Ben Iverson (Wildland Firefighting, Learning from Deaths and Human Performance) - Episode 1025

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To learn more about Thorn, go to episode 323 of the Behind the Shield podcast with Joel Titoro and Wes Barnett. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show veteran wildland firefighter and trainer in the Department of Innovation and Learning for the US Forest Service, Ben Iverson.

Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his own journey into firefighting, forging human performance in the wildland space, some of the heartbreaking losses from wildland firefighters, the metamorphosis of how the US Forest Service is handling those events and taking care of the families and fellow firefighters after, the impact of the recruitment crisis on the wildland side, firefighter fitness and so much more.

Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating. Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of over a thousand episodes now.

So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them. So that being said, I introduce to you Ben Iverson. Enjoy. Well Ben, I want to start by saying two things. Firstly thank you to our mutual friend Rex Hambly for making this connection and secondly to welcome you onto the Behind the Shield podcast today. Yeah, agreed. Thanks Rex and good to be here.

It'll be an interesting conversation I trust. Absolutely. Well, very first question, where on planet earth are we finding you today? I live in rural northwest Wisconsin. I have the, at this stage of my career I'm a virtual employee so I work out of my home and it's a little ironic given some of my duty stations over the years in urban areas. I live in a forest for really kind of the first time in a long time. So it's a great little spot of woods in northwest Wisconsin.

What took you to the virtual medium? I think one of the best things that came out of the whole pandemic was the realization that some people could work at home. I think that was sadly lost. I think a lot of people swung the other way but to get into a car for example, let's say you work in accounting and then drive, you know, if you're God forbid a large city, an hour and a half to go sit at a desk and then do the same. So now you've lost three, four hours with your family.

I think the virtual tool is incredible and you and I are obviously able to have this conversation because of it. So how did you find yourself transitioning into that? Well, I actually went into a virtual job before COVID. I'm one of the few, I guess, comparatively that made that move before I had to. I think that's a big deal, like being able to make that move on my own terms made a difference. Having the structure in our house to have a place that was work that was separate from life.

You know, one of my coworkers, when we all went virtual for COVID, she was working from her kitchen table and the other side of the table was her husband working from the kitchen table. And that thought is like, yeah, no wonder why some people hate it. I didn't have that. I made the move on my own terms, had a great infrastructure at home to do it. And it was good timing. And it was into a virtual work group. My boss lived in Texas, a coworker in Maine and another one in Utah.

I mean, we were spread across the country. And so all of our work would have been virtual anyway, or we wouldn't have been doing it at all, which is entirely possible. But yeah, it was a good move. I was looking for something else. One of my mentors from years ago was leading the work group and reached out to him and said, hey, looking for something different. You got anything?

And that first 120 day detail with Jim working for the Office of Innovation and Organizational Learning led to another one and another one. I just kind of never left. And later got permanent home with that group. And yeah, I've been doing that since. Beautiful. Well, before we go to the beginning of your life story, Wisconsin is not a place the guests are normally sitting, especially in rural Wisconsin. So paint that picture for us. Pros and cons.

I mean, in a lot of ways, it's the same, just different. It's most of I've spent time in my career working in Sacramento, working in Boise. But prior to that, you know, it was just living in rural communities, living in the woods. I grew up about 30 miles from here where I live now. And really, that was another huge benefit. While I was virtual, my wife wasn't. She worked at the fire center in Boise. And so we were kind of stuck there. But her job went virtual with COVID, thankfully.

And at the same time, my folks getting older needed help. So we took the opportunity to move back to northern Wisconsin. It really wasn't a career move at all. It was it was purely a family move and incredibly thankful to to be able to do that. And we're both both my wife and I still work work virtually. And we we couldn't live here. We couldn't I couldn't run over to my folks on the weekends or at those early or late hour phone calls that you dread. You know, I couldn't be doing that idea.

I'd be days away. So it was good. A good move, but, you know, we live near the footprint of one of the very earliest million acre fires in American history. The Peshtigo Fire was just north and east of us a little bit. 1883, I want to say. So it's not like Wisconsin, the Midwest is is is foreign to fire. My career started in North Dakota. So it's I mean, it's it's not not too terribly far from from. Yeah, from what you expect for a wildland fire career. Beautiful.

Well, you always kind of indicated where you grew up. So let's talk about the early life a little bit. What did your parents do? How many siblings? Yeah, really mundane early life. My dad was a realtor for the most part, successful in with that enough that my mom could be a stay at home mom. We lived in in Arizona at the time. And but they had both grown up in in Minnesota. I was born in Minnesota, but we'd moved to Arizona to be closer to my grandparents.

So after my grandparents were gone, they made the call to head back to the woods as a eighth grade 13 year old. I was rather unhappy about that decision. Moved from a really a suburb of Phoenix to a small town and 300 people and school where everybody had been together since kindergarten. It that yeah, it it but very stable, very. I mean, we didn't want for anything. My dad retired early. But then went back to work self employed really for his for his whole life.

So it was it was just really simple and mundane, thankfully. Brilliant. What about the the fire service? Do you have any first responders or military in your family? None, none, zero. And I mean, it was it was a reflecting on it was a shock to me at the time. But I can only imagine how much of a shock it was to my folks. The original plan was military that that ended up not being a path that I followed. So law enforcement was next and that ended up being a path that I didn't end up following.

And so maybe to a certain extent, they were a little relieved when I decided to do something that didn't involve getting shot at. So yeah, it. I went to school in northern Minnesota to be a to be a law enforcement ranger for the Park Service. And one of my early teachers, mentors just observed that, you know, maybe I didn't have the the personality to to really thrive in the law enforcement community. And I think he was spot on.

I know today that I would struggle, of course, being a 19, 20 year old kid. It's this guy talking about. But thankfully, I listened to him and and really kind of kind of by chance in in in in the Park Service, I was working at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota, and they didn't have a fire crew at the time. So it was when when fires happened, the the ranger staff, the law enforcement rangers and the the intergrangers that had quals.

I got my I got my basic fire training in college, really never planning on using it. It was like classic. Well, it's a little good on a resume and moved on. And so that first that summer was on a went out with a pick up 20 person hand crew, just a mix of folks from here, there and everywhere. And there's a type two crew back before there were distinctions between type two and type two I.A. and I hated every second of it. It's miserable, absolutely miserable.

I now know that it was an amazing assignment. But for me at the time, it was it was horrible. But a couple of weeks went by and then I got a chance to do an engine assignment. And that that was the hook. I enjoyed that part of the work much more so than than hand crews. And I've never I've never pursued crews ever since I got I got my crew boss because he kind of had to, but never.

I've always been been an engine guy, spent a little bit of time on Hell Attack, but it was it was the engine work that I really enjoyed. And even that assignment was it was it was at home. There's three type three firefighter twos on a type six engine bouncing across the prairie in western North Dakota on a grass fire and like the things we did. What about when you were in a school age prior to entering the fire service?

Obviously, you know, especially on the hand crews, extremely physical profession. What were you playing as far as sports and exercise when you were younger? Absolutely nothing. I did I did nothing, especially, you know, the elementary school. Maybe the first part of middle school had a good group of friends and we were always physically active playing pick up football or baseball, but never any good at it.

And then moving to rural northern Wisconsin, a small town, a class of I think my graduating class was 26 people. The only offerings were football, baseball, basketball. And not only did I have no aptitude in those. I really am being that angry 13 year old and outsider at that in a really tight knit community. I had no desire to be on a team with any of them. So I spent my time in the woods and on the lakes. I I did I did no physical. Well different physical stuff, I guess, looking back on it.

But I like to say that that I'm in and it's true, I'm in better shape today than I ever was then. The only thing that that. Yeah, I barely got by. And it was mostly ego driving me up that hill, not not strength or endurance or any sort of training. It came to that much later in life. Was that one of the reasons then why you couldn't stand the hand crew? Because I would assume that was probably one of the most arduous assignments of any wildland firefighting group.

It's a good piece of it for sure. And and and pick up hand crews are are rough at best. There's no crew cohesion time built into it. I was working for a former hotshot. And yeah, it it it and that's that's really been a struggle with with with with my part of the wildland community. The engine world we we tend to get away with with not being as physically fit. And it's it's super unfortunate. But I didn't I didn't know it at the time.

And I certainly wasn't driven to I mean, we had the same physical training requirements and we had the same hour of PT a day. I never valued that hour of PT a day. Certainly never knew what to do with it. And I think that was a big piece of the problem. My my my colleagues that did have experience in high school sports, I mean, that's that's how they designed their PT programs is based on their high school football coach. What did they do? And I not only didn't have that, I didn't want that.

So any excuse that I had to not PT, I would readily take and not proud of that. Believe me, not not proud of that. And I definitely have come to a very different place with that today. And over the years, but definitely today. Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't good. The pack test for me, a lot of folks talk about how how how easy it is. It was a struggle for me every year. And during it, I would berate myself for not getting ready for it.

And then the next day, I'd be right back into those same old habits and get through it every every every year. Yeah. And it's I've come to think about even that really differently. I wear my my my pack test vest every day. I definitely am not hiking at the pace for a pack test, but distance and and weight. And that's the thing is it's a it's an NWCG minimum standard to pass the pack test. And I always and I think many of us treat it as that thing that you have to do.

If it's a minimum standard, then why can't you do it every day? You know, minimum standards should be something you should be able to meet at the drop of a hat, not something that you just do once in a while. So yeah, come come come quite a ways there, I think. After a lot of a lot of pain and suffering and ego and yeah. How often do you have to qualify with a pack test? Annually, annually. Yeah. Even now, the qualifications that I hold today, I only do the moderate.

I don't have to stay arduous, but it's my fitness now isn't about work. My fitness now is about living as long as I can after this profession is done. And that mindset made all the difference. Yeah. Well, again, it's it's it's comparable. Now, if you're doing virtual consultation from a desk, you're not going to suddenly have to leap out the window and go drag someone from a building. You know, that's when people are OK. Yeah. And that shift to longevity, obviously, is important.

It's always baffled me, though, and you use the word minimum standards. That's what Florida calls their firefighter one and two minimum standards. So I've said this so many times. They've labeled it for you. This is as shit as you should ever be in your entire career. But then you get into the career and they're like, oh, we don't have any standards for you now. You can get fat and out of shape and no one's going to hold you accountable.

But when you look at ocean lifeguards, when you look at the wildland fire community, you do hold people to a standard. You know, is it the perfect standard? I mean, there could be argument yes and no for that, but it is a standard. It's not an easy standard either. So what is your lens on the municipal fire service and the lack of these standards? Well, I guess the honest answer is I don't know.

I don't have much of a lens into the municipal fire service much, a little bit, mostly through the volunteer fire community where, yeah, no standards. I think my struggle with fitness in particular is when you establish a minimum and that's all you establish and that truly is all we've established is we have the work capacity test, the pack test. Any effort to really raise the bar has been either ignored or resisted actively. And so the minimum becomes the maximum. That's all you ever rise to.

And there are plenty and there are plenty of folks and I'd like to think I've joined this community later in my career that don't accept that. So work to change it culturally. But as far as our organizations are concerned, with the exception of smoke jumpers, pack test is it. Pack test is it. And again, if we treated it like a minimum standard, something you could do at the drop of a hat, then I'd be relatively okay with it.

But it's something that you do once a year and you just get your way through it. That's not a minimum. That's become your maximum. That's the best I can do, not the minimum that I can do. Absolutely. I agree completely. You enter then, you find yourself leaning into the engine side. Walk me through the journey that takes you and any career fires that you would consider were particularly interesting as you progress through. So I finished up college mostly for family expectation reasons.

I finished out my four-year degree. I studied history mainly because what else? I don't know. It was interesting. I liked history. So I studied that. And when I finished up with that, it was still in the days where we were seasonal employees. You spent your summer season, you went and did a winter season, and you did a summer season. You had to put in your time seasonally before you could get a permanent gig. But that really started to change in 2000, 2001. And so I made the switch.

I did a season with the park service on an engine in Arizona. It didn't roll to a single fire, but enjoyed it. Enjoyed the work. Did prescribed fire, did plenty of project work, ran saws. But it was quiet back then. It was, like I said, it didn't roll to a single fire. But then I got picked up permanently with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Northern California. Moved to Tule Lake, California. Kind of sight unseen.

I joke often that I did know that in that day, when you got an offer, you took it. You didn't wait for the better one. You took it. So the first put in for all kinds of permanent jobs, the first offer I got was to Tule Lake. Drove up there, rolled in in the middle of the night. And I was expecting what everybody thinks of Northern California. Lakes, mountains, or not lakes, rivers, mountains, trees. That is not Tule Lake, California.

Tule Lake is flat farmland, high desert, juniper, and sagebrush. And I told myself I'd put in my year and I'd be gone. Ended up staying in that community for the next nine years. It was, it became a very comfortable place to live. And a lot of that had to do with the work. I started with Fish and Wildlife. Went to the Park Service there on an interagency Type 3 engine. Loved it.

Took a short stint back here to Wisconsin to be closer to family and pursue a bit of a relationship, which fell apart quickly. And moved back to California with that next job offer six, eight months later. And just stayed. I got my first captain's job really quickly. Went with Fish and Wildlife on a Type 3 engine there really quickly. But in those days, like a 600 hour season was amazing. That was like crazy overtime, especially for engines.

Hotshots had been there for a long time, but engines not so much. We spent a lot of time at home, initial attack. And I enjoyed that life. So two, three fire assignments, all four assignments a year were fine. Nothing really crazy fire-wise. The Rimfire was one of my division trainee assignments. An important fire for me personally. I met my wife on that fire, or who is now my wife on that fire. Had no clue, totally oblivious of what happened when it happened.

But that one was important and it's one of the larger ones in my career. But early on too, one of my mentors was adamant that each of us have not just an operations path but a non-operations path. I tried out ComTech, Comm Unit leader. Didn't really enjoy that side of it. But then I got involved with Type 3 teams as team safety. And that started to click and I started to do that gig. And I enjoyed it a lot. Started to do that in southern Oregon.

And really that's the position and the qualification that I've pursued since. It's just Type 3 teams, smaller organization. Kind of noticing that trend that the larger the organization is, the less I like it. But a Type 3 team really appealed to me. They weren't as long duration fires. They were interesting. They were different. Yeah, I enjoyed that part of the career. And as far as big major fires, every year we'd go down south, southern California.

For every Santa Ana wind event, I don't know why, just luck of the draw I guess, we'd go to the San Bernardino and spent time on the San Bernardino. And so certainly not being on Esperanza, but being on that forest in the aftermath of that was formative. And I guess really when I think about the formative points in my career, it usually isn't on the traumatic event. It's being there, being around in the days after. And Esperanza was one of those examples. I didn't know I endured the others.

But yeah, it has an impact when you see other people suffering. I think it was the Esperanza fire where we and Anaheim actually were on the bridges as they were going underneath, if I'm not mistaken. What year was that? Because I was at Anaheim 05 to 08. Oh boy. What year was Esperanza? I want to say, I feel horrible for not knowing this. I'm a historian. Yeah, sorry. I put you on the spot that I'm just trying to figure out.

I think it was that fire because I remember we were saluting and we had the flag up and everything on the overpass. I want to say 07. Might have been 08. That's probably what it was then. So we're speaking of that then. You have a background in history. You enter the fire service. Talk to me about that kind of evolution of you starting to see that there were maybe long standing issues that were leading to some of these firefighter deaths.

When I finished studying history and I knew that I would be pursuing fire and I almost just bagged it. But it really was a long time in my career before I really came back to history, to my enjoyment of it, my value of it, my study of it. Definitely wasn't driving things, but I guess the way that I'd approach your question is and Esperanza was an important piece of this. I was not in for South Canyon. That wasn't part of my awareness. It was before my time. 30 Mile was an interesting one.

Again, it was decades later before I actually learned some lessons from 30 Mile beyond professional liability insurance. That was the lesson that you're on your own when something bad happens. Kramer just reinforced that. But Esperanza was a different beast. At that point in my career, I was teaching much more often, teaching fire freshers especially. Learning from events was important to me then. An interesting thing happened with Esperanza.

The organization, Forest Service in California published their report of the accident. Then a couple weeks later, the four other captains on that strike team published a rebuttal. They got together and said, this thing is bullshit. This is what happened. I stopped teaching, really stopped reading serious accident investigations that came out of the organization. I started teaching what the captains had to say.

That became a fork in the road for me, which is really ironic considering what I do today. The 30 Mile Kramer and Esperanza are held up as really the events that led to a real distrust in us of them. Us mainly being frontline incident commanders, fire line leaders, and then trusted on one day and then completely distrusted and in at least one instance almost two criminally prosecuted the next.

Even then I was asking myself, man, how horrible is it to be thinking that at least Watson Hezger doesn't have to go through that? He's dead. What could we do to him? That's a relief? How can that be? Thankfully there were a lot of people, a grassroots effort and a more top-down effort coming together at that time to realize how messed up all that was. What Esperanza did for me was it taught one of my mentors how to deal with the aftermath of those days. I tell the story all the time.

May, I promise you the number of emotions that come up on this show is crazy. Just no apologies, no rush when you're able to. In 2009, as captain on the MODOK, active and active captain, we were actually teaching L280 at the time. As often happens, one of these damn things goes off and you hear something bad happens. Some of us, we don't actually hear anything and they say, oh, well, this is really a one moon job. We goThey're destroying Fort Hell and we don't know a lot of this stuff.

L280 a little bit, which took a while to come back on when he was in school. It built well-rounded firefighters. And on one of those trips to the San Bernardino, a late season fire had a backseat full of apprentices and one of them was caught. And at the time it was, I'm sure it was a, it was a busy enough assignment. It was a good assignment. It got to know all three of those apprentices and kept in pretty close contact with one.

And that's, that next summer, Tom went to work for Chester Hell Attack. And later that summer, they were conducting a proficiency repel. Repelling out of helicopters isn't exactly something you do very often. So they built in a proficiency check system. So every so often they take a stand down from whatever assignment they were on. They'd go do a proficiency repel, stay current on it. High risk, low frequency event, classic. It's exactly what you do to deal with those kinds of events.

But that day, something went very wrong. And during the repel, his gear misconfigured Tom fell. So he wasn't my apprentice, didn't know him well at all. But his captain, well, you can only imagine what his captain was dealing with. So I got a phone call the next day asking if I would go to the Bay Area, go to Hayward, California. And at first it was deliver Tom's possessions to his parents. And at the time, we didn't have a, well, we didn't have any structure to deal with those, that aftermath.

So my mentor, Bob Bell, I didn't know Bob well at all at that point. He had worked on the MODOC before me. I had worked on the MODOC before my time. But Bob, the person really, I mean, he was an amazing guy. So anytime there's an event like that, who do you call? You call the amazing people that you know. And Bob was always that guy. And so through several events, but Esperanza being one of them, Bob was one of those guys that knew how to deal with those days after. And so Bob was there.

And on the way down, I learned that the other MODOC employee that was being sent to Hayward as a family liaison was our public affairs specialist. That did not go over well. Like, what are we doing? What are we doing? And that's, it turns out that I did what humans do in the absence of information. I make shit up and I could only imagine what the force service was doing, sending a public information officer to be the family liaison. Where's the spin on this one gonna be like?

I learned after the fact, I learned really quickly actually that they picked Jim to go not because he was a public affairs specialist, but because he had lost his own son in an accident. And he could relate to Tom's parents in ways that I could never relate to. And thankfully, and when I mentioned earlier, that guy called up years later, decades later to say, hey, you got anything interesting to work on? It was him.

He became a mentor of mine and eventually became my boss before he retired last year. An amazing individual, but so I'm in this, I'm down in Hayward and here's Jim and Bob doing amazing things with Tom's parents. But they were alone. There was no support, no structure. And in fact, all the support and structure that we did have came from Fremont Fire Department. So those guys were amazing. Tom was their academy. He was one of their instructors and young leaders in that.

And they stepped up and did what we couldn't do. They paid for everything. They provided the honor guard. They did everything. Here we were, Tom's own organization. And so the two of us that went down to deliver stuff, we never left. We're like, no, Bob and Jim need help. We're staying.

And so long story, hopefully a little shorter for you, ended up spending the time between then and Tom's funeral with his parents and a grieving organization and people trying to figure out how to take care of, how even to bring them home. We had no plan for any of that. And I'd like to think that it was Tom, it was that experience that really propelled things forward. The honor guard for the Forest Service was forming. At the time Esperanza really kicked that off.

It was really powerful San Bernardino driven movement. But we were still trying to figure out whether we were the Forest Service or we were growing into something else, something different. And so today we use the term Fire Service pretty generally, but it was different then, at least it seemed to me, and still seems to me. We had to learn the hard way over and over and over again. And Bob and Jim deserve a ton of credit for experiencing that aftermath.

They didn't just go back to business as usual, like I did or tried to. They stuck with it. They started to push it. They stuck with it, they started to push the organization to think about what we're asking our folks to do and how we're gonna handle it the day after, the day after the bad days.

It seems, and to a certain extent I think it was true that we were operating under this belief that once we got the, either the bad actor, the stupid person, the dead guy out of the way, that the system was fine again and we won't have this happen ever again. And that's really where the historian in me kicks in is, it's like, and I came to this later, but Mark Twain has a great quote. He says that, history does not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

And when you look at these things, they're different. Every one of them is different. People are different. So the events are different, but there are things that rhyme. There are things that look and feel and smell an awful lot like the previous iteration of that. And that's really where I came to this whole, well, that's what started it, but yeah. There's a lot more to that, but I'll pause there. Is that what, what do you think? Yeah, no, I mean, that's so powerful to hear.

I mean, even again, the emotions that come out, one of the things that I experienced in the last place I worked where the culture was horrendous was we lost one of our own. And I saw people kind of unmoved by it. And it was someone I got hired with. So we'd only been on barely a year when he passed. And I remember thinking the converse.

Like I feel it when a firefighter dies no matter where they are, whether they're in Esperanza or whether they're in, we just had one take his own life in Miami beach. Like I feel that. So it just baffles me. And I've said this so many times, how there seems to be a kind of shoulder shrugging when it happens in your own agency. How can you be the chief of a department locally here?

They've lost several to suicide and then still be so unmoved by it and still sleep soundly in your bed when you have men and women on the front line that will travel sometimes across the country to simply go to the funeral of a fallen firefighter. It took a while. Like I said, 30 mile and in Kramer, I don't know, maybe it's that it wasn't so in your face back then. Like the social media didn't exist. The first firefighter funeral I went to was Esperanza. So Esperanza was a big deal.

And like I said, hanging out with the folks after meeting two of them in particular became more than, certainly more than acquaintances, acquaintances, colleagues for sure. I needed something to connect it, I guess. But once that door was open and I definitely saw it at Esperanza where everybody that was standing there, I mean, not a dry and the crowd, but I still felt that real strong. And I looked at the honor guard folks and I still have no idea how they do it.

I have no idea how they do what they do. That, I mean, shoot, I can't even talk about it today and not get choked up for it. But, and that's important for that role. For the rest of us standing there, it, and I, Tom's mom made all the difference. There was no going back after being around her. And so one of the next kind of pivotal thing in this, well, there's one part of that story that I do wanna tell because I think it's a super important one.

So after we got, we did what we do and Bob kind of became an ad hoc type three IC and the rest of us started filling roles and we were working with Fremont Fire. And the whole goal was to get Tom home to the absolute best of our ability.

And one of the people that came down to help kind of, given that kind of surge capacity and for some specialty skills, a guy by the name of Ken Hood came down and he had a specific mission to do with the helicopter that wanted to pay tribute in their own way given how Tom died. And Ken came down and I like did what he needed to do in like minutes to arrange for this whole event, the flyover during the funeral.

And at the time, we weren't talking about, well, barely about trauma at all, but because of his previous experience, Ken had been close to a couple of accidents himself. He knew, just like Bob knew, just like Jim knew, through their experience, they knew that he was gonna be a hero. And so he was a hero. And so he was a hero. And so he was a hero. And so he was a hero. And so he was a hero. And so he was a hero. And so he was a hero. And so through their experience, they knew.

But Ken, Bob and Jim were doing their thing focused on the mission and where it belonged. But Ken had the presence of mind to stay, to stick around, but not to get sucked into the swirl of the event. His focus was on us. And I don't remember what I was doing, but it felt really important at the time. And he walked by and he said, let's go for a walk. And I was like, not, sorry, too busy. He's like, no, let's go for a walk. And he was, he pushed. But that walk was a really important one.

It was really the first, my first example of someone who I came to really respect and paying attention to the other stuff. And I've always, like we have, we commit to, and I think we're doing a better job today than we ever have from learning from these bad days. But it's always about the event itself. It's always about the equipment or the burn over or the accident itself. But what Ken did that day was an incredibly powerful moment that has, that story has never been told.

But really that's, there are tens, hundreds, thousands of those stories that taken together that arc of history has gotten us to where we are today. And we're certainly not perfect, but man, it is such a difference between 2009 and 2024 in how wildland organizations approach the death of our own. We'll learn the hard way. Thankfully learned from a lot of other folks too. Don't get me wrong, we certainly didn't figure it out on our own.

Couple of decades of war teaches a lot about this kind of stuff. And lots of those lessons have been absorbed. We still have a long way to go, certainly not perfect. Certainly not even close to perfect, but that was an important piece that day. But the other thing that really stuck out to me in that one, especially after how impactful the Esperanza accident investigation was, before we left, we got a commitment that, and I knew what the report was gonna say.

I knew that the report was gonna blame Tom for his own death. And it's like, if you're gonna say that, then you're gonna look his mom in the eye and you're gonna tell her that. And that was a commitment that we got from regional leadership.

Fast forward months, and I'm sitting in the back of a classroom in Northern California teaching, and like you always do when you're not up, you're sitting in the back of your room and an email comes up and there's an attachment in the email is the accident investigation. I knew that it hadn't been delivered to those folks and here it was, getting circulated. And I scrolled down far enough to see who wrote it and looked up the name, walked outside. And I don't remember the conversation.

Thankfully, the person whose name was at the top of that, it actually wasn't the full investigation, it was the human factors analysis. The name at the top of it was a guy by the name of Jim Savland. Very proficient in handling people under that kind of stress. And he handled it amazingly. Thankfully, it wasn't the Deputy Regional Forester or the Regional Forester that I called. Probably wouldn't have gone quite as well, but Jim, again, became one of my mentors.

He and his colleague Ivan that wrote the human factors analysis, Jim was like, have you even read it? And I had to say, no. Have you given it to his parents? And he had to say no. So we both kind of came to that place and he's like, just look at it. I hope you'll see that it's different than what you expect. And sure enough, it was. It was very different than what I expected.

And that's where the whole, the real, the left turn happened with coming back to learning my way through those bad days, seeing that it could be done differently. And what Jim and Ivan were doing was different. It wasn't blaming the dead. It was helping me understand how this could happen to Tom. And not probably most importantly, but definitely most importantly, it was all about acknowledging that I'm as susceptible to human performance, human factors as Tom was.

And I better start thinking about what to do about that. And that was an important shift. That was an important shift. Went from all I got to do is be a great firefighter and everything will be fine to, it's not quite that simple.

When I look at, for example, what we've just talked about, what you've just told us about, when I look at the law enforcement community that do everything they were trained to do and then they get thrown under the bus and charged, or simply just not supported, or like I said, in my particular case with this last department, there wasn't any of this support behind let's do the right thing for the firefighter that we just lost.

I saw and felt viscerally the mental health impact of that, the organizational betrayal, the tribe that you had sworn to possibly die for turning their back on you. What have you observed when it was handled poorly of the impact of the men and women around? Yeah, it's a lot of my work now is really centered around learning from events, learning from our past.

And in that 30-mile Kramer-Esperanza time period, it was a really powerful, if that's how I'm going to be judged based on what I couldn't know, what I couldn't have known, do I really want to do this? And especially in the Pacific Northwest, but other places, IAWF did a survey, and I don't remember the numbers, but it was a pretty significant amount of folks. When Ellery Staniels was charged, said I'm done being a Type 3 incident commander. I will not be pursuing that. I didn't feel that way.

I was still at that point where I was like, OK, I just got to be really good. I got to be better. And I loved, in the 30-mile abatement plan, they came up with a simulation. It's a Type 3 IC simulation. And for qualified current Type 3s, I can understand how it would feel like a questioning of their confidence, like they had to prove themselves again, despite all of their solid work before. So I could see that from that perspective, but I wasn't a qualified.

I was pursuing that qualification, and I thought it was fantastic. I thought it was a great, it was a move from kind of that, sit in the classroom, watch the PowerPoints, hear the war stories to actual, and the California cadre is really invested in it. And my boss told the story of when he did it. He got to the end of it, and they said, OK, Chris, you're done. And he turned around and yelled, I'm not done yet. When somebody does that, that is realistic training.

That is a person in the moment, and that is what we can aspire to when it comes to learning and training for the fire service. And so there were things that came out of it, but it really didn't overcome what I've come to know now as moral injury and a broader sense of who was hurt after these events. And so the organization was seeing the aftermath of that in a very important part of my career and my evolution.

And so there were really two groups of folks, and Jim and Ivan that I mentioned were part of that. There was another group of folks, Steve Holtenbeck, Randy Drager, others. And it's one of those really cool examples of organizational change. We often say that grassroots is best. Grassroots change, something that starts at the field is super important. But what I learned through this is that sometimes the grass just gets mowed.

The grassroots effort is important, but if it isn't paired with executive, with senior leadership that leaves similar things, not necessarily the same things, but they're moving towards the same north star, really amazing things can happen. So thankfully, at the time, we had a chief that was not blind to what we feared was going to happen, was happening. And that's that we were losing capacity to how we were approaching these things after the bad days.

We're losing the ability to fulfill the mission of wildland fire in the organization.

So chief being open to something different, Ivan and Jim pushing from this direction, Steve and Randy pushing from that direction, and a boatload of other people, a boatload of other people really pushing hard to switch from this retributive after a bad day, name, blame, shame, fire, punish, prosecute, or at best retrain people to a learning mindset, recognizing that the people that experience these events have the most to share with us in the aftermath of those events.

And if you're going to go after them, why in hell would they ever share anything with you? And so this retributive, go after them, punish them, prosecute them, just drove learning underground. And a ton of it's been lost. A ton of it's been lost. And a real powerful example of this, and I certainly don't blame the guys that were at the base of the tree with Andy Palmer when he died. That story has never been told. We don't know what happened. And part of me is glad.

Imagine if we knew that story. If we knew everything about how that tree was cut, our focus would have been on that damn tree. Tree's down. It's not going to kill anybody again. But instead, because we couldn't focus there, we had to look at the organization's response to somebody getting traumatically injured on the fire line. And we started thinking about things like tourniquets.

Never would have thought about that if it hadn't been for Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's learned a ton about tourniquets, but then needing one and not having it. The coordinating a response to get a kid out of the forest as fast as possible. Managing bleeds that are unimaginable. That's kind of what that forced us to do is, if we couldn't focus on the tree, we had to focus on something. And great things have come from that.

The fact that we didn't have a medical incident report until that event, how is that even imaginable? But it is. It's true. EMTs paramedics on the fire line? Rare. I put myself through EMT in the aftermath of that, right? Just so that I didn't have to stand there with my hands in my pockets wondering what the hell I should do. We're in a very different place today. Again, we're not perfect. We haven't got it all figured out. We can do better. We can do better. We are working to do better.

And it's better than it was in a lot of ways, not every way. Well, what were the systemic problems? And then how were you, and again, this boatload of people, able to start moving the needle? Because I see this. One of the problems we have in the municipal fire services, we're so segmented. We're so fractured. We're siloed. Very few talk to each other. I mean, maybe one or two will go to conferences and knowledge share.

But overall, we all know that there's a lot of places where cities and counties don't even talk to each other, which is pure insanity to me. And so this issue is rife all over the country. I mean, even just the firefighter work week, which I harp on about all the time, the fact that the Northeast is working 42 hours and California is working 56 and the federal guys are working 72, we don't even have a standardized work week, even though they're all human beings doing a job.

I would argue that a 42-hour work week is the maximum. Someone required to do what we have to do should be working. Unless, God forbid, it's a catastrophe and it's an all-hands event. I have seen over and over again, if I'm taking the gloves off, ego and cowardice a lot from people who are supposed to be leaders who should be advocating for their people. What are you seeing as far as the barriers that you were encountering?

And then how were you able to circumnavigate them to actually make it better for the wildland firefighters? One of my go-to teachers, he talks about how the antidote of fear isn't courage. It looks a lot more like imagination. The antidote to fear is imagination. And I think that's what I see in this is a lot of really great people thinking differently about the problem. And how we go about change is one thing. The implementation is often clunky and slow and redundant and messy.

But if you take a step back before the implementation and you look at how people were thinking about doing something to try to make things better, I think you see the bright side of the story. The implementation is one thing. And that often sinks the idea. But that's where this one in particular. And it connects to a common interest of ours in human performance.

But so with this, you had those two groups, that grass roots group, grass roots group, and that top-down group with the chief, some senior leadership folks, all saying we need to move towards this North Star. And this North Star is learning that our goal after the event isn't to punish, isn't to blame. It is to learn. The last one doesn't matter anymore. The next one is what matters most. And we need to learn everything we can so that we can approach the next one better.

And so at one point, the idea of the Forest Service having an honor guard was like, why would we have that? We're the Forest Service. But those folks, and it was a really weird time. You hear a lot today about how, well, the organization says that I'm a forestry technician, not a firefighter. I didn't really accept that at that time. We were like, OK, that's what the job title is. I mean, my signature line today doesn't have anything to do with what my job title is. We defined our own identity.

And for me and for a lot of us, that identity was I'm a Forest Service Fire Engine Captain. That is who I am. For the folks that spearheaded, that doggedly pursued that honor guard, that was their identity. They didn't accept the fact that the job title on a piece of paper or on their pay stub was going to hold them back from living that. I admire them for that. I admire the people that are striving for change in that arena, too. Don't get me wrong.

So when I see those people and all the people that were pulled into their slipstream as they're moving these changes through the organization and that shift from the retributive serious accident investigation to the learning review, seeing how it could be different, seeing how we could change how we treated people after their worst days, we started to see a bit of a glimmer.

And that was done mainly through the facilitated learning analysis and the learning review, and both of them being accepted by the organization as a replacement of the serious accident investigation. In a really rare instance in government, the thing was deleted. We aren't doing that anymore. We are doing it differently on this day and at this time.

Culturally, lots of changes also had to come along, but it was an important effort for us to, and some really recognized the need to make a really solid split between what was and what will be. And what that led to, I think, is a really important mindset shift. If we're going to accept that we can learn our way through the worst days, that means that it isn't about better rules, better policies, better procedures, or better hard hats or seat belts. It's about figuring out what it is to be human.

And so after I finally looked at the human factors analysis and the study of human factors, you've got to give credit to that origin story with Ted Putnam and the aftermath of South Canyon. His hill he died on, figuratively, was just that. It's the human factor that matters. It's not about rules and policies and procedures to get ourselves out of, to keep ourselves out of situations like this. We need thinking people.

And he recognized the human factor at South Canyon and really got that ball rolling for many people. So we're all standing on the shoulders of giants with this. So that, I think, there's one shift in stopping what we were doing and doing something else. But the more important fundamental, I think, is the recognition that we're human, that we don't know that we're wrong until we find out that, oh, crap, we were wrong.

And by that point, we're quite a ways down the road and oftentimes too far down the road to get out in time. So the study of human factors, the study of human performance. So I went to work for Ivan and Jim. And we're mainly doing accident investigation at the time, still calling it that. But really, what I was doing is I was getting a crash course in human factors, how we think, how we approach risk, what risk even meant. I used the word without ever really understanding what it meant.

And so that shift, recognizing that not only are the people that have bad days on the line are humans, oh my. I trusted them the day before. I can, and I need to trust them the day after. That was a real subtle shift. It wasn't something that you could just publish a new thing and it would happen. And it was a lot of really powerful.

And I don't mean position powerful, but personality powerful people, people that you trusted, people that you looked up to, people like Bob, to imagine a different place and then go about creating a different place. And there's lots of things that structure things, like just having our Wild on Fire Lessons Learn Center, a place to house the learning.

You could talk a lot about whether people are learning from events or not, but it's really an important piece to have a place, have a library, have a repository, have an organization that invests in capturing those stories and sharing them with people. That's not insignificant. Otherwise, we're all just figuring it out.

One of the most important elements, I think, of so many, especially when we're looking at line of duty deaths or near misses or, again, if you want to turn all the way to the other side, elite human performance, that is, in my opinion, a massive elephant in the room that so many ignore is the impact of sleep deprivation. So I'm just going to leave it right there and give you the mic back. What's your kind of entire philosophy on that and the impact of sleep deprivation?

What kind of entire philosophy on that and the impact on your community? So interestingly enough, when I worked for Ivan, I worked for him for a year. He was the most traveled person in the Forest Service. I was the second. I had to get my travel card credit when it bumped up because we were traveling so much. We'd leave on a Sunday. We'd go to a forest. We'd teach. We'd meet people. We'd be there all week and get home on a Saturday. It was not good. Ivan's wife, a ton of credit.

She hit him upside the head with a two by four and said, you can't do this. This is not sustainable. You're going to lose something. You're going to lose your career. You're going to lose a relationship. Make a call. And I wasn't in a relationship at the time, but I remember at the end of the detail, I was going back to my crew and I called up Ivan and said, look, I am not an asset to my crew going back like this.

I hadn't dealt with a ton of psychological stuff, but that aside, on top of that, I was exhausted. And part of me was really looking forward to getting back with the crew, but the other part of me was dreading it. So as part of our evolution, one of the things that we were really strong on at the time was going out and learning from amazing people, leaders in the field.

So Ivan said, okay, we're going to send you to the Human Performance Institute in Florida, and you're going to take their performance course. And that was super important. A lot of, not a lot of, some of the key players in this had that experience under their belt. They'd gone there, they had learned about physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fitness from Olympic level athletic coaches. That's what the Human Performance Institute is all about.

First, I was like, you're going to send me to learn from a tennis coach? But thankfully by that point, I had been surprised by how many people I could learn from that it was an amazing experience. It was a great group of folks, top of their field. Jim Lair was still teaching at that point. And it was truly, well, it was my first real exposure into the idea of human performance.

It was the realization or not realization, I'm sure I knew it, but it was the kind of that moment of acceptance that, holy crap, I am not physically where I need to be. I'm not mentally where I need to be. I'm not emotionally where I need to be. And I'm certainly isn't spiritually where I need to be. So it was very much a mindset shift. It was the start of one, it wasn't the finish.

If there ever is a finish in that, but it was that realization that human performance is the path forward, recognizing those things. And I can't say at the time that sleep was acknowledged for the impact it had. I think that the sleep probably revolution, it's more than that. The evolution, it's more than an evolution, but the recognition of the importance of sleep in recent years is so important.

And yet it's one of those that, well, we just haven't been imaginative enough going back to that idea. Like, how do we deal with that? I remember the long, one of those trips to San Bernardino, the first sleep trailer ever slept in. Being on night shift, trying to sleep in hot, smoky conditions. And the sleep trailer was an amazing evolution.

Packing, I don't know how many people into one of those things in this day and age with what we understand with communicable diseases is probably not a good plan. I don't know, they've evolved there. It's been a long time since I've slept in one, but that was like one of those acknowledgements that sleep is a thing, it's important. COVID taught us a lot about that one too.

There's work to be done on it yet, but there was a realization, I think, that hoteling people up, if you can, if it doesn't pose a driving risk to get folks into hotels instead of fire camps, isn't more expensive. That you should consider that as an option was, I think, a surprise to a lot of folks. The excuse had always been, it's too expensive. Of course, too expensive when you're talking about human performance things is always an interesting excuse.

But again, it's, are we imaginative enough to think of how we could do business different in a way that doesn't increase risk, but at the same time, recognizes the importance of sleep, the importance of nutrition, the importance of mental fitness. We're just, and it's been underway for years, but really in the grand scheme of things, certainly in the arc of history, we're just getting this stuff figured out. How do you do it?

And it's been an interesting experience working for a variety of agencies over the years at NWCG and at the Fire Center in Boise. It's almost like there's a fear that by learning, by studying something, we'll discover something that we can't do anything about, or we don't know how to do anything about it. Really re-imagining how we approach large scale fires so that we can handle, or we can address sleep deprivation. Like, what does that look like? That's where imagination comes in.

Without it, you just sit there and spin. You grind on it. And you may have the best of intentions, but if you can't see a way to implement something different, what do you got? So again, certainly not there. There has been evolutionary change, some revolutionary change, but mostly evolutionary change. Working long shifts on the MODOC, driving home, our station was 30 miles from where most of us lived, or at least parked our vehicles and then drove more home.

And those 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m. mornings driving home, the idea of 24-hour shifts were unheard of for the Forest Service in California at the time. I won't say that they're normal now, but they're a heck of a lot more normal. People figured out how to do it, how to pay people, how to house people, how to deal with it. Long road ahead of us to get that dialed in, but they're trying. It's an attempt.

We're struggling, and it's interesting on large fire, where it seems like we get to a tipping point where we reach where people have earned enough, they've gotten enough overtime under their belts for the year that they can stop worrying about paying the bills, and they can start worrying about their recovery. They can stop worrying about their health, they can stop worrying about maximizing their 16-hour days, and start being okay with coming in off the line at 12 or 13.

But if you don't reach that tipping point first, it's a real, I mean, talk about a human factor. You're asking people not to be thinking about paying their bills and taking care of their family at home. It doesn't work that way. The idea of keep work at work and life and home at home, if it ever worked, I don't know that it worked for my parents, but I sure heard it a lot from that generation. I don't think it works that way. At least it doesn't work that way for me.

But once you can get past that tipping point, and how can you address that in different ways? I know a lot of folks are frustrated. It ain't happening fast. Well, what's interesting is going back to that imagination conversation. I went through my whole career. I started this podcast two years before I transitioned out. So that was 12 years in. I never questioned the shifts. I still believe the kind of fairy tales that we have this amazing shift, and we have all this time off.

And it was only when I took a step back, and after two years of going to numerous, numerous funerals that I questioned, and I had a background as a coach and an athlete and an ex-phys major, just enough to go, something isn't right about this. And then you look at the number of hours that we work, bare minimum, 56, awake every third day. And then you go, well, why? When your barista taps out at 40 hours in Starbucks, why are we working this way?

And so ironically, it's counterintuitive, the answer, when you actually change the work week to one that is healthy, your retention goes through the roof. And we can start saying this now, because in Florida, this has happened. So at 2472, your recruitment goes through the roof. So if you're one of the first fire departments to do this, then you will get all the candidates, I tell you that right now, because Gainesville and some of these other departments are seeing it.

But then the overtime, the attrition, you're training these young people and then you're losing them. The workman's comp claims, the line of duty deaths, the medical disabilities, the lawsuits from mistakes, these are millions and millions and millions of dollars. So the progressive, thoughtful leaders are going, well, this is how we fix it. We give them more time off. And then I will wait a second, we're gonna pay them less and release these crazy responses to that.

But no, you invest in your people. And if you take the wildland community, for example, and you kind of imprint it on the airline industry, you can't tell a pilot, oh, well, you know, to make the extra money, just fly back as well without sleep. No one would go for that, but that's exactly what we're doing in the fire service. And, you know, from what I understand, the wildland community is suffering from recruitment the same as the municipal.

So the way that we attract young people back is to invest in them. The way that we stop them having to work overtime is to pay them a wage where they don't need to work overtime and then cap it, you know, and then have an extra group that works when they go home.

So when you compare what we are asked to do in wildland, in municipal, you know, in police and dispatch and corrections, and you compare that, especially the fire service, because obviously our hours are just insane compared to most people's, and you compare that to your supermarket, your supermarket, you know, your coffee shop, your accountant, they wouldn't dream of working 56 hours. They wouldn't dream of saying at 5 p.m., hey, you can't go home, stay another 24 hours.

They wouldn't stand for it, yet we have. So the answer is just purely, you've got away with this shit for so many years, but we're at a point now where you've got to change, or you will literally have the next, you know, thousand acre fire and literally not enough firefighters to deal with it, or God forbid, numerous fatalities on that fire because they're so sleep deprived.

You know, I'm sure if you kind of, you know, reverse engineered what happened in California, that sleep was part of that issue as well. So you've got, you know, homes destroyed, you've got firefighters killed. At what point do we say enough is enough? We have to invest in our firefighters if we're gonna ask them to do the things that we do. One of my teachers, a guy by the name, Brian Johnson, has really helped me think about this.

One of his things is he says that your day starts the night before. And that's again, a mindset shift. It's acknowledging that how you spend your evening the night before at home and on fire is going to dictate your performance the next day. It's going to contribute to your performance the next day, the physical fitness as well as your nutrition, but how you spend your evening and how you spend your night sleeping is important.

And I think for the most part, my work has been about getting people to acknowledge that when their sleep is disrupted, when their physical fitness isn't where you need it to be, and your mental fitness isn't where you need it to be, once you realize that, once you need it to be performing at optimal or your worst day's peak level, it's too late to build that. So you gotta be thinking ahead and invest in those things before you need it. That mindset shift I think is an important one.

Because it gets us, I hope, first, it's the first part of acceptance and commitment therapy is like accept it. Accept that your performance sucks or is at least going to be diminished if these things aren't in order, if they aren't in line. Accept that. And once you accept it, I think you can figure out what to do about it. I hope, and that's been trying for years. I think there's some really good examples of movement in that direction.

Some terrifying resistance to movement in that direction as well. It is thinking about the problem differently. And it's such an important thing for us to be doing. I think about, I was listening to one of your earlier podcasts with a friend of mine, and he was talking about evacuations of people, getting people evacuated soon enough so that they can't be impacted by fire. That's solving the problem.

If you can evacuate people soon enough so that when the fire impacts their community, they aren't there to get hurt or killed. That's solving the problem. That's an important thing for us to do. But what if we thought differently? And as Russell Lakoff says, what if we dissolved the problem? And what he meant by that is, what if we thought about community planning, zoning, insurance, in such a way that fire hits the edge of the community and the community is impacted by it at all?

You dissolve the problem. You don't need to evacuate people. You don't need firefighters to risk themselves getting between those flames and those people. If you dissolve the problems, what would that look like? What would that look like? So thinking about it from that perspective, what would dissolving this problem look like? How can we not need folks like you and others and our shock crews to work thousands of hours of overtime a year? What would that look like and how do we attain that?

And I don't think it's by hiring more. Because that's the tricky thing with this. And it's also the tricky thing with paying people better. Don't get me wrong, pay people better. But if you're not looking at the other parts of the system, the other parts of the work environment, the purposeful work, the meaningful work, the people that you end up working for, you're just getting paid better to deal with a crappy work environment.

You're getting paid better to deal with work that is mind numbing instead of purposeful. And you're getting paid better to deal with that crappy supervisor. Is that enough? And maybe it is, maybe it is. Maybe it'll get us to the point where we can shift our focus from pay to building human performance before we need it. Building capacity and resilience and people that we want to follow, doing work that we want to do. Not because of the paycheck, but because it's meaningful, purposeful work.

And for me, that's when I fell out of love with this organization and this profession is when I didn't have anything to do with pay. I make enough. I got to the point in my career where I make enough, but by that time, I don't feel the purposeful work that I used to. Sometimes think I got my high three, why don't I go back as a GSA engine captain again? I finished out my career there. Maybe that would be the way to go. They don't want, they wouldn't want me. They use this analogy a lot.

Let's take, for example, the paramedics, EMTs, and obviously a lot of the US is fire and EMS together. We run on so many calls that we shouldn't run. So for example, there are embedded telehealth groups that can handle some of the lower acuity calls. There's a proactive solution. Now we should still be working 42 hour work weeks. Don't get me wrong, but let's hit it from both sides. Law enforcement, why they always look like they're going to war.

Well, where is the conversation of why are streets of America riddled with gangs? Why do we have the homelessness and the addiction? Why are our children literally rehearsing for their own murder? Why are we not addressing that? We're just putting it all on the shoulders of the cops and say, do better. Well, we take away your funding by the way. So I agree completely.

When I've spoken to Jason Ramos and Ben Strahan and Rex and all these other great wildland people have had on, we're talking about prescribed burns. We're talking that a local town will oppose. I used to work for Disney's fire department and they would oppose them doing any kind of prescribed burns because God forbid there's smoke in the parks, it will ruin the magic. So instead these firefighters are out there traipsing through these swamps.

We're just waiting for a fatality there one day, these muck fires that are under their feet, rather than just as one of my friends was educating me, checkering the surrounding areas and that way, there's fire breaks everywhere. So, and I'm not a wildland firefighter. I've worked in Anaheim, I did some of the training and I was on a truck company. So you guys go fight the fires out in the fields, we'll protect the buildings. Good luck, enjoy the overtime. So I agree 100%.

It's never, it's not just that one side, it's both. And now you've got this, as you said, grassroots and top down approach with all the things. If we had a healthier nation, if we're talking about the obesity epidemic, the whole EMS system would be more appeased. So a thousand percent, it's not one conversation, it's all of the conversations together that will improve everyone.

But the guy I mentioned, Russell Aykoff, he's, well, I don't think he's with us anymore, but a forefront of systems thinking. That's what this is, is it's not a one solution to one problem. It is a system of a network of efforts, interventions here, there, unintended outcomes are gonna happen. That is the nature of a complex system. But boy, those unintended outcomes are possible, but so are those interventions that have amazing, positive influence throughout the system.

Telehealth is such an interesting one to me. Pre-COVID, we wouldn't even talk about it. We didn't even know about it. And one of the struggles that we've had with mental health services for our rural communities, for firefighters, is that they just don't have professionals in those communities. The idea of telehealth dramatically changes that equation.

And even in communities, I live near Klamath Falls, and my one attempt at trying to go down that path didn't go well, not because the dock that I connected to wasn't a good person or a profession in their arena. It just wasn't my arena. It wasn't this profession. So I'm hopeful for those things.

I mean, I'm also on the downside of my career, and I'm not naive enough to think that it'll happen prior to my being done, but I would like to think that the groundwork, and a lot of more than groundwork, has been laid, and that people are thinking about this imaginatively. Well, you mentioned a little while ago about working through some emotional issues as well.

I think the wildland community doesn't get the same exposure, but Ben and some of the other guys have told me about the numerous suicides and the addiction, especially in the seasonal work. You're part of this tribe, you have this purpose, and then you're off, kind of like the crab fishermen that we see in Alaska. Talk to me about what you're seeing professionally through your community, and then if you'd like to walk me through your own mental health journey, the highs and the lows.

So I think, and Bob and myself actually are good examples of where we were. And it was a necessary step, where good people recognized the need and sought out in their own way to make things just a little bit better. I'd like to think that I can look back on my career and I can see those events, those efforts, and for the most part, I can look at them and be at least content that what comes before was necessary for what comes next.

And so when I look at where we're at today, one of the real positive signs that I'm seeing is that for a long time, the excuse was, well, you're not a mental health professional, so you can't or you shouldn't be talking about mental health. And so I think that's a good example of where we are. And while I get what they're worried about, there are conditions, there are the ends of the spectrum where dysfunction needs professional, trained, experienced intervention, and that isn't me.

For a long time, we approached those ends of the spectrum by outsourcing it. And in a lot of ways, our organizations, the employee assistance programs, have gotten a real bad rap. And I get it, like I said, in many ways, in the aftermath of Tom's accident, there was a day. And it was a good tipping point. Thankfully, my boss was also my mentor and friend, and he recognized what was going on.

But what I had to tell myself was that I'm gonna call, I'm gonna get an appointment with the doc so that I can honestly with integrity tell my crew that they should do the same. I'm not gonna advocate for them to ask for help if I'm not gonna ask for help. So went through the process and it wasn't great, it wasn't horrible. Called the EAP number, got connected with the doc in Klamath Falls. And walk in and the office is set up, not at all, what I expected a psychologist's office to look like.

It looked more like a kindergarten classroom. And there's a reason for that. Her specialty was child sex abuse. But she was in the system, she was available, she was a psychologist. And she was very open and honest. She was like, look, I don't know, I'll try. I'll listen, I'll try. But I don't know what you're dealing with. I don't know how to approach your circumstance. So if you're willing to try, we'll go, we'll do it.

But if you want to try to find a different doc, we'll support you with that too. And so, like I said, I really didn't wanna do it in the first place. So it's like, no, we're here, let's do it. Let's get it over with, right? And it was that mindset. It wasn't let's get to a place of dealing with anything, moving from dysfunction to function. It was just go through the motions, get it done, moving on.

And that's the tricky part with things like our Employee Assistance Program is in order to, like those are, like today, if that were to go down and I reached out through EAP for a doc for, I don't know, marriage counseling or something like that. And I walked in and I recognized that the doc just isn't the right one. I mean, I've done this with a lot of people and I've done this with healthcare doctors. Just for whatever reason, one doesn't click, I go find another one, right?

But when you're not in balance, when you're on those ends of the spectrum, the function dysfunction spectrum, like those are not, like you're not thinking like that. So at least that was it. And so one of the real positive changes that I've seen is, well, we've made some significant changes to our Employee Assistance Programs. It's too early to tell if it'll help, I think too early to tell.

But I think one of the most positive changes that I've seen is an acknowledgement that we need, at least at this stage, it's not for clinical treatment itself, but an acknowledgement that we need mental health professionals, trained psychologists, stress psychologists, trauma trained clinicians, on, in the organization to advise, to evaluate, to test the AAP programs and other things, to build to a better place. I've tested the AAP program a lot.

I call it up, I tell them I got a problem, and I time them to see how quickly they connect me to a doc. I've tested that, but what can I do about it? Not a whole lot, but if we're, if, if, and I know it's a big if, but I got a, I got a, I've met a couple of them, I know one of them really well. I gotta give them a chance, give them a chance to make the system better. They know what they're talking about, I trust that, at least with these, the two that I know.

But we gotta give them a chance, we gotta give them a chance to make it better. And it is a change, it is different. It's a change that we're gonna make, and I think that's a big change. It is different, like, we've never done that.

But at the same time, we, in doing that, in recognizing that we need those professionals for that, those dysfunction times, that we also need peers, we need coaches, we need mentors for the, for maybe that, the center of that spectrum of the dysfunctions on this side, in here, a coach can do amazing things. A mentor, a friend that, that, that knows to shut up and listen, and not try to fix. And that's huge, I mean, I can't count how many times I've, I thought they were asking me to fix it.

My wife, how many times has she come to me and to, to, to just vent about something, but it looks like she's asking me to fix it, so I try and we all know how that goes. So just, just, just that building that skill and mentors and friends and peer support is huge too. And that didn't exist, it did not exist structurally. There were a lot of good people like Ken, like Bob, like Jim, that knew its importance. Having it built into the system is not insignificant. I've sat on here a few times.

I've heard the EAP horror stories so often, and like you said, they might be okay in their field, some of them probably not, because it's a low bid system as well. But they've sat in front of child psychologists, marriage counselors when they're going with a trauma issue, not a marriage issue. And I've heard them, people have burst into tears, they've been told to get out, I can't help you.

And what saddens me so much is those are the ones that I heard, how many will I never have the opportunity to hear because that was the last ditch. They found the courage to ask for help. They were handed a piece of paper, they called the number, they sat in front of a person, they got that response, and they were like, well, I must be bat shit crazy then. Let me just go finish the job.

And I even did, I just wrote my second book, and there's an element of that in there because I think it's so important for us to understand. The woman that did my psychological exam in Orange County when I worked there, her office was chaotic. There's no way in hell that that woman was gonna give solid psychological advice when she couldn't even keep her room clean, you know what I mean?

So this is the danger is there are some incredible culturally competent clinicians out there who we absolutely need to trust. Brooke Bartlett in California is a perfect example. But on the other side of the extreme, it's an extremely dangerous place to just throw the dice and hope that these counselors on your list are worth a shit when as you said, you've got someone in crisis and that might be their very last ditch attempt to get some help and then they walk out the door and then that's it.

Yep. And it's kind of that layered defenses idea. Thankfully, I walked out of that room, went back to work and there were lots of people paying attention, thankfully. And I think this is one of our greatest weaknesses. I think we've come a long way in recognizing that the folks on scene of the drowning or the motor vehicle accident or the burn over, that they need help. Yeah, copy that, let's go. Let's get them the best help we can.

I think we've got a long way to go in recognizing that, well, Saddleback, when Luke Sheehy got hit by a snag on the Modoc, everybody on the force listened to that. Dispatch listens to every one of them. It's that those conceptor grings of that bullseye, yeah, they're further out, but it's different. It's different. I think about dispatch, throughout the course of my career, I've been asked to do a lot of workshops, human performance learning workshops.

And whenever I get asked to come into a dispatch center, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to give. Because my advice, the coaching advice that I give through human performance is almost all about physical and environmental. Your dispatcher can't leave the console, especially in our dispatch centers where there's one or two of them. They're stuck there. It's a dark room. They aren't getting the sunshine. They aren't getting the physical exercise.

Like for an engine crew or a hotshot crew that experiences something, fresh air exercise, go get into nature, those are like, easy, they're accessible. They're part of the normal work. And it helps. It helps to be out in that environment. I did EMS for a while on a volunteer basis. And one of the most important things, the reason why I think I didn't go down a bad path with some of those experiences, was the fact that our hospital was 30 miles away.

So the ride home after even the worst of them was, and I was a young EMT with really experienced, quite frankly, old guys. But that ride home with those experienced old guys was a debrief built into our normal work. Not by design, but just by circumstance. Being able to decompress with those guys on the way home from the hospital was huge. When those things can be built into the system, I think you've got an advantage.

But when I look at dispatch centers in particular, but it applies to other folks too. Like those things aren't built into the system. They're there to help you. And I think that's a big part of the problem. They're not built into the system. They're at a disadvantage. And how do we recognize what those further outrings need? I'm thrilled to death that the folks that are at the center of the bullseye, that we're acknowledging that, that's a huge step. Can't be undersold.

But I wasn't there the day Tom died. I didn't see it. I didn't have to go through what those folks did. I wasn't a spotter, wasn't his buddy checker. Can you imagine? It's different. It's not a competition. It's not my drama is bigger than yours. It's... It's... Yeah. I had Beth Bauer Sox on the show. She was the dispatcher, one of the dispatchers during the Paradise Fire. And she was a Paradise resident. And again, we talked about this very thing.

You know, you've got, let's say municipal firefights, that's what I know, you know, I get banged out on an extrication. So I get my gear out. I may not be in nature, but again, you know, we get there. We're pulling out tools, you know, it's physical exertion. And on the way back... The physical exertion. Yep. Yep. You got this crew and maybe, you know, if I'm on the medic side and I'm transporting that person, now I get to talk to the doctors and nurses, how are they doing?

And there's a closure element too. That dispatcher, not only are they in a dark room, chances are they was dark when they entered the building. It's dark when they leave the building. They have no physical offload.

And then a lot of times like with Beth, you know, you got people screaming in the phone and then it goes dead as that poor family are burned over, you know, so I know it affected her immensely, but that is definitely one of the, you know, the least discussed groups in the first responder professions. And I would argue again, they need, you know, shorter shifts. They need the ability to go outside, you know, between calls if they need to, you know, and again, does it have to be dark even?

You know, with technology these days, can they not, you know, put on, you know, I mean, I don't know what it would be, but there's got to be a way of still being able to see the screen clearly, but letting some natural light in as well. So their corona receptors in the rise, at least acknowledge, okay, this is night, this is day.

So again, like you said, there's proactive, double-sided solutions, but I feel like they really are left out and there's a huge recruitment crisis in that profession too, because, you know, they're understaffed and they're being forced to work extra hours because you have to have someone there at that microphone. Right. And if they aren't there, I'm not rolling, right?

I'm saying like that, I'm still sitting in the right seat of a truck, but the point being is none of us can do the work without the other. I started to refer to as enabling functions, the people that enable others to do the core mission, whatever that core mission might be. We call them support functions. Like you don't need support, you're a big tough firefighter, you don't need support. It doesn't work that way. They enable you. You're not rolling without them.

We have a lot of autonomy in wildland fire. That's one thing that you're not doing. You're not rolling prior to a dispatch. We need them. It's not a nice thing. Well, I want to be mindful of your time. So before we make sure everyone knows where to find you and round out, is there anything else that you want to impart before I let you go? Oh boy, I don't know. I almost said I always struggle with these kind of things. I don't do these kind of things very often at all.

So I can't say I always struggle, but I do. I know I will struggle, but I don't know. I know I will wonder for the rest of the day if there was any coherence in the rambling. There was, I promise you. So I guess to answer your question better. No, I don't know. There's... Everyone's got a story for this and I don't know. I'm sure I left people out, important people out, and I'm sorry for that. I know there are other perspectives.

It's one of the things we try to do in our learning review work is acknowledge that there is no one story. It's one of the things we got wrong back in the day is trying to tell a nice, neat, coherent story with the beginning, middle, and end where everybody agrees. And life just isn't like that. And I know that what I've seen, what I've experienced, what I've done won't resonate with everybody. And I'm glad in a lot of ways.

Whenever somebody says that they just can't understand why somebody would take their own lives, I'm thrilled to death that they can't understand. That is such a blessing, I think, I hope, that they don't understand. It means they've never been there. Do you have to have been there? Do you have to have walked in those shoes to empathize? No, I don't think you do. And maybe that's the important next step is you find yourself saying, that's just ain't my experience. It still sucks.

Maybe I'm being too optimistic or OK. Maybe. But maybe there's more to it that we're not seeing, but I'm not seeing that you're not seeing that we can understand if we choose to. Well, I want to ask you then, seeing as you've kind of opened the door to that, the old school mentality that you and I were probably hearing 10 years prior was that suicide was cowardly, suicide was selfish. How could they think of your family?

And in the last eight years, I've listened to hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of people that were there. Some went through with their attempts and survived, most of whom, thank God, were stopped just before. But I started to hear the same thing over and over and over again.

And the takeaway from this is when you reach that critical mass of that perfect storm of negative factors, sleep deprivation, unaddressed childhood trauma, organizational betrayal, the side effects from alcohol or meds, all the things together, financial issues, that the brain at that point is distorted. The reality is distorted. And so many times I hear people say, I am the reason for my family's pain. I am a burden to my loved ones.

And at that moment, in that moment of psychosis, and I use that term affectionately, their reality is, well, I'm in a profession where I'm willing to die for a complete stranger. If I just remove myself, then my family will be happy. Now, to the healthy brain, of course, that makes no sense. But they're not there. And in the same way as if I broke both my legs, I wouldn't be able to run. I'm in a different place. So with your experience, did you find yourself there?

And was there any kind of truth in what I've just said for you? Well, absolutely. So in a lot of ways, when I talk about Tom's accident and I talk about that human factors analysis and how important that was, when I finally calmed down enough to actually read it and see that it was different, that was one of, it was a formative experience of what I've come to refer to as learning through the worst days.

When I encountered, I forget his first name, but it's Dr. Joyner, and he described perceived burdensomeness. It was a moment of, just like with Tom's human factors analysis, it's, oh, that's what that was. Understanding it, like you said, in the moment, it certainly didn't happen like that. And I'm not advocating for like just doing your research when you're thinking of killing yourself. That's not what I'm saying.

But in those moments of balance, of opportunity, I guess, to think about those moments of disbalance, of unbalance, of dysfunction, not hide from it. And I think that's one of the important evolutions in American culture today. And I can't give the fire service credit for it. I can give a lot of veterans that aren't with us credit for it.

It wasn't that long ago that we did not talk about this, that we did not talk about suicide, that we didn't even bury those that died by suicide in the same cemetery as with the good people that didn't. And I say that very tongue in cheek. That's how, for a long time in our culture, we looked at it as they often, so they aren't one of us. They are an outsider. We bury them outside of the consecrated ground in the, with everybody else that aren't one of us. That's how we dealt with it.

Well, I wasn't dealing with it. We both know that. It was ignoring it. It was distancing ourselves from the connection and the reality of it. And talking about it, acknowledging it as part of our community, our culture, our profession isn't enough. But it's absolutely unnecessary, necessary but insufficient. I don't know how to crack the nut. I know for me, it was a very complex mix. And I think that's an important piece is that it isn't all about the job, the job as part to deal with it.

But it's the human experience that there's all kinds of not good stuff. And it all, there's all kinds of good stuff too. And that's the, and part of the, again, part of the learning through it is the realization that the dark is just part of it. And you don't appreciate the light without it. And I fall back on this all the time. And sometimes it is a cop-out.

Sometimes it is a retreat to a safe space where I can just say as the historian, knowing that we are part of a really long arc of history that we'll see. But that historian's perspective, that stepping back and just observing, we'll see, isn't being an active participant in making things better. So I have to believe it's a little bit of both, that it's a little bit of we'll see, and it's a little bit of try. Try this, we'll see. Try that, we'll see. Try again, try again, try again, try again.

So what has worked? What are some of the tools that you found that have moved the needle the other way? I think it's, especially for your main audience, I struggle with this one. I can't, I was talking to another colleague the other day who put it this way, and I've put it this way many times throughout my career, that he fell out of love with the profession. And I know I did. I know I've said that, but I don't know when. I can't put my finger on what it was. And maybe it doesn't matter.

The end result, though, was a really, at first, it was a really troubling shift in who I am, who I want to be, what I want to do. And I remember saying to myself over and over and over again, I was like, what else could I possibly do? This is what I've done my entire adult life. What else could I possibly do? And the real answer is I could do any kind of number of different things. For a lot of reasons, I'm choosing to stay in my organization until I reach retirement.

A big piece of that is financial. The golden handcuffs are real. But I've also found what I often call one of the only positions that I can see within my organization where that purposeful work is still there. It's not fighting fire anymore. It's not leading the crew. It's not that. But there's other purposeful work.

And I think that shift from what else could I possibly do to I can contribute, I can not be a burden long enough to realize the insidiousness of that feeling of burdensomeness to get through that. You know, a reframe, I've always struggled with the idea of resilience as bouncing back, as if Ben 1.0 was who I ever wanted to be again. And one of the folks I learned from a ton, there's so many of these really great, smart people that make stupid decisions.

And we end up thinking that what you learn from them might not be valid anymore because of a completely different decision. They ain't perfect, neither am I. But Eric Greitin is one of the authors that I've learned a ton from. He wrote the book Resilience, redefined for me resilience. It's not bouncing back. There's no such thing as bouncing back.

He called it moving through, moving through to who you are going to be, moving through that experience and thinking about it in those lights made it OK to set aside who I was, Captain64, to who I am and who I'm going to be. I'd like it to be able to make that shift a little quicker maybe. But I look at Bob, my mentor that I talked a lot about in the last couple of hours, had to pull him away from his work when he was 57. They had his assistant had to walk up to him.

He was dispatching air tankers. And she had to walk up and said, Bob, it's time to go home. And so having identity tied to that work that strongly was really tough for him. My identity shift came quite a bit earlier and that sucks in its own way. But it definitely has helped with instead of dreading what's next, it's like, man, hurry up, get here. I'm excited about what's next. And in those not so great times, that I think was the most important thing. That I think was the looking back on it.

And that's like that thing. There was no excitement for what was going to come. Yeah, that identity crisis is so prevalent, especially when it comes to transition out. And we're not a firefighter. We are, you know, you're Ben, I'm James. And it's what we did. And we're incredibly proud of it. But I think it's so, so important and so healthy to find that next thing. Because, you know, what else can I do?

Well, who would have thought, for example, that this idiot would just sit behind a microphone and arguably be a force multiplier and do more good than I ever did in a uniform. I was so proud of my service and I loved it. But, you know, the universe kind of spat me out after 14 years on this bizarre tangent. And, you know, I volunteered initially because I was hanging onto that bunker gear for dear life. And then when I let go, I was like, oh, oh, yeah, that's just what I did.

And it was amazing. But who I am is someone who wants to serve. And I can serve in so many different ways. I'm serving now. I serve through the books that I write, you know, in all these different ways. And so when you realize that, yeah, you are valuable and you don't need bunker gear or a shiny badge to define who you are, you have value as a human being, your compassion, your empathy, your courage. That is who you are.

That's what makes me laugh when people say things like, you know, the fire service, you know, the leather helmet. So that's that's tradition. No, that's not as a hat. Tradition is courage and compassion and camaraderie. You know, those, you know, empathy, those are the tradition of the fire service. And they don't stay in the station. They stay within you and you take them to the next thing you do. So I couldn't agree more. It's exciting to find out what that next chapter is going to look like.

Let that other bit go. You did it. You did it well. But now it's time for a young fired up firefighter to fill your spot, just like you did for someone else, and for you to take all that knowledge and experience and go and apply it in a different way. When when your one of your previous guests reached out and said, hey, you should do this. That's like, well, I don't do that work anymore. What could I possibly contribute? And I find myself doing it still.

I'm going to teach a class in a couple of months and I still leverage that. I see three division suit, safety officer that those those pieces of identity. So I want to go completely up. I don't do that work anymore. But you're making me think a little bit differently about about what the service is now. We all got a transition to what's next or not. I want all of us to transition to what's next with excited anticipation or shoot, even dread. I'd rather you dread it.

That's OK. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it has been an incredible conversation. Before I let you go, if people listening want to reach out and I'm sure they will, where are the best places to do that? I have no idea how to answer that question. I don't have a I don't have a presence out there other than my professional one. I have no issues if folks want to reach out to to to me via via email. I'm happy to share if you want my address said or. Yeah, yeah, please feel free.

You'll get a chuckle out of this. Captain six four was my identity for a long time. And I guess it still is a little bit because B. Iverson B IV er so on six four at Gmail dot com. I am not that was not born in sixty four. That is not where that came from. So if anybody wants to chat, I'm happy to. Just the guy trying to figure it out, but. I love a good conversation. Yeah, well, it's been an amazing conversation, so I want to thank you so much.

I mean, not just for the two hours that you've given us, but also, as I always underline, that you're courageous and vulnerability. I mean, this is so important for us to just be open when we do the things that we do. It comes at a cost. And don't get me wrong, that can be worked through, just like you said, and resilience forged from it. But the facade that we were raised on that men are, you know, stone faced and emotionless is absolute rubbish.

And so each one of these conversations I have when people are unafraid to express their emotions and be moved by loss and some of these other things, I think it's so important. So I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today. They are absolutely glad that I said yes.