92% of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged and 90% of the population is now displaced.

I think this video struck a particular chord with me because I am intimately familiar with the feeling of burned skin and scorched hair, of breathing in super-heated smoke, and the primal terror instilled by the thought of burning alive.

In wildfire the rule of thumb is you must stand four times the length of the flames away in order to be safe. For Ward Khalil she would have needed to be a minimum of 24 feet away from the flames in order to be not burned. In the video she is at most three to four feet away from the raging fire. She undoubtedly has second and third degree burns and it’s a miracle that she survived at all. I found the Instagram page of the rescuer who posted the original video. He has a subsequent video where they pull two small corpses out of the ashes of the school. Their bodies are completely blackened and only recognizable as humans because of their arms and legs. They’re only recognizable as children because of how small the bodies are. The blackened corpses were still smoking when the first responders pulled them out. In total 36 humans were murdered in that single attack on the school. The rescuer has hundreds of videos just like this showing countless civilians, murdered by US manufactured bombs.

I think that’s the correct attack. It’s hard to tell whether I’ve found the correct news article. When I search “child burned in school bombing Gaza” multiple news articles come up for different schools that were bombed in Gaza, with different stories of children being burned alive and their charred bodies being discovered. Just two days ago news broke of a Palestinian ER doctor who had to identify the bodies of her nine children, all murdered by an Israeli dropped and likely American made bomb, all charred beyond recognition by the subsequent fire. The doctor’s family, all murdered by one bomb. And she continues to work because the patients keep flooding in. She keeps working despite the fact that her hospital has been bombed multiple times that week, with patients and healthcare workers murdered indiscriminately.

“Only 19 of Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals remain operational, including one hospital providing basic care for the remaining patients still inside the hospital, and are struggling under severe supply shortages, lack of health workers, persistent insecurity, and a surge of casualties, all while staff work in impossible conditions. Of the 19 hospitals, 12 provide a variety of health services, while the rest are only able to provide basic emergency care. At least 94% of all hospitals in the Gaza Strip are damaged or destroyed.” A report from the WHO published five days ago.

Watching those flames and the young girl struggling to reach safety I wonder if we aren’t already dead. If we aren’t already in hell. It makes me think of this snippet from sci-fi author Terry Pratchett:

“I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

I first read this quote in 2020, in the back of our Hotshot buggy. Wildland firefighting is very similar to the military. We have a similar command and control structure with squads and crews/platoons, and there’s the same kind of no nonsense attitude where it’s perfectly acceptable to yell at someone to get your point across. When lives are on the line there’s often not the luxury of polite communication. Like the military, there can be periods of long boring waiting. The main difference is that the military seems to be made up of nothing but waiting, while in wildland firefighting you spend more time fighting fires than you do waiting. The interludes between fires can be a welcome rest for your tired and broken body.

It was our first big fire in Arizona where I read this passage from Pratchett. The fire was east of Phoenix, in the Superstition mountains and we spent a week digging line around towering Saguaro cacti under the relentless Arizona sun. Some of the larger cacti were over 200 years old. For some reason they’d dispatched 18 different Hotshot crews to this fire so we often found ourselves without work. On that roll I’d started to read Terry Prachett’s DiscWorld series.

Imagine if you were to design a world. You could create it in any way that you wished, but imagine that you created a world like ours. Imagine you populated this world with sentient beings who could feel pain and feel suffering. And then you made the rules of the world such that these beings would have to kill and devour each other in order to continue to live. We would call you a psychopath. We would say you’re a sick pervert and need to be locked up with the keys thrown away, right?

But that’s the world that we live in. Even if you’re fully vegetarian or vegan you can’t escape the fact that in order for you to live, other living entities must die.

It’s difficult for me to not see our world as a hell realm. The only reason I don’t hold the belief that we are living in a hell realm is the fact that I’ve experienced so much beauty, love, joy, laughter, and light in this reality. Still, it’s difficult for me to reconcile. I’ve experienced quite a bit of suffering in this life, but what I’ve gone through pales in comparison to the experience of the Palestinians in Gaza. Or the Karens in Burma. The Darfuri in Sudan. The Yazidi in Syria and Iraq. Ukrainians. Rawandans. Bosnians. Somalis. Kurds.

That’s a short and incomplete list of peoples who have experienced genocide within my lifetime. I’m only 38 years old. And that’s only genocide, the worst of the worst of human atrocities. If I listed out all of the peoples and nations that have experienced war, poverty, and other man-made horrors then this chapter would never end.

I associate hell with fire. With heat. Burning. When I think of hell I think back to the brutal days we spent fighting wildfires in the deserts of Arizona and Nevada. I thought I was tough because I’d survived the infantry. Then I worked wildfire and saw what true toughness looks like. In the Army there’s a thing called “heat cat 5” where you’re only allowed to work for 15 minutes out of the hour because it’s dangerously hot. The rest of the hour you are ordered to sit in shade in order to prevent soldiers from becoming heat casualties.

On the hotshot crew we worked straight through days that would have qualified for heat cat 5 in the Army with no breaks. You don’t know physical pain until you’ve performed manual labor in 100 degree heat, working as hard as your body can sustain, slamming your tool into the hard packed earth again and again for hours without stopping all while you’re completely exposed to the brutal desert sun. You don’t know what true endurance is until you’ve spent a 16 hour shift carrying a 20lb chainsaw through the mountains, cutting trees that are on fire while you stand in hot ash pits. Ash pits that are so hot that they will melt the rubber of your specially designed firefighting boots.

You don’t know the physical exhaustion that comes after months of going from fire to fire with only two days off between fourteen day rolls. The mental stress of facing danger again and again, of encountering situations where one change of the wind, one errant spark could mean a brutal and agonizing death.

I think that’s why the video of the young girl trying to escape the inferno of the school hit me so deeply. None of us will ever know the suffering that she’s experienced and will continue to experience for the rest of her life. The trauma of losing your entire family to a fiery inferno is unimaginable. It is our duty to feel empathy for her suffering. Empathy is the tool we can use to bridge the divides of geography, culture, religion, and race. With empathy we can see her and everyone else in Gaza as human beings, deserving of safety and security and the chance at a happy life. I draw on my experiences fighting wildfires to find empathy, I remember the heat, the flames, the terror, the exhaustion, the stress, the suffering, the uncertainty of not knowing what the next moment will bring.

I remember the pain of losing my family at the age of eight. The pain of my father’s death when I was 13. The suffering I’ve experienced my whole life due to those traumas. And it makes my heart break for all the orphaned children and the suffering they’ll face for their entire lives, if they get to survive to adulthood.

I empathize with the Palestinians who have found refuge in foreign nations. I empathize with the pain that comes from the fact they’ll never feel quite at home. Even if they gain citizenship and learn the local language they’ll always feel like an outsider. I’ve lived in the US for 30 years now and speak perfect English but still, ignorant people will ask “but where are you really from?” To always feel like an outsider, to never feel like you truly belong, that wears you down.

Most of all I empathize with the white-hot fury of injustice these children will feel for the rest of their lives. The anger and frustration at having your life obliterated through no fault, no action of your own. The fury at an unjust world and unjust universe. The nights they will spend crying and pounding their fists asking why did they have to suffer, what did they do to deserve this fate. They will have to bear that unresolvable fury for the rest of their lives. They will never find justice to satisfy the fury in their hearts, because what has been done to them is unjustifiable. I know this because a similar fury still burns within my heart.

Suffering is the common experience of all humans. We all suffer. And because of that fact, we are all connected. We should remember this truth and find empathy in our shared experience of suffering. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free of suffering. May all beings be liberated.

And maybe that’s why the American public seems to be largely indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians. Maybe the experiences of the humans in Gaza are simply too foreign to the masses of comfortable Americans. Americans, who have never missed a meal in their lives, who have never experienced real physical danger, who have never experienced the heat of flames burning their body. People who have never experienced the primal fear of imminent death.

The mental strain of wildland firefighting takes a heavy toll. My squad leader that I write about in the following paragraphs would lose his life in his struggle with mental health just three years after these events. Wildland firefighters attempt suicide at ten times the rate of the average American.

“Run! Run up the hill!” My squad leader C called out. C was a veteran firefighter and 33 years old, the same age I was, making us two of the oldest members on the crew. Embers were raining down around us and smoke was heavy in the air. I coughed and spit in a vain attempt to clear my airway. “Move your asses!”

I couldn’t see the fire through the thick smoke but I could hear it roaring through the trees below. We’d cut a line on the side of the mountain and had started a controlled backburn, working with smokejumpers who were the first ones to arrive on the fire. They’d jumped out of an airplane from 3,000ft above the ground, each jumper with about 100 lbs of gear attached to them. They’d quickly called in our shot crew for reinforcements as the fire grew. This was our third day on the Badger fire in the steep mountains of southern Idaho.

We’d spent a grueling three days cutting in line. This is what wildland fire crews spend most of their time doing and is the bread and butter of hotshot crews. Half the crew, about 10 people will cut a 20ft swath through the forest using chainsaws. The most experienced sawyers will lead the crew and their job is to cut down any trees that could potentially fall and injure someone. The rest of the saws follow, removing limbs from big trees and cutting down small trees, bushes, etc. The dig follows behind and our job is to dig a trench about a foot wide using hand-tools. Pulaskis and Y-tools were our weapons of choice. Y-tools are specialized hoes with a wider than normal head designed to efficiently cut through grass and roots. Sawtooth makes these tools in-house. The dig’s responsibility is to remove every piece of organic material from the foot wide line.

The idea is that the fire will burn up to the edge of the cut line and then die down in intensity as it runs out of fuel, then at the very far edge of the line the fire will stop when it encounters our trench and runs out of organic material to burn.

Backburning operations at night

Depending on the terrain a hotshot crew can cut 1-2 miles of line a day. We often will cut indirect line like we did in those three days on the Badger fire. Indirect line means that you are not close to the fire and is actually one of the most dangerous positions to be in because as you cut line you will have unburned forest on both sides of your line. Counterintuitively you’re often more safe fighting directly on the line of the wildfire as opposed to being back away from the main edge of the fire. This is because you are safest if you can step “in the back,” or the area that has already burned. Because what has burned cannot burn again.

We were running toward the black that day on the Badger. We’d cut in miles of line over three days on the steep mountainside and the smokejumpers below us had started the backburn. Then the wind had switched. Firefighters live and die by the wind. When we started the burn the wind was blowing away from our line. Shortly after the smokejumpers started the backburn the wind switched and started blowing the fire directly into our line.

A backburn is when we intentionally set the forest on fire using drip-torches, mini flamethrowers that spit out a mix of gasoline and diesel fuel. The idea is that the fire intensity will be lower when we start it, and so we can slowly burn the forest from our line back towards the main edge of the wildfire, thus creating a large pre-burned fire break. When the main front of the wildfire reaches this burned barrier the fire dies out because there’s no more fuel left to burn. This is one of the most common tactics in wildland fire and works great most of the time. The times that it doesn’t work, usually due to a switch in wind, things can turn catastrophic in the blink of an eye.

“C, pull your burners out. The wind’s switching.” The voice of our crew boss had come over the radio moments earlier. “Good copy,” our squad boss, C, answered back on the radio. “Hey! Stop burning! Pull back!”

The burners came out of the forest holding their drip-torches, molten droplets of fire sputtering from the ends of their lit nozzles. “Put those torches out and get ready to move,” ordered C, urgency and stress evident in his voice. I watched fiery embers blow across our line and land in the trees on the other side, “in the green.” Within seconds small fires engulfed the tops of the dry pine trees. The wildfire had crossed our lines. There was now fire on both sides of us.

“Push up guys, we need to get to the black.” We started to hike up the mountain. Every few steps someone would lose their footing and fall to a knee. I winced as the sawyer in front of me slipped and dropped his saw. The steep terrain was unforgiving and we were moving at a snail’s pace. I could hear the crackling roar of the wildfire behind us as it raced up the mountain. I wondered if we should drop our packs and leave our gear. That’s what they teach you, when the fire is on you you need to drop your pack and gear and run for your life. I kept my pack on because everyone else kept their packs on. It’s funny that in that moment the fear of looking stupid in-front of my peers outweighed the fear of literally burning to death.

“Direct attack” working directly on the edge of the fire.

Our breathing came in short, shallow gasps. People coughed and spit all around me. We were fully engulfed in smoke and visibility dropped to about 10ft. Embers rained down around us. The scene was truly apocalyptic. I could feel the heat from the flames below and slapped away hot embers as they landed on my neck. “A little further, keep pushing! We’re almost in the black!”

Gasping and out of breath we finally broke through and entered an older section of line which had been burned the previous day. Being mindful of the ever-present danger posed by fired weakened trees which could fall at any moment we hiked into the black. Safe for now. Five minutes slower and we would’ve burned. This was the first time we almost died on the Badger fire. We watched as the wildfire engulfed the mountainside below us, wiping out three days of hard work. “Base, this is Sawtooth. We’ve lost the fire. I say again, we’ve lost the fire. Send some tankers, we'll try to slow it down and catch it on the next ridge.” Our crew boss told the firebase over the radio. He was asking for air assets to drop water on the edge of the fire and slow down its advance.

Modern firefighting is a complex symphony of moving parts. You have bulldozers that can push in miles of firebreak on flatter terrain, effortlessly cutting line with their wide blades that make dozer operators the envy of hotshots. You have engines that carry hundreds of gallons of water and are often used to contain fires around roads. You have twenty man type 2 and hotshot crews like ours which hike miles into adverse terrain and cut line deep in the forest. You have helicopter crews that deliver firefighters and supplies to remote mountain-tops. You have smokejumpers who jump into remote wildfires from C-130s via static line, airborne firefighters modeled after the paratroopers of WW2.

Our air assets include giant 747 supertankers which drop 20,000 gallons of pink fire retardant at a time, costing taxpayers $60,000 per drop. We got splattered by this pink goop more than once. The government’s official line is that it’s non-toxic. The same government that labels federal wildland firefighters as “forestry technicians” in order to avoid paying us benefits and protections that are by law mandated to any federal firefighter.

More economical are the super-scoopers, planes that can skim over the surface of large bodies of water and scoop up 1,600 gallons of water at a time. Then you have helicopters, my favorite was the Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane which have a unique square cut-out in the middle of the aircraft’s body and could lift the heaviest loads of water. Coordinating with all of these assets are the firefighters on the ground. I even got to coordinate a few helicopter sling-loads, my Air Assault training from 2014 finally put to practical use!

When you’re directing air assets you want them to drop their water and retardant ahead of the fire, not on the fire. This is a common misconception. Online, people will ignorantly ask “why don’t we just drop water on the fires and put them out.” Because when you drop water on the fire you essentially explode a bomb inside the fire and blow burning embers out in every direction which only serves to spread the fire more quickly. We use air assets to wet down the edge of wildfires so that the fire slows down. Fires are all about temperature. They are most out of control during the heat of the day, when the sun is highest, and they calm down at night. So when you soak the edge of a fire with helicopters and airplane drops the fire intensity drops.

This is a common tactic to allow hotshot crews to get in right up on the edge of the fire and cut in line. This is a preferred and one of the safest tactics for fighting wildfires, but often the fire burns so hot that firefighters can’t get near it, or the edge of the fire is in inaccessible terrain, that’s when we’ll cut indirect line and have backburns.

The second time we almost died on the Badger fire was in a different part of the mountains. We were pulled out and redeployed after we lost the fire two days before. Our new order was to cut another indirect line, this time off of the Rock Creek road, a paved road situated in a canyon with a stream and riparian area at the bottom. The trees were still green next to the stream. The thought was that this green vegetation along with the clear road could be a defensible line to hold the fire. We spent the morning cutting in line and had almost tied in the line to “the black” when the wind switched.

The wildfire which had been burning above us in the canyon was driven by the wind right at us. “Pull back to the road! Jones, go up and grab the drip torches!” Here’s another time when my instinct to obey the tribe overcame my instinct to not burn to death. I knew that the wildfire was barreling toward us, and I knew that it wasn’t worth risking my life to run up to the top of the mountain to retrieve some damn drip-torches that cost $100 each.

But I did it anyway. And I was mad as hell the whole time. Because I knew that the five minutes it took for me to run up to retrieve that drip-torch could be the five crucial minutes which determined whether I escaped with my life or burned to death. On my way back, a drip-torch in each hand, my pack got snagged on branches and I had to get help from my crew to pull me through the dense undergrowth the last few feet to the road. I remember the frantic frustration of being caught on those branches and the images of not being able to extricate myself and burning alive while the wildfire descended upon me. All because my squad boss wanted me to run up and retrieve an inconsequential piece of equipment.

I was pissed when I got to the road. Having someone order you to risk your life for equipment is quite infuriating. I stood with the rest of the crew and caught my breath as we watched the fire descend upon us. In addition to being one of our crew medics I was also the crew videographer. In this downtime I pulled out my camera and started to film. I filmed as a medium sized tree went up in a blaze. The fire consumed the tree in seconds. I’d been stuck in the dense undergrowth directly beneath that tree just sixty seconds before.

You can see the videos I’m referencing in the beginning of this documentary that I cut together:

Skip to 15:40 to see what I’m describing below.

I felt hot embers burn my neck and started jogging down the road because the heat from the burning tree was becoming too intense to withstand. I think everyone there was in shock. No one was issuing orders. In the video you can hear me say “Jesus. We need to get the fuck out of here. Where are the trucks at?” I knew we weren’t safe. I knew we needed to run. But no one had issued orders so we were all looking around at each other for guidance.

Thirty seconds after the tree was engulfed, the grass on the other side of the road was ignited by the hot embers spewing forth from the tree. I started filming again as an engine crew drove in reverse to try and suppress the new fire. I ran toward them to help but stopped almost immediately as it was obvious to me that there was no stopping this fire from jumping the road. Within seconds the fire had grown from one small spot to engulf the entire hillside. The hill was covered in dry grass, fire can spread through this type of light fuel at terrifying speeds. A similar fire spread through grass and brush on the Yarnell Hill Fire at over 20 mph, driven by high wind. It killed 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots. They were attempting to hike one mile from a ridge to the safety of a ranch below, and were overtaken by the fast moving fire within that short 15 minute hike. The hotshots tried to use their saws to cut away brush from around them to no avail. Investigators would find that the temperatures exceeded 2,000 degrees F where the firefighters tried to shelter in their fire shelters.

It’s required for every wildland firefighter to carry their fire shelter on them at all times. This is one of the reasons we’re never allowed to take our packs off during our 16 hour shifts. The shelters weigh 4.4lbs and sit at the base of our packs in a quick deploy pouch. Picture a half sleeping bag made of insulated tin-foil. The idea of the fire shelter is that you can cover yourself with it when you’re about to be overtaken by a fire and it will protect you from the worst of the radiant heat. Fire shelters have saved many lives, but just as many firefighters have died under them as well, the heat of fires often being too much for the thin shelters to protect against.

We practiced deploying the shelters a few times during our training at the start of the season. Our crew boss yelled at us to sprint up the mountain and then when we were good and out of breath he yelled “deploy, deploy, deploy!” We would rip our practice shelters out of their case and shake them out like you would a sheet when you’re making the bed. We would then lay down and pull the shelters on-top of us and tuck the edges of the shelter in around our hands, knees, and feet while we buried our faces into the ground.

It’s a claustrophobic experience. We deployed our shelters on a sunny day when the temperature was only in the mid 80s. Even so I felt short of breath and on the verge of panicking as I tried to catch my breath under the thermal blanket. It took all of my willpower and discipline to remain under my shelter until our bosses called the all clear and allowed us to get out. I couldn’t imagine the terror of deploying a fire shelter for real and the claustrophobia of trying to draw in breath as fire superheated the air around you. I heard rumors of firefighters who chose to open their shelters in order to die more quickly because they couldn’t stand the pain and horror of being slowly roasted alive. I don’t know how anyone could possibly know that these were the actions of firefighters in their last moments of life, but, the rumors circulated amongst us and they terrified me.

As I watched the fire jump the road and engulf the opposite side of the canyon I had no thoughts of deploying my shelter. I knew that there was not enough separation between the dense undergrowth and trees which lined the left side of the road and the grasses which lined the right side of the road. If we tried to deploy here we would just cook to death. The fire shelters would serve no purpose other than to preserve our charred corpses.

“We need to get the fuck out of here.” My video shows us running down the road, our packs flopping and fire shelters banging against our legs. I heard over the radio that some of the crew had managed to reach our trucks and were going to drive through them through the fire and pick us up. “Where are the fucking trucks?”

I stood with half a dozen other crew members as we watched the fire descend upon us. Finally to all of our great relief the trucks broke through the inferno. We quickly threw our gear in the back and piled in. Without those trucks we would have needed to run down the road and try to outrun the wildfire. I don’t think we would have made it. We were again spared from burning to death by mere minutes.

The fire would rage down this canyon and threaten ranches and homes hours later. We worked until 4am that night digging in line around houses. I’m proud to say we saved every single one of those homes and it’s some of the most satisfying work that I’ve ever done.

Wildland firefighters are facing budget and staffing cuts by DOGE even as fire season ramps up. People risking their lives and their health for shit pay and at great personal sacrifice are being summarily fired. Some of them became instantly homeless as many USFS and Parks employees rely on government housing, which they lose access to after they are fired.

President Donald Trump’s executive orders shrinking the federal workforce make a notable exception for public safety staff, including those who fight wildland fires. But ongoing cuts, funding freezes and hiring pauses have weakened the nation’s already strained firefighting force by hitting support staff who play crucial roles in preventing and battling blazes.

Most notably, about 700 Forest Service employees terminated in mid-February’s “Valentine’s Day massacre” are red-card-carrying staffers, an agency spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica. These workers hold other full-time jobs in the agency, but they’ve been trained to aid firefighting crews, such as by providing logistical support during blazes. They also assist with prescribed burns, which reduce flammable vegetation and prevent bigger fires, but the burns can only move forward if there’s a certain number of staff available to contain them. (Non-firefighting employees without a red card cannot perform such tasks.)

Red-card-carrying employees are the “backbone” of the firefighting force, and their loss will have “a significant impact,” said Frank Beum, a board member of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees who spent more than four decades with the agency and ran the Rocky Mountain Region. “There are not enough primary firefighters to do the full job that needs to be done when we have a high fire season.”

But notwithstanding Trump’s stated guardrails, the cuts have affected the Forest Service’s more than 10,000-person-strong firefighting force. Hiring has slowed as there are fewer employees to get new workers up to speed and people are confused about which job titles can be hired. Other cuts have led to the cancellation of some training programs and prescribed burns.

“It’s all really muddled in chaos, which is sort of the point,” one Forest Service employee told ProPublica.

“This agency is no longer serving its mission,” another added. https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-cuts-forest-service-firefighting