that is a fair article, although it kind of goes for a bit of pop culture victimhood, it seems. In my personal case, i think my body took more of a beating than my psyche. the first photo shows a swamper with his face close in, something that is very risky behavior, because should the sawyer get stung in the ass by an angry hornet, for example, he might swing a running saw and the swamper will have a 3/8 inch kerf cut into his face, and i know a guy or two who had their noses cut off, in which case bleeding to death is almost merciful.
I can recall only one incident that still appears during sleep sometimes, and it was a situation where a light helicopter pilot from new jersey that had never been on a backcountry fire was waiting to take off from a hogback ridge that fell off sharply, he took off prematurely after he saw me button up the compartments on my side of the ship (i was a helispot manager that was stowing some cargo haulback on the starboard side of the ship), but the pilot forgot that there was another guy bungee-ing a chainsaw to the tundra pad on the skid on the other side, the pilot took off without my signal (a major no-no), the other guy was straddling the skid and got a bit of a rodeo ride which unbalanced the ship, it spun the Hughes 500 around and the tail rotor hit me and knocked my hardhat off but didn't touch my skin, the other guy fell off the skid from about 50 feet high onto the steep slope, and the helicopter did a 360 but stayed aloft due to the free air under him just off the ridge. Not sure why that got to me, as i had had a very hard landing in a helicopter, the kind where the ship was wrecked, and various other stuff but PTSD wasn't an option as i had mouths to feed.
To me, the crazy stuff was just part of feeding the adrenaline rushes of what we did, and was part of the deal. Nowadays they have grief counselors and other such stuff instead of just reassigning people to calmer duties. But even more significant to me, all of us younger managers, etc. did fires during fire seasons, it kept the agency intact... now, firemen are pretty much exclusively firemen and and the land managers sort of get detached from that world, consequently, the managers are more prone to making less informed decisions and expect things from the fire suppression guys that are not always reasonable and sane which puts them at more risk.
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