Reporter
Eternal Flame
After the 1999 tragedy that killed twelve Aggies, Texas A&M wanted to extinguish its annual Bonfire. Good luck.
James says: Howdy Pamela, I just finished reading this article after reading other related articles, and I have to say your prowess of writing a piece from an outsider’s point of view was indeed spectacular! As an Fightin Texas Aggie class of ’08 dead zip from the Corp, Redass Bonfire builder of Bonfire myself I’m stunned by how accurately you’ve managed to write this article. The culture, context, emotions, and truths of Student Bonfire are so hard to explain to friends who don’t know what it’s all about, and yet your article shows me that sometimes it takes someone from outside the circles of passionate people to best tell the tale. I can see the care you took to be kind to those who so passionately love this tradition, and that you also managed to tell truth in pointing out some of the tradition’s vices. Good journalism that is both honest and caring is rare these days, and so I wish you continuing success in your career. Thanks & Gig’em! (April 1st, 2010 at 5:14pm)
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The organizers of Student Bonfire believe that building and burning an off-campus blaze can help repair flagging school spirit. But universities have a short collective memory; the students who are now seniors began attending A&M the year after Bonfire’s collapse and aren’t necessarily nostalgic for its return. “We haven’t felt it,” said Sommer Hamilton, the editor of the Battalion for the fall 2003 semester. “We haven’t built it. We haven’t seen Bonfire burn. When I brought it up to my editorial board, I said we had to take a stance about whether or not to bring the tradition back. One person said, ‘I really don’t care.’ That’s the attitude I see on campus, a shrugging of shoulders.” Hamilton, who described herself as “a cynical senior not quite unhappy that a ‘tradition’ that killed twelve people just like me isn’t still a part of this campus,” is wary of bringing back the rowdy, mostly male culture that surrounded the building of Bonfire, which was not always welcoming to women and minorities. “Is that really something we want to embrace?” she said. She recalled having seen several guys at a campus cafeteria last year, in work clothes, who had just left the off-campus cut site; rather than using silverware, they ate with their hands, as is Bonfire custom. “It seemed outdated,” she said. “It didn’t seem to fit with what we were trying to do at A&M.”
After the collapse, Bowen commissioned a study that estimated that the cost to safely reinstate Bonfire on campus would be $2.5 million—a prohibitive price tag. “Some thought the study was a complete sham and that the numbers were wildly inflated,” said alumnus Dave Nelson, who is working to bring the blaze back to campus. “Others thought it was an honest effort to bring back a Bonfire, not a pile of scrap wood, that was worthy of Texas A&M.” Whatever the case may be, the subsequent suspension of Bonfire had the effect of purging a generation of “redpots,” student leaders who oversaw its construction. Redpots embodied the best and worst of Aggie culture, serving as the guardians of both its traditions and its excesses. Under their watch, drinking and hazing were common. Underclassmen were paddled with ax handles, sometimes covered in feces, and subjected to other humiliations. Injuries involving axes and machetes were not unusual, and concussions and broken bones occurred long before the tragedy in 1999. An A&M-sponsored commission that later studied the collapse concluded in its report: “In the experience of the investigation team, Texas A&M is unique in allowing this level of irresponsible personal behavior in and around a construction project of this magnitude.”
That is the lingering sorrow at A&M—that the collapse of Bonfire might have been prevented. More will be understood when suits brought by some of the victims’ families go to trial in 2005, but already it is known that there were warning signs that Bonfire’s multilayered wedding-cake design was unstable. Throughout the nineties, several engineering professors had expressed concern to both the administration and the redpots about the stack’s design and were ignored. In 1994 it collapsed during heavy rain; no students were injured since none were present, and reconstruction proceeded.
For these reasons, the sense of loss at A&M is still as acute today as it was four years ago. On the anniversary of the Bonfire collapse, November 18, hundreds of students gathered on the polo fields just before 2:42 a.m. to commemorate the dead. A photo of each victim was illuminated by a candle—every bright, young face a stark reminder of the tragedy’s personal toll. Parents embraced one another, crying softly. Solemn members of the Corps of Cadets wiped away tears. As a bagpiper began to play “Amazing Grace,” one girl, overcome with emotion, fell to her knees, weeping. There were prayers and a recitation of the victims’ names, followed by silence. Then, spontaneously, the crowd began to sing together, in broken voices: “Some may boast of prowess bold/Of the school they think so grand/But there’s a spirit can ne’er be told/It’s the spirit of Aggieland.”
TWELVE DAYS BEFORE STUDENT BONFIRE was set to burn, members of a group called the Bonfire Coalition gathered on campus, as they do every Tuesday night. Sixty students in maroon polo shirts and khakis took their seats, some wearing commemorative pots, as student leader Alex King greeted them with a cheerful “Howdy!” After a few announcements, King began grilling the freshmen:
“When did redpots start overseeing Bonfire?”
“‘74?” one freshman said, apprehensively.
King shook his head. “Ten push-ups!”
The coalition, which is not affiliated with any off-campus blazes, is trying to keep alive knowledge about Bonfire while lobbying the administration to allow for its return. (“Don’t worry,” King told the anxious freshmen. “The test next week is hard, but it won’t ask you for details like what gauge wire was used.”) After students were drilled, alumnus Marty Holmes spoke to them about his memories of Bonfire and showed them a grainy videotape of the 1986 blaze. On the television screen before them, a majestic plume of flames unfurled skyward while tens of thousands of Aggies cheered and sang in unison. It was a magnificent spectacle, and the students watched in reverent silence. “We didn’t build Bonfire,” Holmes told them. “Bonfire built us.” But he cautioned the group about Student Bonfire: “If someone gets hurt or, God forbid, gets killed out there, what y’all are trying to do is toast.”
The following week, Aggies finished building the stack for Student Bonfire. Unlike previous years, the base of every log touched the ground, and five supporting logs had been driven ten feet below the soil by a driller. Construction had been overseen by a professional engineer, an A&M alumnus who was donating his time. Every possible precaution, Student Bonfire organizers maintained, had been taken to ensure students’ safety. “No alcohol on the site is our number one priority,” said Aaron Stagner. “We’re zero-tolerance. A Breathalyzer test is given if we suspect anything. At the beginning of every shift, we take attendance. If anyone is new to the site, they have to take a class that we give in safety procedures. We have an insurance policy that covers anyone who works here. And we shut down the site at midnight, so no one’s making important decisions at three o’clock in the morning.” What about injuries? “The worst one we’ve had so far was a sprained wrist, and that’s it, besides lots of blisters,” he said. “We have people trained in EMS procedures on-site. And we have cell phones if we need to call for help.” Hazing was forbidden, though the spirit of the old days lived on through students’ frayed T-shirts and painted pots, a few of which read “Hell-raiser,” “I Kill Trees,” “Pro-Hazing,” “It’s Not Peer Pressure. It’s Just Your Turn,” and “Girls With Big Tits Do It Better.”
By Saturday night, when Student Bonfire was scheduled to burn, huge crowds stood waiting near campus for the buses that would take them to the burn site. So many Aggies showed up to see the blaze—13,000, by the final count—that the lighting was delayed for almost two hours while students who had given up on catching a ride walked the last few miles in the dark. “Maybe next year!” one student who was lucky enough to have gotten onto a bus called out to the crowd, laughing. “We’ll take pictures!” At the stack, the mood was ebullient. Because the university would not recognize the event, there were no yell leaders or Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band members to rile up the crowd, so students improvised instead. “We’re going to beat the hell out of t.u.!” screamed several self-appointed yell leaders as the crowd whooped back in agreement. Each time the pile of logs was hosed down with diesel, the crowd grew more raucous, chanting “Light it! Light it!” The bright pops of camera flashes cut through the darkness, and for as far as the eye could see, people stood, craning to get a view. Just before ten, cheers rose up as a band of students wearing pots and overalls marched, arm in arm, into the crowd behind a Student Bonfire crew chief who held aloft a torch. “Farmers, fight! Farmers, fight!” they cried, as the crowd let forth a long, low “Whoooop!”
Burlap-wrapped ax handles soaked in kerosene were lit off of the torch and carried to the stack, which took only a few moments to ignite. The crowd cheered, then fell into a hushed silence. Fire climbed up the outer ring of logs, radiating such intense heat that onlookers began to strip off their sweaters and jackets. The customary orange outhouse symbolizing UT that rested atop the stack caught fire and soon crumbled and fell, to wild cheering and applause. Thousands of embers darted through the air, brightening the night sky. Anyone who stumbled across the scene would have thought he was witnessing some sort of ancient pagan ritual, for as soon as the fire was lit, students began to run through the litany of yells, hand gestures, and cheers that are unique to A&M. The assembled Aggies did not linger for long after the outhouse fell; alcohol was not allowed at the site, and there were parties back in College Station to attend. But that night, as they stood and stared up at the flames together, watching a bonfire burn, the Aggie family was united—for a little while, at least.
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