ABSTRACT
This chapter offers insight into how organizations shape workers' perceptions in such a way as to ensure that they place themselves in harm's way and stand firm when things begin to fall apart. It explains how the forest service socializes firefighters to understand risk and evaluates the degree to which firefighters accept this socialization process, demonstrating that they are trained to view firefighting as an activity dangerous only for the incompetent and explores how this position holds up when confronted with the death of a firefighter. The training booklet features the ten standard fire orders and the eighteen situations that shout "watch out!" or simply the ten and eighteen. Accepting these rules requires accepting unspoken institutionalized principles that influence the way firefighters understand risk. The external eulogy holds firefighters to be innocent victims whose altruistic and sacrificial deaths can be explained simply by the violent and volatile nature of wildfire. By exaggerating individual deviance, the forest service erases risk.
