THE SUMMER of 1968 was Alaska's worst fire season in ten years: forest fires burned close to a million acres of land in three months.

Early in the summer, a few forest fires had been contained on the outskirts of Fairbanks--an overgrown frontier town that is the closest thing to civilization in Alaska's 400,000 square-mile interior. Throughout August, the distant fires still created a persistent haze and a strong smell of pine incense. At any moment, lightning could ignite the dry moss in a forest much closer to home and destroy some section of the town, but the pool of 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.

The 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-minute interview. The recruits then piled into two buses and drove off to a smoke-jumper base.

Most recruits were given a few 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.

ON A 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.

Then the morning commissary call often killed an hour or two: six or seven instructors would sit around and pass the time of day while distributing the few dozen items the men had ordered the day before.

Most afternoons were spent rooting out stumps in a clearing as practice for digging trenches, but after the first day, they had removed most of the stumps. Afterwards, they tried to look busy by moving branches from one brushpile to another, but after a while the sham became a bore, and most of the men threw stones at floating cans or leafed through nudist magazines for hours at a time.

Long before dinner was served, one or two hundred men would gather at the kitchen tent, not so much because the menu was outstanding, but because the food line passed a warehouse where a nubile brunette bounced around in her low-cut blouse and tight dungarees loading supplies for helicopter shipment.

Since the government instructors loafed almost as much as the elite firefighters, the recruits received their most significant foretaste of the job ahead from bearded veterans who resembled chimney sweeps after working for weeks in the smoke without washing. They learned how dangerous the job could be: several men had been killed in a recent plane crash, and an Indian firefighter had lost an eye when he walked into a helicopter's tail rudder.

One day, two returning veterans walked into the training camp and claimed that their entire crew had traveled four hours to the end of the potholed road, where they expected a helicopter to ferry them to an interior fire. The helicopter removed from the fire the crew which they were to replace, they said, but when five o'clock rolled around, the pilot quit work for the day. The new crew of firefighters jammed into the nearest village tavern; everyone got drunk, and the government abandoned the uncontrolled fire.

After hearing this story, one of the green recruits, an acidhead who had been sleeping in an aspen grove, sat up and said, "Well, it's time to earn a few more dollars." He rolled over again and earned his next $3.75 by sleeping for an hour.

THE ONLY REAL break from the training camp's ennui was occasional evening leave when a few dozen recruits were released on the town. The local movie theater was showing a Walt Disney kiddie film, so most of the men made the rounds of the saloons lined up along Second Avenue or tried to pick up a "squaw."

After watching their men sleep for the better part of a week, the BLM administrators gave the order to fight a fire 150 miles out in the wilderness. Each firefighter picked up a pack, a plastic tent, a sleeping bag, and a huge, double-edged Pulaski ax or shovel and climbed into a rickety DC-3. The air was so filled with smoke that for much of the flight, the men could barely see the wing tips. At the bush landing strip, they saw sooty veterans who had been swinging their axes for 15 hours a day, lying exhausted in the shrubs or simply staring at the clean newcomers.

A green firefighter waiting on a wilderness airstrip for a helicopter ride to a fire has a lot in common with a soldier manning the trenches. He realizes that a clumsy bureaucracy has plucked him out of his familiar city life and pumped him full of tales about his opponent's evils, but his training seems suddenly inadequate. He is defenseless, and his overriding concern becomes to pull out of this latest adventure in one piece.