Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why
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First, the helicopter headed toward Olian, mistaking him for a passenger. He waved it off, and the bystanders began to reel him in toward the shore. He had done all he could do. “A helicopter was real help. I was an illusion,” he says. When he got to the shore, he couldn’t walk. When the body gets extremely cold, muscle rigidity sets in. Someone dragged him up the bank and into a heated truck. He started shaking violently, the body’s way of generating heat through muscle friction.
The helicopter eventually plucked five of the survivors from the river, dragging them one by one over to the bank with a lifeline. After Priscilla Tirado, the woman who had lost her baby, repeatedly lost her grip on the line and dropped back into the water not far from shore, two other men—a firefighter and a government clerk—jumped into the water to drag her out and finish the job. The final crash survivor, the man whose legs had been trapped by the wreckage, died, just as he had predicted. He sunk into the water before the helicopter could reach him. Of the seventy-nine people on Flight 90, seventy-four died.
Olian rode in an ambulance with Stiley and other survivors to a nearby hospital. He was placed in a warm shower until his body temperature went up to ninety-four degrees. Then he went home to his wife.
The next day, the government was closed due to the blizzard. So Olian had the day off. He went to an impound lot to pick up his truck, which had been towed from the riverside. Sure enough, the battery was dead. Luckily he and his wife had brought jumper cables. When Olian went to pay the fine, he was a few dollars short. The money he took out of his wallet was still wet. He muttered an explanation to the cashier (“There was this plane crash, and I jumped in, and everything is still wet, see…”). The cashier let him take the truck.
One of the other men who had jumped in at the end of the ordeal, Lenny Skutnik, became an instant celebrity. His feat had been captured by the news cameras. Skutnik appeared at the State of the Union address at the invitation of President Ronald Reagan, the start of a new tradition at the speech. But no one knew about Olian until Stiley and the helicopter pilots told reporters they had to find him. “I was fascinated by this man. He just kept coming,” Stiley would later tell Life. “It was he who saved my life.”
A Hero Database
Olian and Skutnik, along with the helicopter crew, received something called the Carnegie Hero Medals. Over the past century, the little-known Carnegie Hero Fund Commission has doled out over nine thousand medals and cash assistance to people who voluntarily risk their lives to an extraordinary degree to try to save others.
Andrew Carnegie, even more than most people, was enchanted by the hero. In the winter of 1904, from his sixty-four-room mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he heard about a horrible coal mine disaster outside of Pittsburgh. A massive explosion had killed 181 people. Within hours, a respected engineer who had designed the mine had arrived at the site and descended into the main shaft to help rescue survivors. Deep underground, he encountered toxic gas, a by-product of the explosion. He died soon afterward, leaving a widow and a stepson. Another volunteer, this one a coal miner, went searching for survivors the next day. He, too, died from the asphyxiating gases, leaving a widow and five children. Carnegie, not an easy man to impress, was moved to match the $40,000 in public donations for the victims’ families. “I can’t get the women and children of the disaster out of my mind,” he wrote. He also arranged for two gold medals to commemorate the heroism of the dead volunteers.
A few months later, Carnegie, then the richest man in the world, established a $5 million trust and the Hero Fund Commission. Of all the charitable organizations he started, the Hero Fund was his favorite. “I don’t believe there’s a nobler fund in the world,” he once said with characteristic immodesty. “It is the fund that may be considered my pet.” Most of Carnegie’s other philanthropies were someone else’s idea. But Carnegie dreamed up the Hero Fund himself. For all his ruthlessness as a businessman, he had a soft spot for civility. He disdained football as a sport for savages, so he donated a lake to Princeton University to give athletes another outlet. He was a pacifist and railed against the traditional definition of heroes as warriors. “The false heroes of barbarous man are those who can only boast of the destruction of their fellows,” he wrote. “The true heroes of civilization are those alone who save or greatly serve them.”
The Hero Fund offers an unusual database of documented heroes. (The Commission does not award medals without thoroughly investigating each case to confirm the facts.) And the list of recipients is diverse. “They come from every conceivable occupation, every age group, every ethnic background,” says Douglas Chambers, director of external affairs for the Commission. “I think our youngest was a seven-year-old girl. Our oldest was an eighty-six-year-old woman.”
But some similarities do emerge. Of the 450 acts of heroism recognized by the Commission from 1989 to 1993, a whopping 91 percent were performed by males, according to a study by psychologist Ronald Johnson at the University of Hawaii. Of course, that could just be a bias of the sample. The Hero Fund is hardly comprehensive. The Commission learns about most of its heroes through media outlets, so perhaps the kinds of heroics that men perform are more likely to get coverage. Or maybe men are just more likely to be in high-risk situations where someone needs to be rescued. (After all, 61 percent of the victims who got rescued were also male.) Due to their occupations as well as their higher tolerance for risk, men are more likely to be caught in perilous situations. And men are stronger, on average, which could influence their willingness to walk into danger.
But the gender breakdown might also suggest something more nuanced. Men are probably far more likely to see themselves as rescuers—to believe they are not only capable of heroics but that such behavior is expected of them. A disproportionate number of Carnegie Heroes were also working-class men, like Olian. Of the 283 men who rescued someone other than a member of their family, only two had high-status jobs. Once again, it’s possible that most of these men were doing what they thought was expected of them, given their roles in society. They tended to be truck drivers, laborers, welders, or factory workers—physical jobs that required taking some risk, just like rescuing.
A surprising number of the rescues occurred in rural or small-town America, the study found. About 80 percent of the heroic acts happened in places with populations less than one hundred thousand. Again, that could be a bias of the sample. But it’s also true that in small towns, people tend to know one another. And, following the theory of reciprocal altruism, acts of kindness are recognized and remembered.
Samuel Oliner, the Holocaust survivor who has devoted his life to understanding heroism, has analyzed the Carnegie Heroes as well. He chose 214 of them at random and interviewed them about why they did what they did. As with the World War II rescuers, he found a range of explanations. But a full 78 percent cited the moral values and norms they had learned from their parents and the wider community. “Many talked about how they had been taught at some point in their lives that people are supposed to care for one another and felt that being a helper is intimately connected with their own sense of who they are,” Oliner wrote. Roger Olian, the man who jumped into the frigid Potomac after the Flight 90 crash, did not live in a rural setting. But otherwise, he looks a lot like the other heroes in these studies: he is male, he had a working-class job, and he had a strong sense of duty to help others.
So we are coming around to a psychological explanation for heroism. A sense of empathy, combined with an identity as someone who helps and takes risks, may predispose one for heroism. But none of this explains how Olian’s actions make any sense from an evolutionary point of view. When I ask animal behavior expert John Alcock about heroism, he is skeptical. Tales of heroics are probably “overblown,” he says. After all, among other mammals, like lions, “Powerful predators will band together to defend themselves. [But] it’s not a matter of one lion sacrificing himself for the good of the group. If that ever happens, it happens accidentally.”
Olian has thought a lot about this question since he nearly froze to death in the Potomac River. “I’ve always found it extremely interesting that people who treat each other so badly in everyday life can do tremendous things for each other in the worst of times,” he says. He can’t speak for other people, but in his case he’s concluded that what he did was self-interested. “If you didn’t get anything out of it, I mean flat-out nothing, you wouldn’t do it,” he says. “I wouldn’t do it.”
During the Holocaust, Alec Roslan rescued two young boys at great risk to himself and his family. Many years later, when he gave a speech at a temple in Los Angeles, Oliner served as his translator. Afterward, Oliner remembers, journalists crowded around and asked Roslan the same question over and over. “Why did you do this? What made you risk your life? Why?” As usual, we seek out heroes with a religious fervor, and then we act incredulous when we find them. Finally Roslan turned to them in exasperation and said, “Why are you asking me why I did this? You mean there’s another way to behave?”
Time after time, heroes explain their actions with the statement, “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t done it.” It’s become a post-disaster cliché. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the simple truth. The more heroes I interview, the more I realize that I’ve been asking them the wrong question. It’s not a matter of why they did something; the better question is, “What were you afraid would happen if you did not do what you did?”
“Basically, you’re doing it for yourself,” Olian says, “because you wouldn’t want to not do it and face the consequences internally.” In his case, he was afraid of disappointing himself. His determination at the crash site grew out of confidence—and insecurity, he says. Confidence because he knew he had the strength and skill to try to swim to those passengers, and insecurity because he needed to prove to himself that he could do it. He didn’t jump into the river to be a hero; he did it to avoid being a coward. Or, as he puts it: “It’s more a feeling of an emptiness than adding to something that’s already there.”
Olian enlisted in the military during Vietnam for the same reason. He didn’t particularly agree or disagree with the reasons for going to war. He went to Vietnam because he was scared not to go. “For that reason, I had to do it. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I could’ve done it. Could I rise to the situation, whatever it was? I didn’t know if I could survive, how I’d feel about killing people. I had a lot of questions.”
In 1969, Olian was on patrol with a small group of soldiers in the Central Highlands of Vietnam during the rainy season. They crossed a river using a small footbridge one day, only to find in the morning that the rains had flooded out the bridge—leaving them no way back but to swim a hundred yards through the crushing current. They waited for hours, sending out calls for help over their barely functioning radio. No help arrived, and they were running out of food. Once again, faced with a river and a problem, Olian had just enough confidence—and just enough insecurity—to jump in. He made it across, and so he answered one of his questions.
Evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. does not hesitate to make a prediction about the average hero: “I would bet most heroes will be male, single, childless, and young.”(Coincidence or not, Olian, while married, was male, childless, and young.) Gallup tosses off this prediction because he knows that evolutionary imperatives rule our lives. If we are going to do something, it is probably going to promote our genetic survival. Men are more likely to be heroes because they accrue reproductive benefits from doing so, Gallup says. If they don’t already have children, heroism is a good way to ensure that they will one day have many. Heroes, put a different way, get all the girls. “Scratch an altruist, and you’ll find a hedonist underneath,” Gallup says. That might be a bit strong, but the point is taken. And if would-be heroes die trying? Well, then their sisters and brothers and parents—the other keepers of their genes—will benefit from being the grieving relative of a hero. Women, on the other hand, can most efficiently promote their genes by finding high-quality (not quantity) mates, evolutionary theory suggests, and by parenting—which, if done well, can be heroic, Carnegie Medal or no.
Reducing heroism to its evolutionary roots can at first be a bit deflating, like seeing the inside of a magic hat. But these are just the buried roots, remember. A giant, gnarled tree has grown up over millions of years of evolution, laden with cultural and psychological motivations. If evolutionary theory tells us that heroism can, at least genetically speaking, be selfish, then that need not be bad news. What it means is that we all have the potential to be heroes at some point in our lives. Grace, in other words, is good for you. If we all have the potential, then we can encourage that potential in our culture, and we’ll see it more.
The Problem with Fantasy
It would be remiss to leave the subject of hero worship without visiting its dark side. The history of disasters is riddled with stories of heroism gone wrong. We admire heroism because we might need it ourselves one day. But sometimes the urge to find a hero or to be a hero can be powerful to the point of pathological.
The more atrocious the wrong, the more urgent the demand for a hero. After teenagers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed twelve students and one teacher in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, a story circulated about one of their victims. In the library, one of the shooters, the story went, had asked Cassie Bernall, seventeen, if she believed in God. She was reported to have answered yes. Then she was shot to death. This story appeared just days after the shootings. Already, Bernall had a label: the teenage martyr. She inspired several songs, including Michael W. Smith’s “This Is Your Time” and Flyleaf’s “Cassie.” Bernall’s mother, Misty Bernall, wrote a book titled She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall. The book became a New York Times nonfiction bestseller.
But this conversation probably never happened, according to the local sheriff’s official investigation into the shootings. What Harris most likely said when he saw Bernall hiding under a table was, “Peek-a-boo!” Then he shot and killed her. According to the report, Klebold had taunted someone else about believing in God. But that girl survived. The confusion quickly developed into lore, and it became more powerful than truth. Long after the official investigation came out, news articles continue to perpetuate the mistake.
“That idols have feet of clay is a banality; what is interesting is the question why, knowing it, we are still enthralled by them,” writes Lucy Hallett-Hughes in the book Heroes: A History of Hero Worship. “Looking at heroes, we find what we seek.” Stories of children killing other children at random are unbearable. If life really is as purposeless, unfair, and uncontrollable as it was that day at Columbine High School (or as it is every day, somewhere), then life is simply too terrifying to be managed. So we search for a redemptive narrative, and often we find it. That search is a survival mechanism unto itself.
Sometimes we need heroes so badly that we embellish them—often with no harm done, as in Littleton. But other times the quest for a hero can get ugly. It can become a vehicle for all sorts of other ambitions. After Air Florida passenger Joe Stiley was fished out of the Potomac, he woke up in a hospital bed with severe injuries. A hospital spokesperson appeared and told him he had some visitors, he says. Next thing he knew, a phalanx of ravenous reporters had surrounded him with microphones and cameras. They needed a hero by deadline. Then the bedside phone rang. The hospital operator said his mother was on the line. “OK, put her through,” Stiley said through his haze. It was a newspaper reporter. He thought there had been some kind of mistake, until it happened again—with another reporter.
Peel open the history of any disaster after
math and you will find a second, third, and fourth strata of heartbreak. Over the years, Skutnik, the other Flight 90 hero—who received dozens of awards and a standing ovation at the State of the Union address—became increasingly embittered by his interactions with reporters, Hollywood producers, and even the woman he had rescued, according to multiple news stories. “What I’ve found out is this: If you do something like that for people, they are not always as grateful as you’d think,” he told the Washington Times in 1992. (Skutnik declined to be interviewed for this book unless he was paid for doing so. For more on why I did not pay him or anyone interviewed for this book, see the endnotes for this chapter.)
Disasters often bring out the worst in people, right after they bring out the best. Emergency vehicles frequently have problems getting to plane crashes because so many locals have piled into their cars to see the wreckage. At the scene, police have to be diverted just to control the spectators. Everyone wants to see a disaster site, sometimes to help but often for more complicated reasons.
Immediately after the attacks of 9/11, David Jersey, a homeless man, volunteered to search for victims in the smoking ruins of the Trade Center. He claimed at one point that he had heard the voices of survivors. Firefighters stopped what they were doing and conducted an anxious search. They found no one. When I interviewed him a year later, Jersey denied he had done anything wrong and insisted that he had heard voices. “He had no evil motive,” said his attorney Brad Sage. “I think for the first time in his life he was part of something.” But New York City juries showed little mercy in those days. He was convicted of reckless endangerment and sentenced to five years in prison.