Army Reserve Chief Warrant Officer Denrick Mills, an air mobility warrant officer deployed to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, with the 310th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), said his favorite Black History story is the Triple Nickel “smokejumpers.” In 1945, the all-black 555th Airborne Infantry Battalion was ordered to Oregon to fight forest fires started by nature and by incendiary-bearing balloons sent into West Coast forests by the Japanese. “They used this airborne unit to jump in an put the fire out—that’s how the smokejumpers started,” he said.