Smoldering doubts over Yarnell hotshot's book deal

Every major American tragedy ends with money. We get to the point where we put a price on misery, a price on death and destruction. And we go looking for someone to pay. A person. A government entity. A private business. Maybe some combination of them all.

All tragedies begin, like the Yarnell Hill Fire began, with horror, with shock. There is confusion, exasperation, an intense desire to know any small bit of information. At the same time, there is a sense of overwhelming grief, and along with it outpourings of sympathy, empathy, solidarity. Of national and international support. Of what seems like boundless acts of human kindness.

We tell the stories of the lost, stories filled with honor and bravery, with irony, love, unfulfilled dreams.

We mourn them.

We memorialize them.

We pray with their families and for their families. And for them.

But we know deep down, because it's happened before, because it will happen again, that every American tragedy ends with money.

The tragedy of the Yarnell Hill fire is no different.

It was universally agreed that the families of the 19 hotshots lost to the flames deserved to be taken care of. But how much? And who would pay?

It was bound to end up in court. It was bound to end up with hurt feelings, with outrage, with a kind of confusion and exasperation that doesn't lead to sympathy, empathy or solidarity, but to the opposite.

To resentment. To accusations. To suspicion.

It's already like that for some of those caught up in the aftermath of the fire, and it will be so again now that we know former Granite Mountain Hotshots member Brendan McDonough, the lone survivor of the 20-man crew, signed a deal to work with best-selling author Stephan Talty to produce a tell-all book. And that he has done so even as reports surfaced that he may have information that could impact the lawsuits filed by families of the lost, information he has not shared under oath.

He'll be criticized for all of this. Harshly, I'd guess.

But not by me.

I'd like to believe that if I were in McDonough's shoes I wouldn't want to earn a dime on the deaths of my friends and colleagues.

But that's easy to say from a distance. Individuals and businesses already have made money on the Yarnell Hill Fire, directly or indirectly.

Survivors often write books or sell their stories to movie producers. I've heard some of them say it was their way of honoring the dead.

Maybe that's so. Maybe they don't owe us an explanation.

We don't know what kind of deal McDonough signed or for how much money or what he plans to do with it.

And we weren't out there on the edge of an inferno, like he was. We didn't go through the horror of that awful day or have to endure the media frenzy that followed. And then try to put his life back together.

All we know for sure is that after the flames of the Yarnell Hill Fire died out the ashes were kept smoldering… by money.

And the smoke now swirls around Brendan McDonough.

And I have no interest in making it even harder for him to breathe.