Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

  Meditators, like deep-breathing cops, may have found a way to essentially evolve past the basic human fear response. In other words, they may have discovered a bridge in the brain—between their conscious and subconscious—that most people don’t know exists. What’s most interesting is that just knowing they have such powers might be valuable in itself.

  Laughter, like breathing, reduces our emotional arousal level as well. It also has the benefit of making us feel more in control of the situation. Again and again, studies have shown that people perform better under stress if they think they can handle it. In studies of rats, scientists have taken this discovery one step further: the medial prefrontal cortex appears to detect whether a threat is under the rat’s control. If the brain concludes that the stressor is indeed under its control, the brain blocks some of the more devastating effects of extreme stress. Self-confidence, in other words, can save your life. Says Massad Ayoob, a veteran police officer and instructor: “The single strongest [weapon] is a mental plan of what you’ll do in a certain crisis. And an absolute commitment to do it, by God, if the crisis comes to pass.”

  The Hostage-Taker

  On February 27, 1980, Rosemberg Pabón, age thirty-one, put on a pinstriped suit and tucked a pistol into his waistband. Pabón, also known as Commandante Uno, had never been in a gunfight before. He’d never even been to Bogotá until now. The night before, when he met his M-19 accomplices for the first time, he was given one last chance to back out of this operation. But the camaraderie in the room had fortified him. “All the compañeros said really beautiful things—like they were proud to have been chosen, that they were doing it for a better country. So I heard that and I was filled with courage,” he remembers. “The only thing I thought was to ask God to help me not to be afraid.”

  But Pabón was afraid, terribly so. That morning, the group waited at a hideout house nearby for the final go-ahead order. They would not leave until they heard that the American ambassador, Diego Asencio, had arrived at the party. “Without him, it wasn’t worth it to run the risk of the operation. He was the key.” The call came around 11:30 A.M. Asencio was there. Pabón, another man, and two women, dressed to look like diplomats, got into a car and headed for the embassy. The car let them off at the corner. Pabón took the arm of one of the female terrorists, and they headed for the front door.

  Already, there was a problem. Soldiers had occupied the National University across the street to quell a disturbance. That meant that armed men would respond immediately to the siege, which was not part of the plan. Pabón and his comrades had counted on having at least fifteen minutes to subdue the crowd without serious opposition. “The situation was difficult from the very first moment,” he says. And so the terrorists had few illusions about their chances. “There was nothing other than death awaiting us there. We knew it. We knew it would be very hard to get out alive.”

  It’s easy to forget that the victims are not the only tremulous people at a crime scene. Fear transforms everyone, from the police officer to the bank robber. Many of the terrorists who took over the embassy that day were later killed in other conflicts. But Pabón is still alive to tell his version of the takeover. In the kind of comeback story that could only happen in a society that is exceedingly generous with its former insurgents, Pabón now works as a midlevel functionary for the Colombian government. He occupies a large, wood-paneled office in a dingy building in downtown Bogotá. In November of 2006, from behind a polished wooden desk, under a crucifix and a portrait of the Colombian president, he recounted his memories of the siege. He wore a dark, pinstriped suit, just as he had the day of the takeover. This time, he was well accessorized—with a red-and-white-striped shirt and a yellow tie. He spoke matter-of-factly, revealing only an occasional glint of pride in the role he had played in an international hostage incident.

  Walking from the corner to the embassy, Pabón remembered, he had slipped into the same kind of time warp he was about to impose upon his victims. “I felt like those fifteen meters from the corner to the door were interminable,” he says, using the very same adjective Asencio used to describe his impressions of that morning. “They stretched on and on and on.” He followed the other couple, but they seemed to be going very slowly. He felt like he was walking in place. “The movie of my life came to me. With every step I took I remembered my childhood, my adolescence, everything—like it was a farewell. It was like having the eyes of a fly with a thousand lenses, and in each lens, there was a different image. That’s what I felt.”

  When he got to the front door, a man asked him for his invitation. Pabón took out his gun. With that, the fog lifted. “I felt as if I was back in reality.” But as he walked through the front door, he was stunned to see a man to his left with a gun. He felt a new surge of fear, this time tinged with betrayal. He had been promised that once they entered the embassy, none of the diplomats would be armed. So who was this man in a suit gripping a pistol? Pabón dropped to the floor instinctively. So did the other man. Pabón opened fire; so did the other man. “I lifted my head, and he lifted his head. I fired again, and so did he,” Pabón says. The man was unstoppable.

  Then one of his comrades stopped him; Pabón was firing at a mirror, scared of his own shadow. Fear short-circuited his higher-level brain functioning, just as it did for the hostages and the soldiers who tried to rescue them. Telling the story now, Pabón laughs gently at himself. “I had good reflexes, but I was very nervous. I didn’t recognize myself. I just saw a gun and started shooting.”

  As the gunfire and the screaming rose to an unsustainable climax, a sudden vision of the next day’s newspaper flashed across Pabón’s mind. He saw a head shot of himself and another picture of the people in the embassy on the floor, all of them dead. The images popped into his head, and then vanished, just as quickly. Pabón’s brain was contemplating the possible outcomes of his actions, just as Asencio imagined what it would be like to face his family and colleagues if he exhibited inadequate courage under fire.

  When the shots finally began to fade out, Pabón and his comrades divided the hostages into groups, depending on their political worth. They had before them a crowd of valuable assets. The terrorists chose five diplomats to form a committee to represent the hostages. The committee included Asencio, the U.S. ambassador. “They had all this experience in diplomacy, and this was all about diplomacy at the highest level,” Pabón explains.

  Asencio, meanwhile, was already a man who did not want for confidence. In this situation, he recognized that he had a skill the terrorists needed. In his role on the committee, he became more comfortable. He began to joke with the other hostages and his captors. As the days wore on, he even got into animated debates with the guerrillas about U.S. foreign policy. One day, when he and the other diplomats learned about a long diatribe that the terrorists were planning on issuing at their next negotiating session with government officials, they told the terrorists that their strategy was flawed. They wrote up a more nuanced draft of their own, and the terrorists used it, Asencio says.

  Pabón does not remember the hostages actually writing any documents. But he does remember that they were helpful. “They taught us how to read between the lines of the messages that the government sent us. When things got really confusing and somber, they helped us to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and they showed us how to stay positive.”

  The siege of the Dominican embassy would last sixty-one days. When it finally ended, it happened very differently from how Asencio or Pabón would have predicted that first, bloody day. The Colombian government agreed to allow international observers to monitor prison conditions and trials. And the terrorists eventually gave up their demand for prisoner releases. They did receive $1 million in ransom (supposedly from private donors, but Pabón believes the ransom may have been paid by the government). And they were permitted to fly to Cuba with twelve of their hostages (including Asencio), whom they then released.

  For students of disasters, the story of the
Dominican embassy siege was astonishing. It proved that hostages can in fact be very useful actors. They do not automatically melt down into helpless victims. Nor do they necessarily fall prey to the so-called Stockholm syndrome, whereby hostages become perversely loyal to their captors. The Stockholm syndrome, named after a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm in which the hostages ended up defending their captors, rarely happens in real life, Asencio believes. But belief in the Stockholm syndrome made his countrymen discount his input when he was being held hostage, he says. The memory of that sense of helplessness remains bitter for him. “My requests were being either ignored or very distinctly opposed,” he says. After his release, Asencio was honored at the State Department, and he continued to rise through the ranks of professional diplomacy. But he still argues with his colleagues about the existence of the Stockholm syndrome. “I have had many conversations with counterterrorism experts at the State Department about this. And I haven’t had any luck,” he says. The experts, as is so often the case, underestimate the victims.

  Asencio now lives in Mexico City, where he works as a contractor to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Dominican embassy has been torn down, and an apartment building constructed in its place.

  In Cuba, Pabón and his fellow rebels did not retire to the hills. They repeatedly returned to Colombia to carry out more operations. In 1981, Pabón was captured by the Ecuadorian military as he attempted to cross back into Colombia. “We committed thousands of mistakes,” he says now. Ecuador sent Pabón back to Colombia, where he spent twenty-two months in prison. Luckily for him, Colombians adore their rebels. Over the past century, the country has negotiated eighty-eight peace deals with different insurgent groups. In 1982, the new president, Belisario Betancour, declared an unconditional amnesty for political crimes. That December, Pabón walked out of prison a free man.

  Seven years later, M-19 disarmed and formed a political party. Pabón was elected to the constituent assembly, which drafted a new constitution for the country. M-19 got the second-largest number of seats in the body. In 1998, Pabón was elected mayor of Yumbo, a city of seventy-one thousand in southwestern Colombia. Two years later, he was voted the country’s best mayor by two major newspapers. He returned to national office in September 2006, when he was sworn in as director of Dansocial, an agency that promotes economic cooperatives and volunteer work.

  Asencio and Pabón have not spoken since the siege. But through their stories, we see the striking similarities in the body’s reaction to fear, even from two very different points of view. The fear response is profound, and it colors every moment of a crisis, to varying degrees, for every victim, perpetrator, and rescuer at the scene. The next logical question then is about the varying degrees. Why did Asencio respond so appropriately to the gunfight, ducking down below the couch and remaining still, while other diplomats did decidedly unhelpful things? After all, they were all terrified, worldly professionals at a cocktail party. So what made the difference? To find out, I figured it made sense to go to one of the places in the world where stress is part of the texture of life, embedded in the stones and atomized into the air, a place where people have absorbed a lot of fear, on all sides.

  4

  Resilience

  Staying Cool in Jerusalem

  BRIGADIER GENERAL Nisso Shacham commands the police force in the southern half of Israel, a triangle of land bordering the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Egypt, and Jordan. It may well be the most stressful job anywhere. In 2000, Shacham was in charge of keeping the peace in the holy places of Jerusalem. He was the only police officer who warned against Ariel Sharon visiting the Temple Mount. His concerns were dismissed, and Sharon’s visit, in September 2000, sparked the second intifada. “If you want to get a doctorate in stress, I’m the case,” Shacham says.

  We meet at his home, located, appropriately enough, on a precipice in the hills outside Jerusalem. Shacham spends the first thirty minutes in the kitchen. First, he assembles a plate of sliced peaches, grapes, and cherries. Next come neat squares of chocolate cake. Then he insists on making Turkish coffee. Finally, he settles down at the table with a cigar and starts telling stories. Shacham speaks fluent English but feels less self-conscious when speaking Hebrew, so my colleague Aaron Klein, from Time’s Jerusalem bureau, acts as a translator. When Shacham’s teenage son comes home from school with his report card, Shacham interrupts the interview and slowly and silently reads through the document. Then he plants a big kiss on his son’s cheek. Other than the glowering, equine dogs lying next to the front door, there were no indications that this was the home of a man who had repeatedly been the only thing standing between shrieking Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists in the Old City.

  Shacham became a police officer out of curiosity, he says. “I was like a good guy, a nerd. I never had any experience with criminals.” But he did have a ponytail and earrings, so his superiors chose him for the undercover unit. His first and hardest job was to earn the trust of gang leaders. He was afraid all the time in those days. “The gangs tested me every day because I was new.”

  One day, Shacham made contact with one of the most dangerous criminals in Jerusalem, a major dealer who had been linked to multiple murders. “He was a psychopath by definition,” says Shacham. After their meeting, the dealer asked him for a ride downtown. Shacham’s cover story was that he worked as a messenger in an office and sold drugs on the side. In the car, the dealer suddenly asked Shacham to show him his office. It was a test. Shacham headed toward the large building where he was supposed to work. He had never been inside. No one there knew him. As he drove, he tried to control his fear. His mind raced through all the possible outcomes, all of them bad. He had no training for this scenario.

  When they pulled up to the building, the parking garage was blocked by an electronic gate requiring a code. Next to the gate was a guard. Shacham didn’t know the code. “What am I going to tell him, this guard?” He slowed the car to a stop and paused. Then he flashed his headlights. The guard opened the gate. “It was a miracle.”

  Now what? How would he get inside? Where would he go if he did? Shacham had another idea. He stopped the car next to the guard and asked, “Is John inside?” The guard looked bored. “I don’t know. Go inside and check,” he replied. It worked. The dealer in the passenger seat had seen enough. “Let’s go,” he said. Shacham turned the car around. He had passed the test.

  There are people whom psychologists call “extreme dreaders”—people who have a tendency to live in a state of heightened anxiety. Then there are people like Shacham. What makes him able to negotiate extreme fear so well? How does he navigate through the fog of deliberation without a map? When I ask him this question, he says it’s not that he doesn’t feel fear; he does, every time. But a calmness resides just adjacent to the fear. “You have to be very cold-blooded,” he says. But what makes someone “cold-blooded”? Is it genetics? Experience? A chemical imbalance? What makes the difference?

  The Profile of a Survivor

  The answer is out there, I was told by trauma psychologists and other disaster experts in Israel and the United States. But it is slippery. We all have ideas about what we might do in an emergency. But we are probably wrong. There are ways to predict behavior under extreme duress, and they aren’t what you might expect. People who are leaders or basket cases on a normal day at the office aren’t necessarily the same in a crisis.

  But before behavior even comes into play, our basic profile can dramatically alter our odds. Our handicaps tend to be the same ones that plague us in normal day-to-day life. If you are very overweight, for example, you will almost certainly have a lower chance of survival in most disasters. In car crashes, we know that heavy people are more likely to die than thin people. That’s partly because very overweight people have more health problems in general. So they have a harder time recovering from any injuries. Their bodies also have more difficulty handling intense heat. For the human heart, the strain of a crisis can be far more deadly t
han the actual threat. That’s why more firefighters die from heart attacks and strokes than from fires.

  There is the cruel reality of physics, too. Overweight people move more slowly and need more space, so they have more trouble escaping. On 9/11, people with low physical abilities were three times as likely to be injured while evacuating the Trade Center. This problem has gotten worse as Americans have gotten bigger. Body fat even changes crowd dynamics. When people walk down a staircase, they sway slightly from side to side, taking up more space than their actual body width. The heavier people are, the slower they move and the more they sway—and the fewer people can fit down a staircase.

  Sex matters too. It is far better to be a man in certain disasters, and a woman in others. Men are more likely to be killed by lightning, hurricanes, and fires. Nearly twice as many men die in fires, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. That’s partly because men tend to do more dangerous jobs. But it’s also because men take more risks overall. They are more likely to walk toward smoke and drive through floods. “Women tend to be more cautious,” says Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Research Laboratory at the University of South Carolina. “They are not going to put themselves or their families at risk. They are going to be out of an area before the rains come.”

  Remember that equation for dread? It’s different for men and women. Almost every survey ever done on risk perception finds that women worry more about almost everything—from pollution to handguns. On a superficial level, this makes sense. Women are physically weaker, on average, and traditionally more responsible for caring for others. Maybe they should worry more. But when risk expert Paul Slovic tried to explain the gender gap this way, he ran into problems. The stereotype didn’t quite fit. For example, African American men worried just as much as women generally did. So unless African American men are born nurturers, nature didn’t entirely explain the difference. Slovic tried other variables. Are women and minorities less educated and so more emotional in their risk assessments? Well, no. When Slovic controlled for education, the sex and race differences persisted. In fact, when he asked scientists who study risk perception for a living to rank hazards, women scientists still tended to worry more than their male counterparts. Maybe women and minorities just have less faith in government authorities. Do they worry more because they don’t trust other people to do it for them? But there again, when the researchers controlled for such attitudes, it didn’t fully explain the worry gap.