Good morning.

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Across California, with firefighters battling blazes in the north and south and search-and-rescue teams looking for human remains, the dramatic imagery emerging looks much like what comes out of the world’s conflict zones — not a slice of America known for its beaches and other natural wonders.

There are charred cars lining a street near Paradise, in Northern California, where dozens have been killed and an estimated 200 people are missing. There are houses in Malibu reduced to rubble, just a stone archway or chimney remaining. And as families fled the encroaching fires, in cars filled with clothing and other important items they could grab at the last minute, the scenes could have been refugees escaping a war zone.

The things I have seen have certainly reminded me of moments of covering wars in the Middle East. For the many firefighters who are veterans and served in Iraq or Afghanistan or both — whom we interviewed for this piece — fighting the fires has summoned their memories of war. And it’s not just the visuals of burning buildings or destroyed cars but the scent of acrid smoke, the airplanes and helicopters in the sky and the language of firefighting, of aerial assaults and boots on the ground, that are so reminiscent of how military officers plan war.

“There’s the visual similarities in the disorder and chaos and smoke and fire and all that,” said Robert Spangle, a former Marine who was deployed to Afghanistan twice and lives in Malibu.