Life Before Marian: Mr. Koesters Putting Out Fires

Story by Elena Burt '25

Mr. Mark Koesters, theology teacher and leader of Marian’s Operation Others club, once lived in California serving others. When he was 19 years old, and the Vietnam war was in full force, he was drafted to serve the country. 

You may be thinking that he went to go fight in the war; however, he refused to bear arms because he took the Catholic instructions of not killing people very seriously. So, he became what was called a conscientious objector, meaning that for reasons of conscience, he did not serve the country by fighting. Rather than be in the Army, he worked for the California Division of Forestry.

“I had to do two years of service in some capacity for the health, safety or wellbeing of our country,” Koesters said. Accepted as a conscientious objector in March/April of 1972, he was sent to California that September to do two years of alternate service.  

Koesters could have been excused, though. He had a deferment for going because he was learning to be a priest and men studying for the priesthood were exempt from the draft. But he said, “I knew I didn’t want to be a priest, so I gave up the deferment because I didn’t want to lie about it.”

Koesters was sent to California to help put out fires and treat hot spots, earning just $100 a month from California’s governor at the time, Ronald Reagan. Reagan had set up camps for the conscientious objectors to be sources of cheap labor, fighting forest fires and floods. 

“We were told, ‘you’re never going to work as hard in your life as when you are fighting a forest fire,’ and that’s true, because you just work, you don’t—you don’t even think. You have to build what’s called a fire line and you take the vegetation down to dirt, so the fire will stop at that, and your big fear is if the wind would come and jump the fire line. Once the fire is under control, you just have to sit and watch and make sure it doesn’t start again,” Koesters said.

“In between fires, we worked in various capacities, but usually in the forest. I had a very good experience doing that,” Koesters said. He was unique amongst the men, though. Not only did Koesters fight against two forest fires, but he also fed 30 men a day on average. 

He had thought, “I am going to be returning to the Midwest, so I want to learn a skill that I can transfer [back home]: so I volunteered to become their cook, and I literally cooked for forest firefighters for about 20 months.”

He soon became the beloved appointed chef for the camps, making hearty meals with meat, potatoes, vegetables and sweet treats. “I got really good at baking pies and they loved that,” Koesters said. “At one point, I was baking all the bread for this camp. There were about 30 guys, so it was about 10 loaves per day of homemade bread.” 

Koesters was the ol’ reliable of the bunch. “My supervisor who ran the whole camp said ‘the weakest link in a camp of forest firefighters is the cook. That’s the hardest position to keep.’ He said, ‘as long as you were running the kitchen, I didn’t have to worry about it at all.”’

“One night I got a call at 11:30 and they said, ‘you have two busloads of convict firefighters coming to eat in 30 minutes, be ready,’ and I was. I fed them! I made some quick pancakes, eggs and bacon,” Koesters said. 

Beyond being a firefighter and a chef, Koesters said, “I had a great experience living in California for two years. It got me out of the Midwest, I made good friends, I went to a variety of churches—I really expanded. I made it to Mexico, Disneyland, the beach—things I wouldn’t have normally done.”

He also tried out numerous different Christian churches and made many friends through the network of worshiping God, and Koesters said, “It’s through that that I got to see California.” 

Although he is very glad that he had this experience, his life as he knew it was flipped upside-down. “My life was put on pause and completely changed. Being drafted interrupts a person’s life, it really does,” Koesters said.

“In my year, the draft was conducted by lottery. They literally pulled numbers (your birthday) out of a pot, and everybody born that particular day was given a number. My number was 14, so I knew I was going to be called. Whereas my next older brother, his number being in the 200s, he was never at risk of being drafted.” 

This news was brought to Koesters and his family by television on the live-broadcasted news channel. “They published the order: if you’re born on this day, this is your number. If I had been born an hour earlier or a day later, I would’ve missed it completely.” 

However, he appreciates and values that time of his life, every day, by being himself. “That whole experience really built my confidence, and it’s just become a part of who I am.”