I chose the theme “Exploring Life Purpose Through Achievement and Adventure” because I like to live my life with adventure and helping other people. This theme means to me that you are up and out in the world living it with adventure and achieving instead of sitting at home like a couch potato. My theme connects with my short term goals and hops because I plan on going into the military. I chose books this year that also suppose my theme. My nonfiction book I chose was My Lost Brother’s by Brendan McDonough and I chose this book because I like firefighting and hearing other people stories that happen during there fire career.
Brendan McDonough’s life as a teenage boy was not easy at all. In the book My Lost Brothers by Brendan McDonough in the absence of his mother and father and because his grandparents did not discipline him at all, he became addicted to drugs and was convicted of a crime. The only thing that made his eyes open and see what was going on was when he was relying on friends for transport and ex-girlfriend told him she was pregnant. He said, “If this ain’t bottom, I don’t want to know what is” (60). Three days later he heard about an opening for hotshots.
While others choose the easy path, Brendan had to make his own choices with an absent father, carefree mother, enabling grandparents, readily available drugs, felony conviction, loss of choices, depression, and more attempts to escape reality he had to do something with his life then being a drug addict. Brendan was on the verge of becoming a hopeless inveterate heroin addict when the birth of his daughter, combined with a horrible experience while getting high in a crack house, served to push him toward making the right choice. He enlisted in the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a team of elite fire fighters based in Prescott, Arizona. The leader Eric Marsh, was in a desperate crush after other hotshots left the unit, he took a chance on the unlikely McDonough, and the chance paid off. Despite the crew’s criticism, he went on to successfully battle bunch of blazes and eventually win the confidence of the men he came to call his brothers.
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On June 30, 2013 McDonough, aka “donut,” served as lookout as they confronted a freak 3,000-degree inferno in nearby Yarnell, Arizona. The hotshot crew was well experienced and ready to take this blaze head on. The relentless fire trapped his hotshot brothers, tragically killing all 19 of them within minutes. “Nationwide, it was the highest loss of firefighter lives since the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers” (250).
Finally, My Lost Brothers is all about exploring life’s purpose through achievement and adventure because Brendon McDonough and his brothers are like a family and they take everything head on as a team not individually. One critic wrote “I could feel the bravery and camaraderie among the guys who went into danger every day to help save towns and wilderness from fire” (Harding). This is why the hotshots were able to fight the others wildfires and put them out as a team. We come to remember Brendon McDonough and how he climbed his way to safety after he watched the fire take 19 of his fellow brothers on the tragic day of June 30th 2013.
