Burned-Out Cars, Smoke in the Air, Aerial Assaults, All in California

“When you are driving through these streets and through these neighborhoods, it’s kind of Armageddon-like,” said Jed Teter, a firefighter with the Los Angeles Fire Department who served in Iraq in 2008 with the Marine Corps Reserves. “Same thing in Ramadi. All the trash, all the disarray.”

At night, when the fires were raging and he was racing to try to spot them, Mr. Spangle was brought back to patrols in Afghanistan. “The first night I was out here looking at hot spots, and just how strange the terrain became, being in total darkness without electricity,” the experience reminded him of Afghanistan, he said. He was crossing a gully, and the ash made everything look as though it were covered in snow. He came across the burned-out remnants of cars, a fixture of the landscape of war in the Middle East, where any car on the road is a possible weapon packed with explosives.

The environments of war and wildfires share a terrifying mixture of randomness and precision.

A single ember kicked up by the winds a mile away can land on a house, torching it to the ground, while surrounding homes are left unscathed. Some saw a parallel with the precision-guided bombs delivered by American warplanes, which can take out a single sniper on a roof and not the buildings on either side.

But often there is a sense that luck — or “the grace of God,” as one Malibu resident put it Sunday when asked why his house survived while his neighbors’ homes did not — is what explains survival.

Travis Wilkerson was a Marine who fought in Iraq in 2007 during the troop surge in Falluja, and also in Afghanistan. For the last five years, he has worked for the Forest Service, and currently serves on a helicopter crew battling fires in remote forests distant from cities and towns.

“When you walk through an area that has been nuked out, you can’t help but go back” to the memories of war, he said. The briefings he sits through before going out to fight a fire are peppered with military expressions: aerial badaults, nighttime badaults, “a coordinated badault with multiple units.” When he sees airplanes circling overhead, as they did near the slopes of Malibu Canyon on Saturday, dropping retardant to slow the fires, he thinks of war.