When you really ave no other choice - 1
Life is about using your God given intelligence and some balance to find your intended way.
Many things not always as you want them - therefore you must come to make the necessary adjustments. Most often it will be with a few people whom God Blessed to be on your pathway!
See how some of these people were present in the following movie!
** Watch the movie about the " Granite Mountain Hotshots " a true story.
But his path to the Granite Mountain team was tumultuous. He made decent money selling drugs — and sampled his own product.
Shortly before high school ended, he learned he was going to be a dad. He found odd jobs and tried to prepare for fatherhood, despite continued drug use and an arrest tied to stolen property.
By then, he’d botched an attempt to join a hotshot crew. He decided to try joining the Granite Mountain Hotshots. The day he showed up at the station, they happened to have an opening. The crew’s leader, Eric Marsh, took a chance on him.
McDonough got straight, got fit, and after a rocky start with the crew, was fully accepted as a member of the team. They traveled from Colorado to Idaho fighting fires. In the wilderness and on the job, they put on skits to entertain themselves. Travis Turbyfill was an equipment and tool whiz. Jesse Steed was an ex-Marine who was good with a chainsaw, a "full-on meathead” who, "If you got past his leatherneck stuff ... was a real teddy bear."
Anthony Rose tried to act cool, but would “turn into a proper gentlemen” the moment his girlfriend called. Chris MacKenzie, who was hard on him early on, became a close friend and roommate. MacKenzie became "like a second father" to McDonough's daughter, Michaela, and spent holidays at McDonough's mom’s house.
“Granite Mountain had become my substitute family,” he writes.
'A nothing fire'
On June 28, 2013, a lightning storm ignited the Yarnell Hill Fire in the high desert northwest of Phoenix. Two days later, the brush fire that covered a few hundred acres exploded across 13 square miles.
The crew, which had been working a lot that month, was called out. Based on the smoke puffing in the distance, McDonough thought they’d be home for dinner the next day.
The team was briefed and a ranch was identified as a “bombproof” safety zone. So were burned-over areas known as “the black,” which can keep firefighters safe because they no longer have fire fuel.
As their buggies made their way to the fire line, men made their "final calls” to family members. Some didn’t take their phones into the fire.
McDonough was assigned the task of “lookout,” which involved observing the fire and watching the weather: “You are the eyes of the crew,” he writes. He identified a spot, and another hotshot crew working in the area gave him a ride there. The UTV turned around “and I got my last glimpse of the boys as they headed into the brush, their bodies leaning forward, their heads tilted down.”
As the fire grew, air attack told Marsh around 3:50 p.m. the storm was making its way toward Yarnell and could soon reach the town. Marsh said he was coming up with an escape plan.
Around that time, McDonough was fleeing for his life: He'd underestimated how quickly the fire was bearing toward him, and was terrified it would cut off his escape route.
“The roar of the fire was huffing behind me, growing louder and shriller,” he writes. He tore through the brush and the other crew, anticipating he’d need a ride out, rescued him.
McDonough wasn’t worried about his own crew, even as the fire shifted and picked up speed. He assumed they were still on a ridge where they were in the "cold black," he writes, where they were "Untouchable." He heard Marsh tell the supervisor of another crew that Granite Mountain was headed toward the ranch, the safe zone picked out earlier in the day. McDonough thought they were taking a curved, two-track path to get there.
Chaos ensued. The fire wasn’t contained. Radio problems hampered crew communications. The smoke was too thick to see clearly. Flames were eating up houses.
In Yarnell, there was confusion about the Granite Mountain crew’s location. Around 4:20 p.m., they reached a ridge above a box canyon filled with thick chaparral. The canyon stood between them and the ranch.
They dropped into the canyon and lost sight of the fire, he writes.
Nineteen minutes later, McDonough was sitting in a truck when he heard Marsh’s voice over the radio: “...we are in front of the flaming front.”
McDonough was stunned. He'd thought they were in the black, up on the ridge. Transmissions with the team ensued, and the crew’s chainsaws were heard "ripping in the background” as they prepared a site to deploy their fire shelters. “I’ll give you a call when we are under the sh-shelters,” Marsh screamed.
Still no answers
About a month later, McDonough stood on the rim of the deadly canyon as state forestry officials moved around below, where the men frantically tried to save themselves.
He walked down the slope, and touched the char-covered dirt where the investigators had been. He cut his hand on a piece of partly-melted glass, and after walking and sifting through the char, found 10 objects, pieces of his brothers, that included a coffee mug, a broken tool head and a small drip torch.
“I took each one and pictured the face of the man it belonged to and held that picture for a moment before relinquishing it,” he writes. “My hands were thick with the black soot that I knew contained trace amounts of the bodies of my friends.”
He wondered why they dropped into the canyon, and he “tried to get inside” Marsh’s head.
Marsh, he wrote, “would never have brought Granite Mountain into the canyon if he thought it presented a real danger to the men.”
Speculation abounds that McDonough knows more than he has disclosed about events that day. But McDonough says he doesn’t. He makes no mention of a conversation he purportedly had with Prescott’s former chief of wildland firefighting, in which he reputedly said he overheard a radio call in which the hotshots were ordered to leave their safe zone.
McDonough on Friday tried to end the speculation. "I did not hear that," he said.
In the time that has passed since his friends' deaths, he has turned at times to alcohol, he said. He has not returned to drugs.
"I'm man enough and willing enough to admit that, hopefully to show people that it's OK to struggle," he said. "It's real life. Something like this that you go through, it's not going to be easy ... but you can come out on top."
He still lives in Prescott, in a rented home. He continues therapy and has surrounded himself with people who lift him up. He concentrates on being a good father and honoring the crew, he said.
He won't return to firefighting.
"I'd like to go back to school," he said.
"I don't think there's ever a way I could go back to fire ... to be honest, I'm scared."
posted by Kerminator at 23:39
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home