Paul "Red" Adair was the oil field firefighter first made famous by a 1968 John Wayne movie The Hellfighters. After the first Gulf War, he led the effort to cap the Kuwaiti oil wells set ablaze by Iraq. Adair was a brash, fearless fighter. He joked in 1991 that it would be no different after he died. "I've done made a deal with the devil," he said. "He said he's going to give me an air-conditioned place when I go down there, if I go there, so I won't put all the fires out."

Adair died at age 89 on August 7, 2004. The devil, he may have discovered by now, is a liar.