On Aug. 5, 1949, lightning crashed down in the vast spruce forest above Seeley Lake, Montana, and touched off a roaring blaze.

Every Westerner knows that lightning means fire. With climate change has come more of both. Many more fires will scar California, Oregon, Colorado before this year is out. Many have already blazed, some in the mountains above my southern Arizona home. We have come to expect such things.

The fire that raged through Mann Gulch, Montana, immediately grew enormous, the sort of fire that used to occur only once every few decades back then. A battery of paratrooper-firefighters, many of them veterans of World War II, had been anticipating it. The smokejumpers, as they were called, thrived on fire, on the thrill of confronting and extinguishing it. And before the day ended, 13 lay dead.

Montana-bred Norman Maclean (1902-1990), best known for the fictionalized memoir A River Runs Through It, saw plenty of fires as a teenager, when he battled blazes in the place of men sent off to Europe during World War I. When news of the Mann Gulch fire spread across the nation, he was teaching English literature at the University of Chicago, one of the foremost Shakespeare scholars of his day. He knew the roar of flames, and the tragedy haunted him, so much so that when he retired from teaching in 1973, he immediately set about writing the story that would become his posthumously published 1992 book, Young Men and Fire.

It’s a scarifying read. Maclean had a horror of dying by fire, writing, “burning to death on a mountainside is dying at least three times.…First, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach the verge of death in your boots and your legs; next, as you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into the main fire that consumes.”

The 13 young men died, Maclean argues, for many reasons, none defensible. Though tough and resourceful, the smokejumpers had received only three weeks of training. Their U.S. Forest Service leaders were ineffective. Most damning, the firefighters were misdirected: Where they should have approached the fire by a side canyon, they were ordered from a distant command post, long before the days of GPS and satellite imagery, to advance straight up a hillside leading to Mann Gulch. The fire racing downhill caught them before they could save themselves.

The lessons of August 1949 were not entirely lost. Federal firefighters received better instruction. The burial benefit was doubled to $400. And the Forest Service began to understand that not all fires need to be fought, that fire clears dead undergrowth and fertilizes the soil with ash.

Even so, firefighters die, and horrifically, as when 19 Arizona firefighters were trapped and incinerated by another lightning-caused fire in 2013. They do not have their Young Men and Fire—not yet, anyway—a book that offers somber testimonial to those who perished in flames in the Montana woods all those years ago.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.