David
Navon
​1920-1949
Gates of the Mountain, MT
On a spring day in 2001, a helicopter hovered above a steeply sloped gulch on the Missouri River in Montana’s Big Belt Mountains. At the end of the copter’s cable swayed a swaddled 210-lbs. rectangular piece of Georgia white marble with a Star of David carved into its top. The parcel’s destination, a site just yards below the rimrocks that cap Mann Gulch’s now-austere north slope, was adjacent to a tall granite marker bearing the name “David R. Navon.”
Navon's grave marker, placed in 2001. All graves were marked with crosses prior to the discovery that Navon was Jewish.
Seventy-five years ago, on August 5th, 1949, at 12:18 PM lightning ignited a fire in the newly designated Gates of the Mountains Wild Area twenty miles north of Helena, Montana. A crew of eighteen “smokejumpers,” an elite group of US Forest Service wildfire fighters who parachute into inaccessible or remote areas, was dispatched in a C-47 from their base in Missoula. Forty minutes later, at approximately 4 PM, they made the jump into Mann Gulch where the temperature was likely much hotter than Helena’s 97 degrees F. Numbering among the crew was David Richard Albert Navon, who had graduated with a forestry degree from UC-Berkeley only months before.
Navon was born in Buenos Aires in 1920 to Chicagoan Sylvia Goldstein who was of Polish Jewish descent and International Harvester salesman Elliott Navon, a Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jew from Constantinople. Very soon after his birth, the Navons returned to the US and farmed in California’s Central Valley. After their farm failed due to the Depression, they relocated to Modesto where Navon graduated from high school in 1938 and was named as an alternate to the US Naval Academy. “Seeking relief from the humdrum, David ‘ran away to sea,’ working his way around the world for a year on a Swedish freighter,” his younger sister, Anita, recalled.
Upon his return, Navon joined the National Guard and attended junior college briefly before transferring to UC-Berkeley. In March 1941, the six-foot tall, 152-lbs. twenty-year-old enlisted in the US Army and was assigned to the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment serving in combat in the European Theatre. He was awarded a Bronze Star. Following his honorable discharge in March 1946, he returned to Berkeley, graduating three years later, and took the smokejumper summer job “the last jumping he [said he] would do” remembered his sister.
August 5th, 1949 would be Navon’s last jump.
As Norman Maclean, himself once a wildfire fighter, proclaims in “Young Men and Fire,” his elegiac analysis of the Mann Gulch wildfire and its aftermath: “It should be clear that this tragedy is not a classical tragedy of a monumental individual… It is a tragedy of a crew, its flaws and grandeurs largely those of Smokejumpers near the beginning of their history. Their collective character counts, and being young counts, it especially counts, but only certain individuals emerge out of the smoke and roar that took in everything...David Navon [counts and] was already something of a four-dimensional adventurer; he had been a first lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division and had parachuted into Bastogne and in about an hour would be taking snapshots on his way to death."
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Navon in 1949.
Although Navon was not the crew foreman or even second-in-command, Maclean describes his demeanor at numerous points in the “stations of the cross” narrative scaffolding he utilizes throughout the book. At one point the crew foreman took a lunch break with the recreation & fireguard ranger who had first spotted the fire after ordering his men downhill to the safety of the Missouri where they would have a more advantageous position to fight the fire. Maclean writes that Navon filled this leadership void “…part of the time…He was the one really professional jumper—and professional adventurer—among them and evidently was always something of his own boss and boss of the whole outfit if it looked to him as if it needed one…”
Maclean also notes Navon’s alternating “benevolen[ce] and being boss” on that late afternoon as he handed his light saw to Walter Rumsey in exchange for the latter’s heavy water can. He & Rumsey had “timber cruised” or inventoried USFS timber near White Sulphur Springs the previous month.
In the meantime, the foreman—who had hastily returned to his crew at 5:40 PM when he saw the wind increase to 24 MPH & change direction—observed that the spot fires in the timbers downhill were intensifying. At 5:53 PM, he ordered the crew to drop their tools to accelerate their pace away from the fire and up the slope, wading through waist-high patches of bunch & cheat grasses. But their efforts were for naught as only three minutes later, at 5:56 PM, the heat of the fire, estimated to be 1,500 to 1,800 degrees F, had caught up with the slowest runners and suffocated them.
According to Maclean, however, “[Navon] had already left the line and on his own was angling for the top. Having been at Bastogne, he thought he had come to know the deepest of secrets—how death can be avoided—and, as if he did, he had put away his camera. But if he really knew at that moment how death could be avoided, he would have had to know the answers to two questions: ‘How could fires be burning in all directions and be burning right at you? And how could those invisible and presently only be a roar all be roaring at you?”
But, by 5:57 PM Navon and three other firefighters, dubbed the Four Horsemen by Maclean, were, despite their superhuman efforts, likely slowed not only by the 18% slope and the smoke & furnace blast heat but by burning spot fires sparked by firebrands. They lost their race only one minute from the refuge of the rimrocks. Only one of the Four Horsemen, a 19-year-old, outran Navon before he, too, died.
The Mann Gulch wildfire and the resulting deaths of Navon and twelve other young men, ages 19 to 28, redefined wildfire fighting. The unprecedented loss of life—no smokejumper had ever died in the line of duty—instigated new research into fire behavior and a comprehensive review and revision of the USFS’ firefighting policies, protocols, and training.
For 51 years, thirteen white-washed concrete crosses, placed in 1950 by smokejumpers, marked the location of each of the crew’s bodies as found on the morning of August 6th, 1949.
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In 1997 when granite markers were being installed next to the deteriorating crosses, Navon’s sister, Anita, asked that the cross marking the site of his death be removed given its unsuitability. Without the cross, however, the site of his death was difficult to ascertain, and funds were raised to place a new marker with a Star of David carved above the name plate.
Anita Navon recalled that “no one ever visited Mann Gulch or talked about her brother. ‘When it all happened, just the mention of Montana put me off…it was just too awful a memory.’” Yet, she did find solace in Maclean’s book: “My first response was, though it hurt to read it, it was altogether a wonderful book for me. The book was a real catharsis for my long-unfinished grief about David. Maclean helped me accompany the men to the end and to be inside their shoes…”