Fire

by Sebastian Junger

Overview

A riveting collection of literary journalism by the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, capped off brilliantly by a new Afterword and a timely essay about war-torn Afghanistan — a superb eyewitness report about the Taliban's defeat in Kabul — new to book form.

Sebastian Junger has made a specialty of bringing to life the drama of nature and human nature. Few writers have been to so many disparate and desperate corners of the globe. Fewer still have met the standard of great journalism more consistently. None has provided more starkly memorable evocations of extreme events. From the murderous mechanics of the diamond trade in Sierra Leone, to an inferno forest fire burning out of control in the steep canyons of Idaho, to the forensics of genocide in Kosovo, this collection of Junger's reporting will take readers to places they need to know about but wouldn't dream of going on their own. In his company we travel to these places, pass through frightening checkpoints, actual and psychological, and come face-to-face with the truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060088613
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/24/2002
Series:	Harper Perennial
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	642,135
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

SEBASTIAN JUNGER is the New York Times bestselling author of Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm, and co-director of the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for Reporting.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

January 17, 1962

Place of Birth:

Boston, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A. in Anthropology, Wesleyan University, 1984

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Fire

1992

Late in the afternoon of July 26, 1989, a dry lightning storm swept through the mountains north of Boise, Idaho, and lit what seemed like the whole world on fire.

A dry lightning storm is a storm where the rain never reaches the ground. It evaporates in midair, trailing down from swollen cumulus clouds in long, graceful strands called virga. The electrical charges from a dry storm do not trail off before they hit the ground, however; they rip into the mountains like artillery. On July 26, 1989, lightning was hitting the upper ridges of the Boise National Forest at the rate of a hundred strikes an hour. Automatic lightning detectors at the Boise Interagency Fire Center were registering, all over the western states, rates up around two thousand an hour. By nightfall 120 fires had caught and held north of Boise, little one-acre blazes that eventually converged into a single unstoppable, unapproachable front known as the Lowman fire.

For the first three days Lowman was simply one among hundreds of fires that were cooking slowly through the parched Idaho forests. Around four o'clock in the afternoon of July 29, however, the flames reached some dead timber in a place called Steep Creek, just east of the town of Lowman, and the fire changed radically. The timber was from a blowdown two years earlier and was so dry that when the flames touched it, the entire drainage went up. The fire created its own convection winds, making the fire burn hotter and hotter until the fire behavior spiraled completely out of control. Temperatures at the heart of the blaze reached two thousand degrees. Acolumn of smoke and ash rose eight miles up into the atmosphere. Trees were snapped in half by the force of the convection winds.

The fire rolled across Highway 21 and right through the eastern edge of town, detonating propane tanks and burning twenty-six buildings to the ground. A pumper crew was trapped at the Haven Lodge, and they hid behind their truck and finally stumbled out of the blaze an hour later, safe but nearly blind. The fire had attained a critical mass and was reinforcing itself with its own heat and flames, a feedback loop known as a fire storm. The only thing people can do, in the face of such power, is get out of the way and hope the weather changes.

Which they did, and which it did, but not until a month later, after forty-six thousand acres of heavy timber had been turned to ash.

I saw the site of the Lowman fire in 1992, three years afterward, when the ponderosa seedlings were already greening the hillsides. A roadside plaque said that eight million ponderosa and Douglas fir would be hand-planted by the mid-1990s. The plaque went on to describe how the land had been treated with enzymes so that water and microorganisms could penetrate soil that was now seared to the consistency of hard plastic. Thousands of flame-killed trees had been dropped laterally along the slopes to keep the land from washing away, and thirty thousand acres had been planted with grass and fast-growing bitterbrush. In a hundred years, more or less, the area would again look the way it once had.

I was driving a big, painfully beautiful loop from Ketchum, Idaho, around the Sawtooth Mountains and down the South Fork of the Payette River toward Boise. It was late afternoon when I drove through the Lowman burn, and the quiet darkness of the dead valleys depressed me. The West was well into one of the worst droughts of the century, and I was out there to see the wildfires that it was sure to produce. My idea was to go to Boise -- where all the fire-fighting resources were coordinated -- tell them I was a writer, and hope they let me on a fire.

I pulled off down an old logging road and pitched my tent in a clear-cut. It seemed to get dark very quickly that night, and I cooked spaghetti on my camping stove and went to sleep listening to the weekend traffic die down on Highway 21. The Lowman fire, I'd heard, had burned so hot that Highway 21 had melted. There were places, I'd heard, where fire trucks had left their tread marks as they rushed from Boise to fight the flames.

In 1965 the U.S. government established the Boise Interagency Fire Center to coordinate the three federal agencies -- the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Forest Service, and what was then known as the Weather Bureau -- that were engaged in fighting wildfire in America. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service were added later, and the name was ultimately changed to the National Interagency Fire Center. Two years after BIFC was established, the Northern Rockies were hit with a catastrophically bad season that culminated in the Sundance fire in northern Idaho. BIFC managed to deploy thirteen thousand men and thousands of tons of supplies, prompting a study by the Office of Civil Defense, which was trying to figure out how to handle a similar crisis in the event of a nuclear war.

BIFC is located next to the Boise airport, across the interstate, south of town. The lobby is filled with the sort of display that, were you even vaguely inclined toward a job fighting fire, would make you move out west on the spot. There is a smoke jumper mannequin in full jump gear, including a wire face mask for when the jumper goes crashing into the treetops. There is a board with everything -- food, medical supplies, tools -- a jumper needs for forty-eight hours on a fire. There are color photos of air tankers dropping retardant and sheets of flame rising from stands of trees. One photo shows a fire in dense forest ...

Fire. Copyright © by Sebastian Junger. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xi
FIRE (1992)	3
BLOWUP: WHAT WENT WRONG AT STORM KING MOUNTAIN (1994)	43
THE WHALE HUNTERS (1995)	57
ESCAPE FROM KASHMIR (1996)	73
KOSOVO'S VALLEY OF DEATH (1998)	95
DISPATCHES FROM A DEAD WAR (1999)	111
COLTER'S WAY (1999)	147
THE FORENSICS OF WAR (1999)	155
THE TERROR OF SIERRA LEONE (2000)	175
THE LION IN WINTER (2001)	199
Acknowledgments	223

Interviews

An Exclusive Interview with Sebastian Junger

Barnes & Noble.com Science & Nature editor Laura Wood met Sebastian Junger at his New York City restaurant, The Half King. This interview was conducted later via email.

Barnes & Noble.com: In the introduction to Fire you make an interesting observation about humans' fascination with danger. Rather than simply a morbid fascination, you speculate that instead there is a feeling of amoral awe. Can you elaborate on that?

Sebastian Junger: Humans are curious, and I think that curiosity can be mistaken for lack of compassion. A fatal car accident or a forest fire or war -- or a human birth, for that matter -- are rare events to witness. As uncomfortable as these things can make us, in some ways we should consider ourselves lucky to have been at the right spot at the right time. We can learn a tremendous amount from these things and apply them to our lives in ways that could be very positive. The criterion I use is: Am I actually making a situation worse -- am I increasing the total amount of human suffering in the world -- by doing what I'm doing? Clearly, turning my head to see a car accident doesn't hurt anyone, but taking photographs at a private funeral might. One is immoral and the other amoral and, possibly, a source of understanding.

B&N.com: As you point out in the title essay, "Fire," smoke jumpers don't exactly make a huge salary (I love the calculation that the actual jump earns them 21 cents!), but since it's so competitive there are obviously people who would rather risk their lives than make more money sitting behind a desk.

SJ: Frankly, I can't think of something that should be less interesting to a 22-year-old than money. The 22-year-olds who have lots of money -- movie stars, heiresses, the occasional musical genius -- invariably seem to lead tragic, unfulfilled lives. That a 22-year-old would prefer -- for a few years, at least -- to jump out of airplanes and put out fires seems to me to be the most natural thing in the world. Of course, there's a time in a person's life to stop doing those things, but that comes much, much later. Ask smoke jumpers if they're happy. Then ask a 22-year-old behind a desk in an office if they're happy. Take their blood pressure. Check their pulse. Ask how much they drink or smoke, and whether they are happy with the relationship they're in. Then decide which is the richer life.

B&N.com: Physical danger is one thing, but there are other kinds of dangerous pursuits. Writing itself can be thought of as dangerous. What do you think the risks of writing are?

SJ: There are risks to writing, mainly failure. The other risk is wasting your time. Think of all the interesting things you could have been doing -- like working as a smoke jumper -- while you were at home struggling to find something interesting to say. Writing isn't an end in itself, like yoga. It's a way to express ideas. If you haven't yet acquired the ideas to express, you're risking all kinds of things by pursuing a career in writing. Get dirty and come back to it later.

Sebastian Junger Catches Fire
From the September/October 2001 issue of Book magazine.

Sebastian Junger’s bedroom -- the one in his parents’ house, where he still sleeps from time to time -- looks out on a lush, verdant landscape. Above a small desk are the bows and arrows he crafted when he used to build lean-tos in the woods to see how long he could survive in the wild. There are summer camp photos here, books about Native American tribes and aboriginal peoples, as well as one book Junger no longer needs -- about how to make a living as a professional writer.

This is where Junger grew up -- on a tree-lined lane in a Boston suburb, where SUVs careen around cul-de-sacs. Here, Junger wrote some of his first stories, in Belmont, Massachusetts, founded in 1630 and known as "the town of homes," where every house looks like a bed-and-breakfast.

It’s only a half-hour drive between Belmont and Gloucester, Massachusetts. But that distance defines the contradiction of Junger. Gloucester, America’s oldest seaport town, was founded in 1623. It is a partly quaint, partly hardscrabble village where muscular fishermen shoot pool, glug Budweiser, and listen to the Allman Brothers Band on the jukebox in a bar called the Crow’s Nest. It is the town from which the crew of the Andrea Gail set off on a fishing expedition in 1991 and never returned. That tale was chronicled in Junger’s 1997 book, The Perfect Storm. Junger, with his permanent five o’clock shadow, weatherbeaten good looks, loping gait, and vaguely punch-drunk patter, could pass for an able-bodied seaman in a Gloucester oceanside bar. Junger might have liked to come from here. But he didn’t.

Straight Out of Belmont
"It was a hard place for him to be," John Vaillant says of Belmont. Vaillant has known Junger since the two were five years old (they attended grade school together). "It was really staid and suburban and prosperous and extremely quiet. He felt like a Martian there."

"He’s always had troubles with the fact that this is the suburbs, and an elegant house in the suburbs is not what he likes," says Junger’s mother, Ellen Sinclair.

In Belmont, Sinclair sits in her living room with her husband, Miguel Junger. The Junger house is filled with antiques and books. One shelf is stacked with volumes about fine artists; another contains leather-bound antique manuscripts inherited from Miguel’s family, who lived in a passel of European countries. Miguel, a retired physicist who ran a consulting company and taught at MIT, is currently reading three books in three languages (he speaks six): One, Peter Nichols’s A Voyage for Madmen, was purchased for Sebastian. Inside it, he has written the following inscription: "For Sebastian, my good shipmate. From the ancient mariner, Miguel."

"We live very, very well, very comfortably," says Sinclair, an artist whose family used to own and operate an amusement park in Canton, Ohio. "But Sebastian doesn’t like this house."

The Perfect Dorm
Sebastian Junger ("Seb" to his buddies), age 39, war reporter, bestselling author, is heading home to his Manhattan apartment to pack for Macedonia. Vanity Fair is sending him to investigate the looming conflict between the Slavic majority and the Albanian minority, as well as the human trafficking there. Loping up the stairs of his Lower East Side walk-up, Junger stops to greet a workman in a white undershirt and soiled jeans.

"You go on vacation," the man says, smiling.

"No, no," Junger says, intent on making his point. "Not vacation. I’m going on assignment."

"Vacation." The man smiles again.

"Not vacation," Junger repeats. "Work."

Junger walks with the purpose and determination of a man who thinks all eyes are upon him but will not allow himself to be distracted. He has a focus and intensity -- which clash with his predilection for self-deprecation -- suggestive of someone who recently discovered he has a secret power but is still uncertain of what it is or how he can harness it.

Arriving on the third floor, Junger slaps loudly on a door.

"Hey!" he shouts, still slapping. The apartment belongs to journalist John Falk. Junger and Falk recently co-wrote a screenplay with Scott Anderson, author of The Man Who Tried to Save the World. The screenplay, which concerns the three writers’ experiences in Bosnia when they were mistaken for CIA agents, was sold to Intermedia. The original title, Risk, has now been changed to Springtime in Sarajevo.

"He usually sleeps during the day," Junger says of Falk. "I want to freak him out."

He rings the bell a few times.

"Hey, what’s the matter? You chicken?"

No answer.

"I guess he’s not there," Junger says, somewhat disappointed, and strolls over to his place. According to Junger’s agent, Stuart Krichevsky, The Perfect Storm sold more than 600,000 copies in hardcover and over 2 million in paperback; the paperback rights sold for $1.2 million, the film rights for $500,000. The Wolfgang Petersen-directed film starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Diane Lane was the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2000, raking in approximately $180 million. People has tagged Junger one of the sexiest men alive. Oprah has drooled over him. Fire, a collection of Junger’s articles -- mostly previously published -- about Idaho smoke jumpers, Afghani rebels, the Caribbean’s last whaler, and other people involved in dangerous activities in the world’s hot spots, is rolling out this fall.

"Things have gone very well and very smoothly for him," says Anderson. "Whether it’s prescience or luck, he’s repeatedly in the right place at the right time."

Nevertheless, Junger’s apartment is sparse and unassuming, more Gloucester than Belmont, more skid row than Gloucester. It’s a cozy two-bedroom (in any city other than New York, this would be called a one-bedroom), and it looks as if it’s still awaiting the next shipment of moving boxes. The living room contains three pieces of furniture -- a mushy couch the color of a very thin gravy, a chair and a table, atop which is a chessboard and a gag lighter in the shape of a bikini-clad woman (the bikini lights up when you flick it). A window is propped open with a hatchet that his sister Carlotta -- now an art director for a London publisher -- once found in the woods.

Junger divides his stereo equipment between the living room and his office; in the living room, there’s a Sony Discman, in the office, a boom box. In the living room, wooden crates house several dozen cassette tapes, most of them hand-labeled (artists include Harry Belafonte, U2, Los Lobos, Bruce Springsteen, and Portishead). CDs, some out of their cases, are stacked haphazardly on the floor. So are printouts of articles about Macedonia downloaded from the Web. There’s a smattering of artwork on the floor and the walls -- photographs and paintings by some of his friends, a couple of iron curiosities he found on the beach at Cape Cod and on the streets of New York.

The bedroom is sparser. True, the mattress is no longer on the floor (a recently purchased bed frame is a concession to his girlfriend, a science journalist). But aside from one of his mother’s paintings and a half-read copy of Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau, it’s basically the only thing in the room.

The most cluttered room is the office. A low shelf filled with reference books. A desk strewn with papers. A laptop. News clippings tacked to the walls -- an obituary of a matador, a picture of a sinking oil tanker. Here and there, other odd items: a temporary ID from Afghanistan, maps -- some on the walls, some rolled up and shoved into corners -- family pictures, snapshots with curling corners depicting Junger, arms around his buddies. (Note to burglars: The checkbooks are lying on the floor.) The window above the desk looks out onto a seedy, profoundly unspectacular New York cityscape -- a dingy Mexican restaurant, cluttered little grocery stores, wholesale clothing shops, their wares spilling onto the sidewalks. "Luxury just isn’t interesting," Junger says. "I really don’t buy expensive things. They just depress me; they always have." (Adam Langer)

Editorial Reviews

Bestselling author Sebastian Junger brings his heart-pounding prose to bear on forest fires, terrorism, and war, in a collection of pieces that span a decade's worth of journalism. Junger's firsthand acounts of how people handle danger reveals both the awe and the terror evoked by desperate situations.

bn.com

[M]agnificently conceived, lovingly written, perfectly evocative of a place, a time, a passion.

[P]ropelled by dynamic reporting that reads as fluidly as great fiction.

Maxim

[M]agnificently conceived, lovingly written, perfectly evocative of a place, a time, a passion.

Atlantic Monthly

Danger junkies rejoice! The Perfect Storm king returns with no, not a new booklength narrative, but a collection of previously published magazine articles. Junger spent the last few years documenting some of the world's toughest places: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, as well as nonmilitary hot spots like American wildfires. His reporting on wartime atrocities for Vanity Fair is well known, and his wilderness stories for adventure magazines like Outside and Men's Health have brought him an enormous extra-book readership. Junger's newest can be considered a sort of early Greatest Hits volume, wherein Junger's disaster-zone reporting will whet the appetites of risk voyeurs everywhere. Consider his interview with Afghan guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud ("After we'd spent half an hour ducking the shells, the commander said he'd just received word that Taliban troops were preparing to attack the position, and it might be better if we weren't around for it"), or his Kosovo klatch with Serbian paramilitaries ("The men grinned broadly at us. One of them wasn't holding a gun in his hands. He was holding a huge double-bladed ax."). But Junger is more than a dispassionate adventure-monger; he is an observer awed by the courage of "people confronting situations that could easily destroy them." Whether describing the trials of airborne forest firefighters or the occupational hazards of old-fashioned harpoon-and-rope whale hunting, Junger challenges readers to reconsider their fondness for ease: "Life in modern society is designed to eliminate as many unforeseen events as possible, and as inviting as that seems, it leaves us hopelessly underutilized. And that is where the ideaof `adventure' comes in." (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This is a collection of first-person reports by adventurer/reporter Junger that span the globe in his search for hot spots, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, from Kashmir to Kosovo. With reporting as timely as today's news, Junger (The Perfect Storm) moves from the first story, of a literal battle with fire by firefighters in the Western United States, which he narrates, to the more figurative but no less real "fire" of battlefields in wartorn areas of the world. The rest of the work is read by noted actor Kevin Conway, whose rugged voice is right for conveying the chaos of fire and war. A counterphobic's dream come true, and thrill seekers of both sexes will love the experience of listening to these "you are there"-style reports. Highly recommended. Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, NC Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Run-for-cover writing from scary places, by Junger (A Perfect Storm), a man with an appetite for the ragged edge of life and the ability to write about it with restrained power. The ten pieces in this collection of magazine articles, one of which won a National Magazine Award for Reporting, have the authentic tang of dispatches from the front. Junger might be considered a bit of an adrenaline junkie because of the situations he puts himself into, but as for being in someone's gunsight: "there was nothing exciting about it, nothing even abstractly interesting. It was purely, exclusively bad." What comes across here is the writer's overpowering sense of awe at the events he describes. He writes with a pressure-cooker urgency, though with the lid firmly in place: no screeching high notes here, but the steady, awful thrum of things going out of control and death standing by. He tells of the intimations that smoke-jumpers feel when the woods they are in are about to explode into flame, and of the survival instincts followed by a man kidnapped with a group of trekkers by Kashmiri guerrillas who allow him alone to live. A good number of the pieces are situated in Kosovo, where the slaughter of Albanians by Serbians is without mercy or bounds. Most remarkable are Junger's accounts of such places where all moral referents are severely out of alignment, having only hours before shifted from everyday life and begun a whirling descent into madness. Sierra Leone is a good example: being shot by a diamond-smuggling, AK-47-toting, drug-crazed teenager is just a daily precaution one guards against, like typhus or dysentery. Deeply affecting stories of a ruthless world, natural and man-made, that will leave you stunned and distraught.

Kirkus Reviews