Someone drove me from the restaurant to the incident command post that had been set up about a mile away. The first face I saw was that of Tony Sciacca, the guy who first encouraged me to get into hotshotting. Alongside him was my teacher from the Fire Explorers. When I saw them I started crying, and once I started, I couldn’t stop.
I was asking myself what everyone must have been thinking: Why had I made it out when my crew hadn’t? I tried to go back and retrace my steps and the crew’s steps and where each of them intersected with the blaze, but my mind locked up. I could only feel the sorrow sludging up my heart.
Someone, I forget who, said I had to go somewhere and give an after-incident report—a debriefing on what you know and what you saw. It’s standard when a hotshot gets hurt out in the wild. I nodded. I would do it. Whatever I could do.
I felt an arm across my shoulder. It was Tony. His eyes were veined with red and he looked at me.
“Just go home to your mom.”
A fire chief from Prescott volunteered to drive me home. But as I got my stuff together, he received a call on his cell: Granite Mountain families were gathering at a local school. That was going to be their rendezvous point.
“Take me there,” I said to the chief.
He sighed.
“You sure you want to do that, Brendan?”
I told him I did.
We got in his truck. It took an hour to drive to the school. I don’t remember much about the ride. Any thought I had, anything at all—This is that country song that Michaela likes or something like that—would instantly be overtaken by a rush of dread. But they’re dead. They’re dead. What does it matter what song is playing? There was no room in my mind for anything but raw grief. It was a horrible, claustrophobic feeling. It said, You will never have another thought, or another emotion, that isn’t touched by these nineteen deaths.
We pulled up in front of the school and got out. I was dreading what was coming but I felt I had to be there. If I could help even one family member just a little bit, it would be worth it. My feelings were beside the point. I knew if something had happened to me, Chris and Eric and Travis would have done anything for my family.
I walked in. There was a buzz of conversation and I heard it dip. I saw a couple of guys I knew, guys I’d worked with. On their faces I could see bewilderment. They looked at me and I heard them through the buzz. “Dude, I am so sorry.” “Brendan, are you okay?”
What could I say? It was embarrassing to be getting anyone’s sympathy. I wasn’t hurt. I had no wounds on me; my yellows weren’t singed by smoke. I almost wished I had some injury that would have shown that I tried to save the guys. But there was nothing. I was obscenely healthy.
The tears came again. Then I saw a family member—one of the mothers—approaching. She took my arm and held it gently.
“Brendan, what happened?” she said.
I was shell-shocked. A black wave of guilt washed over me.
“I don’t know. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
More family members gathered around. I could guess what they wanted to hear. Specifics. “It was a fluke gust” or “The radios were out.” But there was no one factor to point to.
I spent the evening at the school, hugging the wives and sisters and daughters and the brothers and fathers and uncles. I felt the urge to leave, to run away and go to my mom’s house and curl up on my bed. Turn off the lights. But my place was here with the families.
We were all numb with disbelief.
That night I stayed at my mom’s place. Some close friends from outside Granite Mountain came over and talked with me, but I was still in shock and didn’t have much to say. The next morning I went back to my apartment. Chris’s stuff was where he’d left it the morning before. His favorite beer was in the fridge. The rooms were so still.
I walked into Chris’s bedroom and looked around. I could still sense his presence. I felt as though he was going to come in right after me and slap me on the back. “What are you crying for, bitch?” And we’d laugh and he’d go to the fridge and get a couple of beers, and life would start up again. That life looked so good to me now. Just to have Chris back. Just shooting the shit. Eating pizza and playing video games. That would have been everything.
But as it was I just lay on his bed. I started sobbing, covered my face with my hands. He wasn’t coming back. None of them were.
I don’t know how long I spent there. After a while, I had to take a piss, so I got up and went to the bathroom. I reached for the doorknob, but when I looked down my hand was shaking. I tried to grip the knob but my hand was flailing up and down so bad I couldn’t get my fingers on the metal. I was staring at it through my tears.
“What is going on? What the f—”
I stepped back and felt rage take me over. I lifted my foot and slammed it into the bathroom door. It shot back and ricocheted off the bathroom wall, then bounced back a couple of feet and shivered on its hinges. The noise echoed in the empty apartment behind me.
It felt good to kick that thing.
I stepped forward and drove my foot into the bottom of the door again. It sprang back. I kicked it again, harder. I thought, Yeah, that’s it. Keep going. Break it and then kick every fucking thing in this apartment until it shatters.
But the rage died away in a second. I felt numb again.
I went back to the school the next morning. I just wanted to be of service. I would have given anything to have comforted just one of the family members.
Instead, people were trying to comfort me. The owner of the rental property company for my apartment, a retired fireman, called me that evening and, after a few minutes of awkward conversation, said, “Listen. Don’t worry about the rent for the next few months, okay?” I thanked him.
I went into town to my favorite Italian place and the check was picked up, by whom I don’t know. For months, I would not pay for a meal. I would not pay for dry-cleaning, for takeout Chinese, for a car wash. I would not pay for anything. I tried to. But the people of Prescott wouldn’t let me.
I needed that love. I realize that now. But at the time, it was so difficult to accept it. A lump would rise in my throat and my eyes would burn and I would mumble, “Thank you.” The people who did those things will never know how much they meant to me. It felt like the town was lifting me up on its shoulders and saying, “We’ll never let you fall, Brendan.”
But at the same time, I felt unworthy. My brothers were gone and I was getting all this free shit. It was so wrong it was almost funny. I tried to be what I thought people needed me to be: strong. I’m sure if someone looked in my eyes they caught a glimpse of sadness and desolation, but I tried my best to hide it.
Who was I to say I was hurting?
The bodies of my brothers had been taken directly from Yarnell to the medical examiner’s office in Phoenix. Seven days after the tragedy, we went to Phoenix to retrieve the bodies of the nineteen and bring them back to Prescott. There was a huge procession of cars—police, forest service, state patrol—led by cops on their motorcycles. Biker gangs from the area drove in ranks of big Harleys. I rode in the Granite Mountain superintendent’s truck—Eric’s old vehicle—alongside Chief Darrell Willis and Chief Ralph Lucas from the Prescott Fire Department. All I could manage to do was look out the window and stare at the landscape.
We went to the Phoenix mortuary, loaded the bodies into hearses, and set off across the desert. The fire in Yarnell was still burning, but the crews came off the fire line and stood by the side of the road, their helmets off, saluting. I looked up and saw people crowded onto the highway overpasses, standing in front of their fire trucks. Utility trucks with their booms extended and big American flags hanging off them. Masses of people everywhere. We drove through the towns and little villages on the way to Prescott and saw people standing on the side of the road, the men with their cowboy hats held to their chests, the women with hands up to cover their mouths in grief. I had to look away.
I remember we drove past the ranch where the parents of Travis Carter, one of the hotshots, lived. His dad was standing by the road, just waiting by the black asphalt, his head bowed. I wondered if he knew which hearse carried his son. We stopped the truck, got out, and hugged his dad, tears in our eyes.
When we got to Prescott, the roads were choked with people. The whole town pretty much shut down. We drove by them to the mortuary. My heart was heavy and tears rolled down my face.
At the mortuary, I got out and helped unload the bodies of my brothers. I’d expected they would be in caskets, but to my shock, they were in orange body bags, some of them covered with American flags and each one marked with the name of the man inside. The hearse would pull up and a voice would call out the name of the man inside, and I helped carry him into the mortuary freezer, my face expressionless.
I could feel their bodies through the orange plastic. My hands touched their heads, their legs, their arms. Some of the flags had blood on them and some of the bags were partially unzipped.
I’m not sure whose body it was, but one of the bags was unzipped near the bottom and I could see inside. It was one of my brothers’ legs, and I thought, Why is it covered in dirt? But it wasn’t dirt, of course. It was his skin, burned the color of mahogany. I cried and I took the zipper and pushed it all the way down so no one else would see. I was just sick inside.
After all the bodies were loaded into the mortuary freezer, we prayed over them with a pastor, who asked God to accept them into His arms. Afterward, the pastor asked me if I wanted some time alone and I said yes, I did. The others slowly made their way to the exit. I looked at the bags, trying to visualize the faces of the men inside. I wanted to know what my brothers looked like, but I was afraid to unzip the bags. I wanted to know their condition, but I didn’t want to know.
I felt this wave of loneliness, of wrongness. Why am I not in one of these bags? Why was I left here without you guys?
I walked down the line and touched each of my brothers on the leg, feeling them through the plastic. I love you, I said to each one. I’m so sorry I couldn’t have been with you and helped you in your last moments. I said good-bye.
Then I walked out into the hot sunshine. There were clusters of firefighters outside. Bottles appeared, whiskey and bourbon. We passed them around and drank toasts to the men inside.