2
Critics of the Forest Service have pointed out unintended consequences of the military
metaphor before. For example, Pyne (1994) has argued that constructing fire as “the enemy” has
reinforced a “suppression” mindset that has led to a dangerous buildup of fuels in the west. But to
date there has been no systematic effort to examine how firefighting as war, as a root military
metaphor, has informed language use at the U.S. Forest Service. Using rhetorical tools such as root
metaphor analysis, the enthymeme, and lists and stories as organizational communication, the paper
explores consequences of the root military metaphor in three modes of official Forest Service
discourse in the wake of tragedy fires: accident reports (forensic) that characterize tragedies as
breakdowns in discipline, management evaluation reports (deliberative) that simply “tighten the
iron cage” of control, and official memorials (epideictic) that eulogize fallen firefighters as heroes
for safety and bundle their memories with promises of future organizational perfection.
The analysis shows how after each fire, the Forest Service has continued to set impossible
standards for future safety without questioning its own basic assumptions about the relationship
between safety and rule following. When tragedy strikes again, meanings attributed to past deaths
are called into question. While the Forest Service has successfully established “safety” legacies for
tragedy fires in the past, such as Mann Gulch, continued broken promises have resulted in public
resistance to framing Storm King Mountain and Thirtymile Fire in terms of safety. Public criticism
of the Thirtymile fire in particular seems to be challenging the organization’s very ability to
faithfully engage in forensic, deliberative, and epideictic modes discourses in the wake of an
accident.
The analysis has at least four implications for rhetorical and critical organizational
communication theory. First, the experience of the Forest Service demonstrates how a root military
metaphor can endure even in a deliberate “culture change” that fails to question the underlying logic
of its sacred and therefore unexamined discursive elements. Second, the analysis expands lists and
stories theory beyond the functionalist “structure/variety” frame to reveal its more critical
applications: how the use of lists continues to legitimate other lists, and how organizational stories
can be subsumed in that process. Third, the analysis shows how enthymemes that compete for
attention in an organizational culture, where one is clearly privileged by the root metaphor and the
Convention