In case you've seen the trailer for Only the Brave, in which Josh Brolin takes a bath and Miles Teller goes blond, here's the original story by Sean Flynn, the crisis reporter for GQ. It's a marvelous piece of reporting—up there with Flynn's tick-tock account of the Utoeya massacre—particularly once you learn the ending and realize the amount of work Flynn must have done to get all of these details right.
(It's also very serious, without room for stupid jokes about bathtubs and hair, given the horrific nature of what ultimately takes place.)
A few excerpts below. Big time spoiler alert if you don't know the story already.
Hotshots are invariably referred to as elite firefighters, which suggests years of training, high-end equipment, and a mastery of the mechanics of wildfires. But none of that is required. The entry-level qualifications are a few dozen hours of classroom instruction and a decent level of fitness, and the primary tools are chain saws and Pulaskis, a speciality tool combining an ax and an adze. Hotshots also tend to be young—the average age of the Granite Mountain crew is 27, a number skewed by Marsh, who's 43—and few of them make a long career out of it.
And:
On a big fire with hundreds of personnel, it's nearly impossible for any one person to know everything that is happening in real time. Firefighters are spread over enormous distances, and even if the radios work perfectly, they're all on different channels. Transmissions are polluted with wind and static and background noise, and broken by ridges and gullies. Everyone on Yarnell Hill knows the flames have run wild. They can see it, and on the main channels there is much concerned talk about how it's slopping over the firebreaks, spotting on the far side of Highway 89 even. But most people don't realize Granite Mountain is in trouble.
And:
McDonough knows his crew was fully qualified and properly rested on June 30, and he knows none of the Granite Mountain hotshots was reckless or foolhardy. But he does not know why those men, why his brothers, decided to hack through a canyon swamped with unburned fuel. He can't know, because he wasn't there. And what if he had been? What if another man had been posted as lookout and Donut had stayed with the crew, had hiked to the saddle in the ridge above that canyon? He'd almost certainly be dead. Had any man on that crew felt threatened, McDonough said, had one of them doubted the chosen route, he would have spoken up. “Nineteen guys made that decision and took that choice,” he said. “That's what people have to understand. You can't force someone to do that.”
Oh, and Geoff Bridges is in it, too.
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