240 Army Soldiers Swap Rifles for Hand Tools to Fight Washington Wildfire

Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, are usually preparing for large-scale combat operations in the Pacific. This month, they are digging fire break lines on a mountainside in eastern Washington, trying to keep a wildfire from reaching the homes below.

About 240 of them are now assigned to the Modrite Fire, a lightning-sparked blaze burning on the Colville Reservation near the town of Inchelium, along the banks of Lake Roosevelt.

They spend their days the way the civilian crews around them do. First, it’s morning briefings, then moving to the fire itself. Once onsite, the crews start cutting, improving, and patrolling the lines, hoping to contain the fire until it can be extinguished.

What makes them worth noticing is not that they are soldiers fighting a fire. It is that they are active-duty soldiers; the country does not like to call in active-duty soldiers unless it’s as a last resort.

A Different Kind of Call

Most people picture National Guard soldiers when they picture troops on a fire line, and for good reason. Governors routinely activate Guard units to fight fires in their own states under state authority every summer.

Active-duty forces are a different matter altogether. They belong to the federal government, not the states, and they are sent to wildfires only through a specific chain and only when the civilian system is running out of people.

That chain runs through the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Here officials decide when the nation’s fire resources are stretched thin enough to ask the military for help.

First requests go through the Department of Defense for approval. All under an inter-agency agreement between the military, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Interior Department. The logistics of it all date in its current form to 2021. Its origins trace to 1975. Only after all steps are taken do active-duty troops move toward the flames.

Once they get there, they are organized as hand crews under civilian leadership. “Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment are organized into disciplined hand crew teams,” Lt. Col. Cain Claxton, a spokesperson for U.S. Army Western Hemisphere Command, told Military.com.

Their daily schedule, he said, follows the civilian incident command structure, with all activities directed by experienced wildland fire strike team leaders and crew bosses.

So, the soldiers are not running the operation. They are taking orders from the professionals on the ground who do.

How Rare is Last Resort?

According to the fire center’s own records, the 2021 deployment of active-duty troops to California’s Dixie Fire marked the 40th time since 1987 that active-duty personnel had been mobilized to serve as wildland firefighters.

Roughly 40 call-ups in about four decades is not nothing, but against the tens of thousands of fires that burn across the country every year, it is quite rare.

What has changed isn’t states suddenly calling for military assistance on a whim, but the pace of large fires occurring more often. Active-duty troops were mobilized for fires in 2020, again in 2021, again in 2024, and now in 2026. A cluster in a single decade that stands out against the more scattered history before it.

Lt. Col. Claxton framed the current mission in those terms as well. The request, he said, reflects the need for surge support “as wildland fire seasons intensify, and civilian resources are fully committed.”

Under the framework the military calls Defense Support of Civil Authorities, he said, the force provides rapidly deployable ground crews when the fire center asks for them.

Soldiers on the Modrite Fire, in other words, are not an emergency improvisation. They are a planned last resort, and the country has been reaching for that resort more frequently than it used to.

‘Tis the Season

It is not hard to see why the call went out this year. As of this week, the nation sat at Preparedness Level 5, the highest there is, with close to 30,000 personnel committed to fires across the country and more than 100 large uncontained blazes burning at once.

Pacific Northwest was the busiest corner of the map, with dozens of large fires in Oregon and Washington alone, and more than 6 million acres burned nationally so far in 2026.

The Modrite Fire is one hard piece of that larger picture. Sparked by lightning on July 17, it grew to roughly 57,000 acres and was still showing active fire as of publication. Proving resilient, it backed, flanked, and torched through timber with homes and infrastructure in its path.

It burned close enough to Inchelium to threaten the community center, the tribal emergency services buildings, the library and a wood treatment plant. The threat was serious enough that the Federal Emergency Management Agency approved federal firefighting funds at the end of July, having determined the fire could cause the kind of destruction that constitutes a major disaster.

Into that, the Army sent 240 soldiers who, a few weeks earlier, had been training for something else entirely.

Soldiers Learn New Fire Commands

Turning infantry into firefighters takes preparation, and in this case the preparation came first. The soldiers completed initial training with the Forest Service in July, before the call to deploy, which Lt. Col. Claxton described as support that “was previously arranged so soldiers were prepared for the call when it came.”

Work such as this tends to leave an impression. When roughly 250 soldiers from the same base spent 30 days on Idaho fire lines in 2024, one of them, who had never fought a wildfire before, told the Idaho Capital Sun that he loved the entire assignment and the chance to learn something new.

Currently, their mission is also set for 30 days. Afterward, Claxton said, Northern Command and its inter-agency partners will decide when the military support is no longer needed, and the soldiers return to their regular duties.

For now, they are on the mountain above Inchelium, holding a line on a fire that will not quite lie down, in a season that needed them badly enough to make the rare call to bring them in. If the pattern of recent years holds, it will not be the last time the country calls.