I'm not touting it, but at least one of the earliest smoke jumpers was a CO.
pbs.org
Smoke Jumpers
In 1942, the New Deal program Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was disbanded and the conscientious objectors took their place fighting fires in forests throughout the West. While the prevention and fighting of forest fires occupied nearly one-fourth of all CPS labor, the most elite, dangerous and desirable assignment for a CO was smoke jumping. Three hundred CPS men volunteered for this hazardous duty when the first group was formed in the summer of 1943. Luke Birky was among the first group of 60 trained at the Mennonite smoke jumpers camp near Missoula, Montana. By the end of the war, 240 COs had served in the program deployed as squads to base camps in Montana, Idaho and Oregon. Jumping into extremely rugged terrain and using methods barely out of the experimental stage, they parachuted directly onto newly spotted fires before they could rage out of control.
Many of us were wanting to do work that was significant and vital to the U.S. good, and smoke jumping was a new way of fighting fires. Many of us grew up in the West and had a great deal of concern about forest fires....It was a challenge, it was exciting, it was a little scary. I suppose also many of us had been labeled as "yellow bellies," cowards, for not wanting to go into the war and I assume, for some of us at least, there was a secondary motivation that we may have wanted to try to do tasks that might even be dangerous to show that we had courage also.
- Luke Birky, WWII CO |
