Mike West

in conversation with GRWFF’s Pete Dutchick and Kelly Ramsey

March 13, 2021

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SELECT EXCERPTS

For the full interview, see the attached PDF

Mike West has been an incredible friend and mentor to many over the course of his career.  His sense of duty to others embodies the true spirit of the federal wildland firefighter. For sixteen years, Mike served in a multitude of positions with the hotshots, on handcrews, on an engine, as a patrol, and in dispatch.  Before his resignation from the US Forest Service in July of 2020 to pursue a career in teaching, Mike had the courage to speak up and share the challenges he faced working as a forestry technician. He has continued to demonstrate this strength and duty by sharing his powerful story with the fire community. He does so with the hope that it can raise awareness, educate, and help fellow firefighters that may be quietly suffering from similar experiences. Thank you for continuing to lead the way Mike ! We love you brother!

Grassroots Wildland Firefighters spoke with Mike this March about the course of his firefighting career and the factors that led him to be diagnosed with PTSD -- and ultimately to leave the Forest Service and wildland fire forever. Starting at the beginning of his career, Mike described a series of near-misses, fatality fires, lost friends and colleagues, compounding stressors and a lack of mental health support that eventually pushed him to the breaking point. 

MW:    “Looking back on it, it started after that first near-miss in 2003. And I had no clue. And I know 2003 wasn't that long ago, but I think the attitude towards PTSD was much different. And my knowledge of it was very, very minimal. I associated PTSD with the Vietnam War just because, you know, I had some friends' dads who had fought there, and I just thought that was it. I didn't really think it was something you could get from fighting fire. It wasn't even on my radar.

But that first near-miss, we were on a fire on the Umpqua. It was with Lassen Hotshots, and I was a rental. And there was a Type 2 crew cutting towards us. And typical fire, skunking around all day, and then the lid came off and it ripped. And I was oblivious to all this. I was just cutting, trying to not to get yelled at and, like, prove myself. I had this attitude like, alright, these guys think they're better than me. I'm gonna be tough. You know? 

So we're cutting line all day. And then we got up to the top of this ridge, and we dive down the hill. And there was a piece of line, oh, maybe quarter mile long. And when we got to the top of the hill, that Type 2 IA crew, I don't know who they were -- they had full brim, red hard hats, I remember that. They started working their way up towards us. And we tied in with them in the middle, mid-slope, and then they immediately left, they bailed. 

And I remember as we tied in, it was starting to pick up with, you know, single tree torching. And then down below us was a meadow with intermittent Lodgepole and grass, where -- looking back now, it was a safety zone if you improved it. And trees started torching up underneath us. And that was the first time I got scared on a fire. So now I'm scared, and it starts spotting, and I remember the lead saw yelling, “Let's get this,” like get after it.

So we're chasing these spots. And I looked at my friend who was a fill-in on this roll, but he had spent numerous years on Lassen Hotshots in the past, and he was about 10 years older than me. And I looked at him and I said, “Are we in a bad place?” 

And he's like, “Oh yeah, we're in a real bad place.”

Shortly after he said that, the Captain on Lassen yelled, "Double-time down the hill."

And so you know, we ran down the hill, and it was just ripping on both sides. And I remember thinking, 10 of the guys, the bulk of that crew, were all local from Susanville. So like 10 of these guys are age 18 to 22, guys I went to high school with. And I remember this guy -- I played football with him, and he was a sawyer on the crew, and he was running in front of me and I had this brief thought like, “Gosh, are Laben and I both gonna get killed today?” Are all these kids from Susanville going to get burned up?

Two guys got cut off up top. It was a buddy of mine, also another fill-in, cause we had ton of fill-ins on that roll. And he got cut off up top because he was trying to save a pile of drip torches and some saws. Him and an apprentice on the crew ran up over the hill to a road. So they were separated from us.

We ran down into the meadow. We made it. And I turned around and I looked back at the hill and by that point it was fully involved. It was ripping. And that was the first time in my life that I really -- my mortality really hit me. It was just like, Whoa, I almost died. What the hell.

I was looking at the -- in my opinion -- the experienced hotshots, the guys who'd been there two or three years or whatever, and they were all spooked. But then we never talked. And so we just got right back into fighting fire. And I was so tired, and just trying to do my thing, and I just was like, well, that's normal, then. That's Hotshotting. So I finished the roll kind of with mixed feelings, but then the overhead took a liking to me and were like, “You need to apply next year.” So then in my mind, I thought, Cool, well that scared me, but what's the best way to get over it? Just keep doing it. 

That winter, I thought about [the near-miss] a lot. And I asked one of the guys on the crew about it. And he gave me advice, which probably wasn't that good, but at the time he thought it was probably the best advice. He said, "Just don't think about it." 

***

So then I went into 2004 on Lassen Hotshots, and our very first off-forest assignment was a fire called the Nutall Fire. And...another near-miss. But this time we had to run uphill, and this time there were more crews on the fire. And this time, I think our overhead made the right decision by pulling the plug earlier. Cause there was a Hotshot crew working down below us who didn't pull the plug, and half of them wound up deploying. So then this fire, there isn't really any hush-hush on it. There's a deployment. So it became pretty big news. 

And I was spooked after that. Like I was legitimately spooked. I hated going into the hole. And I started some bad nervous tics. Like I remember that season, I was always scratching my head, to the point where I'd have these scabs on my head. Because when I knew we were going to go into the hole, I'd just sit in the buggy and kind of pick at my head, but never tell anyone. Just terrible, terrible anxiety all the time. But in my mind I thought, “I just need to keep immersing myself in this fire, so that way I can get over this fear.” 

Because I didn't think it was PTSD. I just thought I was being, like, soft. So the harder I PT, the harder I swamp, the more I cut line, the more I volunteer to go into the hole and burn, it's going to go away eventually. 

We had a couple other, I wouldn't say near-misses, that season, but you know, like this sketchy style stuff. And at the end of the year party, one of our apprentices announced he was quitting because of that Nutall Fire incident. We had a guy quit mid-season because of it.

After that season, I moved to Los Angeles for a little bit because I was doing standup comedy, and I was living at my cousin's house. And that's when the PTSD symptoms really started kicking in. ‘Cause he left to go to New York to shoot a movie, and I was alone in this apartment in Santa Monica. And I -- oh, I was depressed. Like I was wanting to go to all these open mics and do comedy, and some days I would just sit in the apartment, afraid to go outside. It was right on the beach, beautiful, and I was super depressed and anxious, freaking out, driving on the freeway, cold sweats kind of thing. Not telling anybody, of course. 

***

I actually had a panic attack at my buddy's wedding that no one really knew about. I was the best man standing there in this church, this beautiful church in Arkansas, you know, big Southern family and all this. And there I am standing there and I felt like I was gonna pass out, like I thought I was going to fall over. I couldn't feel my legs. One of my buddies who I worked with on the Hotshots had to grab me and steady me. He noticed I was kind of losing it. I was super embarrassed, but no one in the wedding really knew about it. But once again, this was a PTSD issue that I was dismissing as anxiety, depression. "This Is just something I have," [I thought]. I wasn't thinking about fire at all. But it was there, you know?

So I was having all this internal fear that I wasn't vocalizing. And I was getting spooked on fires when nothing bad was happening. But you know, we'd be burning and it'd be picking up and there'd be spots and it would be loud. And in my mind I just kept thinking, “Oh, we're going to get overrun. We're going to get burned up” -- when we weren't, you know, we were in a good safe location, but I couldn't shake the thought that that's what was going to happen.

When I was preparing to jump, and I was training really hard, is when I finally thought, "Maybe my problems are mostly related to fire." That's when it finally started to hit me. Like, you know what? This job is weird. And this job is making ME weird. And maybe the reason I can't handle things like the grocery store or people being late, and maybe the reason I'm anxious all the time, is because of firefighting.

And then the following season was when Luke died. And then with me being like the mother hen on the crew and not letting anyone cut dangerous trees and all that, I really was thinking, Okay, I'm mentally ill, probably. This is -- something is up. Still though, still, here we are 10 years later -- this is 10 years later, and I still won't admit it out loud that I think I have a PTSD issue. 10 years later.

***

[In 2013], I wound up dislocating my shoulder on our first off-Forest assignment in June. We demobed, and my arm was a swollen mess, so we came home from that fire on June 8th, and I was on light duty. And then on June 10th, one of my childhood friends who was a Redding Smokejumper was killed on a fire on the Modoc. So that was obviously the worst moment of my fire career -- probably of my life. 

You know, it was just this horrific thing. I had known him since I was four years old. He had worked on Diamond Mountain Hotshots in Susanville, so we had been on a lot of fires together. He worked for Cal Fire as well, so my very first fire ever, it was a roadside start, and he was there. And we were roommates one off-season and trained together.

And it was really hard...and he was a close friend with my family, and my wife and my parents and all his siblings, we all grew up in the same neighborhood. So it wasn't really just a fire thing. It was kind of like this family and friends, community shock.

So that season I was just a mess. I was on light duty. I was doing things like working in the lookout, just kind of hanging out while my crew was gone. I was probably drinking too much alcohol. It was just a bad scene. And then I came back to the crew in August after my arm healed and really wasn't getting along with the Superintendent. And on fires, I was super paranoid. I kept thinking someone else was going to get hit by a tree. So I'd find myself taking the saw away from our sawyer so I could cut the nasty trees, and kind of mother-henning the crew. Cause I thought, you know, “Someone's going to get hurt on my watch.”

That was rough, and we did have someone get hurt -- a broken leg -- and they had to be slung out by a hoist ship. That was on my first fire back. And so that happening (and he was, of course, a friend of mine from high school)... so a little more trauma to the stack of that summer. And by the time the season ended, I was just.. I was kind of really questioning if I wanted to stay in fire. 

***

In December of 2015, my son was born. That's kind of when I started thinking that maybe I didn't want to fight fire anymore. My first fire after he was born, he was six months old. Let me backtrack actually..

So when my wife was pregnant with my son in 2015, I had two near misses on back-to-back nights with trees. I was really, really close to getting hit by a tree on the River Complex; I think that was on the Six Rivers. And so then I was like, man, I almost widowed my wife two nights in a row while she was pregnant. So all of these things were things I was thinking, but not telling anybody.

I had been out on a crew boss assignment and woke up in the middle of the night. I had this terrible flashback that our spike camp was getting burned over. It wasn't, but I was half asleep, and the glow of the main fire made it seem like it. And I had a crew from Porterville, which is like a lot of migrant workers and such. And I woke up and I was kind of freaking out and a couple of them woke up before I realized that we were totally fine and I was just tripping out.

***

The final breaking point for me was, I started losing my memory. I was losing my short-term memory. I was losing the keys to the patrol truck. I was forgetting where I was supposed to go patrol that day. I was driving to the grocery store in town, which is a couple blocks away, and forgetting what I needed to get. I got lost a couple of times driving around in Susanville, which I have memorized in my head. It's a tiny little town. I was forgetting people's names. I would see my friend's parents at the store, people I'd known my whole life...and I couldn't remember their names. Or I'd see somebody who knew me, and I couldn't remember who they were.

By the summer of 2019, I was losing my shit to the point where my wife was like, Dude, this is now or never. You've got to figure this out. Father's Day 2019, I woke up in the morning, and I couldn't get off the couch. It was my day off. I was shaking. People were trying to talk to me, and I was just shaking, and I was having all these suicidal thoughts that were so intense. I had a shotgun in the house and I knew that my mind was so scrambled, I just knew I had to get rid of that shotgun. I took it outside and actually, by coincidence, I smashed it with this splitting maul right here, pretty much smashed it right where we're standing. So I smashed that shotgun, and then my wife got on the phone and called a PTSD place in Reno.

My wife got me into the place in Reno. And now, that really helped. The woman who saw me there specializes in first responders, you know, military, medical people, firefighters, she knows wildland fire. She said she treats a lot of wildland firefighters. And her husband worked in the office too, helping her manage the business, and he was a combat veteran with PTSD. So she knows what it's like to live with somebody that has PTSD. So going to her, it didn't really completely fix everything, but it stopped the bleeding for a while, to where I was like, okay, I can go to work.

I can finally go, okay. It wasn't just because I was weak or I was a bad person. It was just because I was losing my shit for 14 years, and I didn't tell anybody. And just by getting that diagnosis, telling people that I had it, acknowledging it...it's knocked down like 50% of the problem for sure. And a lot of people were like, “Yeah, of course you [have PTSD].” And my old Hotshot captain who's one of my closest friends was like, “Of course you do, buddy. And guess what? Probably most of us do too, you know?”

And that was the other thing. I started saying “I have this,” I would tell people I have these problems and they'd go, “Yeah, dude, that's fine, I have it too.” And the guys that were telling me this were like, guys I looked up to and people I thought were so tough and hardcore. And they're like, Yeah, yeah, me too. Me too. Me too. So then I felt terrible for not dealing with it in 2003, you know? 

***

I felt like I was torn between two worlds, and I couldn't be a good firefighter and a good family person. I felt like one or the other suffered. When I went to prevention it was the first time I could actually say no to assignments, or I could say no to working a day off. And my Captain or my Battalion would call and he'd be like, “Hey, there's lightning, can you come in tomorrow?” You know, your day off. And I'd be like -- my Hotshot frame of mind, as you guys know -- I'm like, “Yeah, absolutely. Of course, yeah.” Gung ho. But as dad, as husband, I'm like, No, I don't. I want to go to the lake, or I want to stay home with the family. I don't want to burn them. 

So I felt terrible either way. If I told my Battalion no, I felt like a bad firefighter. If I went to work, I felt like a terrible husband and father. And I just felt like, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to not be a hundred percent in, in firefighting. Some people can do it, but I was getting to the point where I was saying no more to fire than I was to my family. And I thought, okay, I just need to make the call. I just need to break up with the Forest Service, because I'm not the firefighter I want to be. I can't be, and I want to go be dad, and I want to go be the husband. 

And I thought, whatever I'm missing in fire is stuff I've already seen. Like I've been out on the line, I've been in the shit. I've been in the hectic dispatch center when all hell's breaking loose. I've been in the Marble Mountain Wilderness and to Alaska and to Texas and Louisiana and Colorado. I'm not missing anything out here anymore. I've got a hundred different friends from fire. Fire was good enough to me. Let's go be dad. 

And the breaking point was just some late shifts in dispatch where I had gone to work when it was dark and my family was asleep. And I came home after midnight when it was dark and my family was asleep. And I was just like, I can't do this anymore. And I imagined my kids as adults,  you know, 18, 19 years old, leaving home. And I imagine them thinking, wow, dad was not around that much, for at least six months out of the year. And so I was just done. 

***

So just last night, I got a call from a module leader that I used to work with, who was like, “Dude, I have a person on my crew who's having a very hard time with this. Who should they call? Who did you call?” 

And I was more than willing to give them all the information, but I thought: it shouldn't come down to a former employee. There should be a number that this guy knows he can call that's going to work. And this guy had already used EAP. Right? So in however many months it's been since I've written my letter, that's been a very common phone call for me: either a module leader that I know calling me about an employee that's having an issue, and “do I have any advice,” or the employee themselves calling me -- someone that I used to work with or someone that knows someone, and, “Oh yeah, my buddy Mike went though that, here's his number.”

I mean, this has happened 10, 15 times, and I'm thinking, of course, I'm more than happy to help a person, give them whatever advice I can. But number one, I'm not an expert. And I probably shouldn't be giving a whole bunch of advice other than, “This worked for me.” And number two, like, that ain't my job. The Forest Service needs people on site. You know, most police departments have a psychologist or a psychiatrist on staff. Like in the movie Lethal Weapon, right, when Danny Glover and Mel Gibson needed to call that lady, right? We need that on our Forests, you know? Because the demand is high.

And I felt that way, I felt so lonely. Because I'm like, okay, I admitted it, I have a problem. I called EAP. Nothing. I went to the 52 Club website and got these hotline numbers. I called them, it didn't work. They wanted to treat me for addiction. I wasn't addicted. So yeah, I think if there's one thing that would have really, really been helpful it would have been if, you know, the Lassen or the Plumas National Forest had a mental health professional that knew about trauma ready to answer the phone or the email or even the door, if I knocked on it. 

Whatever they gotta do to figure it out. I'm sure it wouldn't be easy, but it's also not easy to, like, get a Type 2 helicopter to a fire within an hour or, you know, get five Type One crews and a strike team of dozers. Working in dispatch, the IC calls and says, Susanville, “I've got a resource and a supply request tonight.” I write it all down. And usually within a couple hours you have all that stuff. So if we can do that, we should be able to have mental health people available. It's got to happen.