Lori Messenger

Missoula Smokejumpers

5765 W. Broadway

Missoula, MT 59802

(406)329-4934

BATTLE OF LITTLE BIGHORN AND MANN GULCH FIRE STAFF RIDES

> MAY 2-6, 2005

Presented by The U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute

and The Northern Rockies Interagency Staff Ride Group

Battle of Little Bighorn

The longest hike during our Battle of Little Bighorn Staff Ride took us
to a lookout point a half mile above Custer's famous "Crow's Nest," the
final place he hid and rested his troops. There Lt. Col. George
Armstrong Custer, 7^th^ Cavalry Commander, had stood, on a warm June
morning, in 1876, squinting towards the enormous herd of Indian ponies
his Crow scouts pointed towards. Custer could not see them. Scouts also
informed him they were seeing occasional Sioux hunting parties in the
distance. Custer could not see them either. He further questioned the
scouts in order to learn as much about this enemies' behavior, and the
ground they gathered upon, as he could. Custer seems to have sifted
through this information, built as complete a situational picture as he
could, made his decision, and then communicated it to subordinates.

"How many of you think Custer made a rational decision at this time,
taking into account what you have learned about the army's standard
operating procedures in 1876?" our facilitator, Army Historian Chuck
Collins, asked the group. We were thirty strong, consisting of Forest
Service Fire Operations Safety Council regional representatives, Fire
Training leadership and others from the Forest Service, Bureau of Indian
Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Services, Montana
Department of Natural Resources and L.A. County. I am a Missoula
Smokejumper who helped design the second part of this Staff Ride to Mann
Gulch, and for today I got to be primarily a student.

Some of our group had never experienced a Staff Ride before, and during
their introductions said that they hoped to learn how this training tool
worked. The military began developing Staff Rides in the early 1900's
and now administer them in three phases: 1. Preliminary study, 2. Field
study, 3. Integration. In the Northern Rockies Region we began seriously
developing Staff Rides for wildland firefighters in 2003, when we flew
firefighters and staff from a variety of agencies to the 30-Mile Fire
site. With this week's event we would be adding two more sites to our
list of events to learn from.

The previous evening I.C. Jeff Scussel \-- Region One USFS Assistant
Director Fire, Aviation & Air \-- had welcomed us to this week-long
Staff Ride, which would take us first to the Battlefield and second to
Mann Gulch, and read us our objectives:

-   Further the development of decision making and leadership skills;

-   Provide case studies in human factors (leadership, cohesion,
    communications);

-   Review high risk, low frequency situations and actions;

-   Study and review key decision gates leading to fire management
    actions;

-   Illustrate the value of staff rides as a national wildland fire
    training tool;

-   Provide a team building opportunity to Regional Training Officers
    and members of the National Fire Operations Safety Council;

-   Provide selected individuals an opportunity to understand the staff
    ride concept and be able to apply it to their own situations.

Our required reading packet included battle accounts from both white
soldiers and Native Americans. Local tribal members Marvin Dawes and
Linwood Tall Bull had joined us to provide further insight from the
latter perspective. Chuck briefed us with background information about
what the Army had learned from 1866 to 1876 fighting Indian battles.

Now we stood high on this Ponderosa Pine covered hill, on an equally
sunny, spring 2005 morning, and looked miles ahead, to where we knew
that Custer and his troops had been killed. Chuck asked us to think
solely about the intelligence that Custer would have had here, without
knowing what would happen next, and once again asked us, "How many of
you think Custer made a rational decision?" Most of the group grudgingly
raised our hands. We had to acknowledge that from all we had seen and
studied so far, Custer's orders at this decisive point, seemed
reasonable. We also then had to admit, since honesty is an important
component to successful Staff Rides, how strongly many of us had arrived
this morning already biased against Custer, even though we had been
coached to remain open-minded. In standing with my feet, eyes, ears and
brain on the same piece of earth Custer probably occupied, I began to
learn in a new way.

The discussion percolated for about ten minutes, and then Chuck told us
that it was time to move on. Chuck had secured permission for our group
to drive through private ranches so that we could examine in more detail
Custer's actions prior to the final battle. Part of the goal of Staff
Rides seems to be that for every question answered, three new questions
are born. Facilitators need to keep the group moving, resist drawing
simple conclusions, and be persistent in not allowing anyone to talk
ahead of historical chronology. At each stand Chuck followed a similar
pattern:

-   1\. Orient the ground -- show students what things looked like then.

-   2\. Tell the historical story.

-   3\. Analyze what happened then and apply the lessons to how we
    operate now.

He also continued to ask us to raise our hands if we thought Custer's
decision at each new point was a rational one.

We learned about how army leadership made decisions in the late 1800's
and how they do now, which provided for interesting comparisons to the
wildland fire organization. One difference now is that modern military
leaders are assigned advisors with the explicit role of providing
feedback from the enemy's perspective, playing a kind of "devil's
advocate." We discussed how Native American warrior culture at the time
differed from the U.S. Army's military culture, especially the strengths
and weaknesses of a society where individuals followed leaders only as
they chose instead of following a rigid command structure.

As the hours of our day passed it became clear that as Custer's day wore
on he had begun to make mistakes because he failed to see the evidence
that the situation he faced was different than he, or any other army
leader at that time, had ever encountered. The Indians were not running,
but were aggressively defending their ground. We studied how Sitting
Bull, a spiritual leader, had motivated the Native Americans to new
heights of determination and organization. Custer's situational
awareness narrowed, he became "eaten up with Victory Disease" and poor
relationships with many of his followers, as well as fellow leaders,
caused his operation to deteriorate. Gradually fewer of us raised our
hands to say that Custer was still behaving rationally. "When have we
reached this point as fireline leaders and followers?" we asked each
other.

During our Integration \-- the third phase of a Staff Ride -- the
discussion bounced back and forth between our pre-reading, the day's
field experience, and challenges faced in the modern fire organization.
Topics included:

-   The importance of promoting and maintaining good relationships with
    your co-workers;

-   The need for constant intelligence gathering and a willingness to
    change plans accordingly;

-   Resisting assumptions about what you expect the day's outcome to be;

-   Admitting defeat for the day and retreating before anyone gets
    killed, especially in fighting fires.

Students also talked about how the Staff Ride allowed them to develop
more experience "slides" in their minds, to compare future incidents to,
and to get to practice leadership and decision making without the
consequences of a real disaster. One participant proclaimed about Staff
Rides, "We're not sending you to the movies; we're putting you
[in]{.underline} the movies."

Mann Gulch Fire

> Wednesday our group traveled from Billings to Helena, where we
> gathered in a hotel conference room for the final portion of Mann
> Gulch pre-study work. Now my role switched from participant-learner to
> facilitator-learner. Paul Fieldhouse \-- Northern Rockies BIA Fire
> Suppression & Incident Management Training Specialist \-- opened by
> asking the group to discuss how we might apply the concepts outlined
> in Weick and Sutcliffe's "Five Practices for Developing 'Mindfullness'
> " -- an article aimed at the business world \-- to our fire
> organization.

We watched a fifteen minute video of Bob Sallee, survivor of the Mann
Gulch Fire, speaking about what kind of young men became smokejumpers in
1949, and what that experience had meant to him. Then Dave Turner,
retired Helena National Forest employee, told us the Mann Gulch Fire
story from the imaginary viewpoint of Ranger Jansson, the primary local
manager for Mann Gulch in 1949, for whom the tragedy never seems to have
ended. Turner's presentation set the tone for one of the next day's
assignments: we had asked each of our students to arrive prepared to
tell the story of one Mann Gulch firefighter.

Thursday dawned gray and misty. Just before 8am we drove our caravan of
green vans and six-packs to The Gates of the Mountains boat launch. Paul
Chamberlin -- Northern Rockies Fire Operations Safety Specialist \--
reminded us about ticks, snakes, loose rocks and steep terrain, and
instructed us to wear hardhats. The fog continued to rise as we motored
up the river, separating and dissipating like smoke released from its
night inversion. As we motored through limestone cliffs our boat
operator pointed out a cave containing 1400 year old Native American
pictographs. The history we were coming to study took place only 56
years ago, and I hoped we could trace the paths taken by Foreman Wag
Dodge and his smokejumper crew well enough to learn some lessons. There
was a sense of touching sacred ground as we stepped off the boat, onto a
stump, and down to the river bank. Standing on the Little Bighorn
Battlefield had been eerie, but for a Missoula smokejumper, this place
hit closer to home.

We hiked a few hundred feet into the mouth of Mann Gulch and Dave Turner
briefed us about what the weather and fuel load had been like on August
5^th^, 1949. Several of us pulled marauding ticks off arms and legs.
Then we broke the group in two as pre-arranged: "The hares" took the
lead with their facilitator Paul Fieldhouse and I followed more slowly
with "the tortoises." To keep logistics smooth we sent Missoula
smokejumper Dave Bihr ahead with a radio to help us locate important
landmarks. Missoula smokejumper Dan Cottrell brought up the rear to help
herd the slower group and to monitor progress on our planned timeline.

We paused our groups for thirty minutes to an hour at each of four
pre-selected stands, chosen because important decisions had been made
there. At each place Paul and I (sometimes utilizing Dave Turner's
expertise) reviewed significant events, then invited two to three
participants to tell the story of the "person of interest" they had been
assigned. One creative student pretended he was a ghost, which allowed
him the analytical perspective to say retrospectively what he thought
about the decisions and actions of the men.

To give participants practice making and communicating decisions we had
prepared three Tactical Decision Games. Paul and I had also developed
several questions for each stand, many of which asked if the modern fire
organization was adequately preparing people for the kinds of situations
the historical firefighters and managers faced in Mann Gulch. We also
discussed situational awareness, communication, crew cohesion, risk
assessment, moral courage, and, always, leadership. We talked about
where both Custer and the smokejumpers had reached their
point-of-no-return.

The final stand took place above the rimrock where Bob Sallee, Walter
Rumsey, and Bill Hellman passed through and made their final dash from
the flame front. I invited students to choose their own route up, just
as those 1949 smokejumpers had done once it became apparent to them that
they were running for their lives. Chilly wind gusts buffeted us at the
top, even though the day had turned warm. Our group discussed rescue
efforts and wondered if those men had died for any good reason. Then we
wandered slowly back down the gulch, each paying our respect at the
monuments of the fallen firefighters.

We boarded the boat a few minutes after 1600 and passed back through the
tallest spires of the Gates of the Mountain Wilderness, the same route
explorers Lewis and Clark followed. I wasn't the only one whose
imagination flew to similar river gates through which the fictional Lord
of the Rings band traveled. Our current journey hadn't brought any orcs
against us, or waterfalls, or even fires, but from the chatter buzzing
around me I gleaned that people felt they had learned some things.

During our hour-long Integration discussion at the boat dock picnic
tables, most people agreed that the chance to walk the physical ground
instilled the lessons more deeply than any amount of reading alone could
do, but that the reading had helped prepare them to better understand
what they saw on the steep Mann Gulch slopes. Most appreciated that the
work of preparing a story about their assigned "person of interest"
helped them to better understand the factors that may have lead each man
to behave the way he did. There was general agreement that we need to
keep working on our Tactical Decision Games so that students can be
clearer about what they are supposed to be doing and why. We talked
about the importance of communicating commander's intent, about how we
are working at developing crew cohesion, about how human's respond to
life or death emergencies and how to keep situations from evolving to
that point.

Dusk slipped around us as the formal Integration discussion concluded,
but informally conversations would continue into the days and weeks to
come. In a follow-up trip report participant John Grosman, USFS Training
Officer from the Northeast Area, wrote: "Understanding the behind the
scenes energy to investigate, honor, protect this event and this site by
so many folks gives me a new admiration for the people involved in this
staff ride -- and those who are working to make it a standard learning
exercise." He also talked about the value of the pre-study phase and how
real learning "requires personal investment of time." The commander's
intent for this Battle of Little Bighorn and Mann Gulch Fire Staff Ride
is that the lessons we learned in human factors will cling more
tenaciously than ticks as we advance upon future fire grounds. We hope
that participants can work to change the culture of fire suppression
safety in their respective organizations, and we see it happening
already.