Formed in 1943, the all-Black 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion was the first opportunity for African officers and enlisted men to become paratroopers in the segregated US Army during World War II. In 1944-45, after Japan launched balloon bombs across the Pacific to ignite west coast forests and spread civilian panic, the battalion was sent in May 1945 on the classified Operation Firefly, attached to the US Forest Service, and trained at Pendleton Field in northeastern Oregon by Army Ordnance personnel in bomb disposal and by smokejumpers in parachuting onto wildland fires and fighting them. That summer, the Triple Nickles jumped on 15 fires and fought on at least 28. On August 6, 1945, PFC Malvin L. Brown, a paratrooper and medic who had enlisted late in 1942, volunteered to replace an ill medic on a jump to a fire in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest near Roseburg; his parachute caught in a tall tree and he fell more than 150 feet to his death, becoming the first smokejumper to die on a fire jump. The Triple Nickles returned to their North Carolina home base in 1945, joined Lieutenant General James Gavin’s previously all-White 82nd Airborne Division in 1947, and a year later President Truman’s Executive Order officially ended racial segregation in the US military.