Twenty-eight years ago today, two U.S. Army battalions arrived in Yellowstone to confront an old enemy.

By mid-September, those soldiers would be joined by 4,000 uniformed members of the United States Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Wyoming National Guard. These troops supplemented hundreds of U.S. Forest Service rangers and National Park Service personnel already on the ground -- all of whom had met their match in the summer of 1988.

Their foe? The fires raging through America’s oldest national park.

That year’s fire season featured every type of blaze: grassland fires, ground fires, deliberately set backfires, and fearsome “crown” fires that raced through the forest, jumping over parking lots, barren geyser areas, rivers, and man-made firebreaks. The blazes began in June of that year and not until the snows of November was the last one extinguished.

By then 1.4 million acres of Yellowstone National Park were burned, and a national conversation had been ignited over how human beings should respond to fire in America’s prized national parks.

For the first century of Yellowstone’s status as a protected park, government policy called for fighting forest fires inside the park whenever possible. But in 1972, 100 years after Yellowstone was officially designated a federal preserve, the National Park Service began embracing a new attitude toward forest fires.

Described as “natural” fire management by its proponents (and the “let it burn” policy by skeptics), this approach had been in effect in America’s oldest park for a dozen years by the spring of 1988. It had even been embraced in the greater Yellowstone region by the U.S. Forest Service, which administers some 10 million acres of land in vast parcels surrounding the park.

If this strategy seemed radical to campers and the public, it was even more discordant within the ranks of the Forest Service.

That agency had been assembled inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1905, more than a decade before the National Park Service was brought into existence on August 25, 1916. And five summers before Woodrow Wilson’s signature brought the NPS into being, the largest forest fire in U.S. history seared its way into the institutional memory of the Forest Service.

This 1910 conflagration is known by many names, including the “Big Burn” and the “Big Blowup.” It started in eastern Washington state and spread into Idaho and Montana on the force of hurricane-category winds, creating tornados of fire that burned some 3 million acres of virgin forests -- an area the size of Connecticut -- and killing 86 men, most of them firefighters.

From that day forward, the prevailing ethos inside the U.S. Forest Service was to suppress forest fires as soon as possible, whenever they arose -- until the “let it burn” philosophy took hold.

Seventy-eight years later, as Yellowstone burned out of control, the Forest Service’s primal instincts returned to the surface.

On July 2, 1988, Forest Service officials diverged from the Park Service and began to fight a fire that had broken out in the Gallatin National Forest north of Yellowstone’s park borders. Ten days later, a lightning strike started another fire, dubbed the Falls Fire, close to Yellowstone’s southern border and near the Caribou-Targhee National Forest.

Nine fires were blazing inside the park without any efforts at suppressing them, and U.S. Forest Service officials at seen enough. The next day, July 13, John Burns, an eponymously named regional Forest Service supervisor, informed Yellowstone Park Superintendent Robert Barbee that Targhee would not “accept” the Falls Fire.

Just that quickly, like the shifting winds in a crown fire, the political winds had changed. The government began to combat the Yellowstone fires of 1988.

In the aftermath, both proponents and opponents of “let it burn” blamed the others’ philosophy for the conflagration. But the superb postmortem done for the Park Service by naturalist Mary Ann Franke came to the conclusion that in that particular fire season, at least, there wasn’t a whole lot human beings could have done anyway.

“In 1988, a combination of conditions never before seen in the park’s history led to the burning of nearly 800,000 acres in just one summer,” she wrote. “One of the lessons of those fires was that there is a threshold between a very dry year and an extraordinarily dry year, and once that threshold is crossed, there’s no closing the door on fire.”