World War II was still under way, but David "Doc" Kauffman and his younger brother, Norman, had abstained from military service. Their Mennonite faith instructed them to serve their country peacefully, not in battle.
The Kauffmans were among 12,000 conscientious objectors, classified 4E during World War II, who served in the Civilian Public Service. They became part of an elite crew when they signed on to be smoke jumpers during the 1945 fire season.
"I had never been away from home to speak of," said Norman Kauffman, 79, of rural Kalispell. "It was a real broadening experience. It introduced me into a part of the world that was really foreign to me."
He loved jumping out of airplanes.
"It was great coming down in a parachute," he recalled. "But it was all work after you hit the ground."
His brother was equally enthralled with smoke jumping.
"If they'd let me, I'd jump again," said David Kauffman, 80, of Whitefish. "It was a very proud bunch of fellows. We proved we weren't afraid to serve the government, that we would do what we could."
The fledgling smoke-jumper unit of the U.S. Forest Service was fully manned by conscientious objectors from 1943 to 1946. Of the 250 who worked as smoke jumpers, only 70 are still living, according to Chuck Sheley, editor of Smoke Jumper magazine.
More than four dozen surviving smoke jumpers gathered at Hungry Horse this week for a biennial reunion. Sheley was there to "build bridges" between the conscientious objectors and the National Smoke Jumper Association.
"They've been treated poorly by history," Sheley said about the objectors, known as COs. "They've been a tight-knit group and they've just not felt welcome (in the association). We want to bring them into the group."
At the most recent reunion of the national association, only four of the 1,000 smoke jumpers attending were COs, he added.
"World War II was a popular war, and anyone who didn't serve was looked down on by the country," Sheley related.
It was Phil Stanley of Polson who wrote a letter to the Forest Service, suggesting the agency use the objectors on the fire lines. Even though smoke jumping hadn't been a fire-fighting tool for very long, unique chutes had been developed that were, to a degree, steerable and had the ability to move with or against the wind.
The technology was there, but not the manpower.
"First the Forest Service thought 'what are they sending us?' " recalled Harvey Weirich of Goshen, Ind., a CO who was in the smoke-jumper unit.
Earl Cooley, one of the first smoke jumpers and trainer for the war objectors, said he wanted nothing to do with them.
"When I first heard that we were hiring COs, I considered joining the Army before they arrived," Cooley said in the book "Trimotor & Trail."
Reluctantly, he and Roy Wenger, the first camp director at the Camp Paxson training facility near Seeley Lake, pored over 300 applications during the winter of 1942, picking 60 recruits for the $5 a month job.
After spring training in 1943, the smoke jumpers were sent out to bases in Missoula, McCall, Idaho, and Cave Junction, Ore. By 1944 the program had doubled to 120 men, with a standby unit in Missoula.
At the end of the three-year stint, the COs had made 4,947 jumps into 269 fires, with no fatalities. There were close calls, though.
Norman Kauffman said he was the first smoke jumper to ever use an emergency parachute on a fire jump. The first chute didn't open, so he pulled the emergency cord, which caused him to start "rolling and flip-flopping." He was bruised afterward, but not badly injured. It was his 13th and last jump.
During his recuperation he worked on another fire, hiking into the fire area, which "wasn't nearly as thrilling."
David Kauffman had a close call, too. At the Burnt Creek fire in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, he had picked a spot on a ridge for a landing, but cross winds caught him unexpectedly.
"It took me a mile down, and I got hung up in a tree," he said. "But we were trained to come down out of trees."
Weirich, too, remembers a harrowing moment during his first jump.
"When I landed, the wind drug me across the airport to a fence," he recalled. "An older friend came over and I was flat on the ground. 'Boy, this is serious business,' I said."
Reunions become a free fall of memories for the aging group of men, who vividly remember the details of their jumps well over a half-century ago.
The elite force, brought together by their individual convictions, is credited with keeping the smoke-jumping program alive through the war.
"It might have died on the vine if the COs hadn't kept it going," Weirich said. "We proved you could jump into forests."
Realizing the small window of opportunity left to document the men's stories, Cheley asked his next-door neighbor, the director of the history department at Chico State University, Chico, Calif., about the possibility of bringing a graduate student to the reunion at Hungry Horse. Once the department realized the historic significance of the program, they sent history professor Bob Cottrell to interview the COs and write a book about them.
After the excitement of that hot, dry fire season of 1945, the Kauffmans went on to raise families and establish careers. David was a general-practice physician in Whitefish for nearly 30 years and is pastor of Whitefish Christian Church. Norman taught school in various places, and was also a pastor for many years.
They both attend as many of the smoke-jumper reunions as possible, for the camaraderie that still exists and a willingness to serve in their own right that impressed even Norman McLean, author of "Young Men and Fire," who called them the "very best."