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"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 trying 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. It was crossing a gully, and the ash made everything look like it was covered in snow. He came across the burned-out remnants of cars, a fixture of the Middle East's landscape, where any on the road is a possible weapon packed with explosives.
The environments of war and wildfires share a terrifying mixture of randomness and precision.
Single single kick kick single single single,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,. American warplanes, which can take a single sniper on a side of the road.
But often there is a sense that luck – or "the grace of God," as Malibu resident did it.
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 as 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 not help but go back to the memories of war," he said. The briefings are in the process of being dealt with with the phrase: aerial assaults, nighttime assaults, "a coordinated assault with multiple units." When he sees airplanes circling overhead, as they did near the slopes of Malibu Canyon on Saturday, dropping to slow the fires, he thinks of war.
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