Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (33 page)

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 aftermath 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.

Two days after the attacks, Sugeil Mejia, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, told police that her husband was a Port Authority police officer who was trapped under the rubble of the Trade Center. He had just called her on his cell phone, she said. A police officer drove her down to Ground Zero while she appeared to take two more calls from her husband.

Rescue workers searched for the man, risking their lives in precarious rubble. Then Mejia disappeared. Officials checked the badge number she’d given for her husband and found no match. Four months later, when Mejia pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment in Manhattan Supreme Court, she wept openly. She was sentenced to three years in prison.

Israeli psychologist Hanoch Yerushalmi believes that most of us have “fantasies” about what we will do in a disaster. Some of us take them further than others. One of Yerushalmi’s clients, a college student, was at a Jerusalem café when it was blown up by a suicide bomber, and although he was not hurt himself, he did help some of the wounded. He tore off his shirt and used it to help stop the bleeding. After that, he became consumed with the part. He started to bring first-aid supplies with him in his knapsack wherever he went, just in case. “His fantasy was to save. He got some kind of kick out of it, in a way,” Yerushalmi says. “When [the victims] were lying there helpless, he felt like he was a little God. He could elect for life or death for people.”

Finally, the young man’s fantasy came true again. He happened to be nearby when a bomb went off on a bus. He rushed over and began helping the victims, just as he had planned. When the paramedics arrived, one of them mentioned that one victim should not be moved due to spinal injuries. But the young man had already moved the person. He was stricken by what he’d done. He contacted doctors later, trying to find out what had happened to the victim, to no avail. “He was in a terrible state of rage for a long time. He was left with a lot of guilt, a lot of damage and memories—the smell of burned hair and other things,” Yerushalmi says. “He could not rest.”

Today, the man is doing much better, after years of treatment. Yerushalmi asked that I not reveal too many details of the case in order to protect the man’s anonymity. It’s interesting to imagine what would have happened if he had moved a different victim at a different time. Maybe then I would be writing about him using his full name, telling you every detail of his life. He would be a hero, after all.

When I started this book, I resisted writing about heroism for this very reason. One disaster’s hero is another’s accomplice. So much depends on the situation—and luck, of course. But then I realized that this problem is true, to a degree, for most disaster behaviors. Denial helped Elia Zedeño get down the stairs of the Trade Center on 9/11, but for other people, denial may have led to fatal delay that day. Heroism is more nebulous than other behaviors, it’s true. But it is also real, and, like so many of the other puzzling behaviors we have examined, a product of experience, aspiration, and fear. For certain people caught in rare circumstances, heroism may be just as much a survival strategy as freezing; it’s a survival strategy not for the body, but for the mind.

Conclusion

Making New Instincts

I
N EVERY DISASTER
, buried under the rubble is evidence that we can do better. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, there was the story of the U.S. Coast Guard, which rescued thirty-four thousand people without waiting for orders from anyone. On 9/11, there was Rick Rescorla.

Rescorla was head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in the Trade Center. He was one of those thick-necked soldier types who spend the second halves of their lives patrolling the perimeters of marble lobbies the way they once patrolled a battlefield. You can find them in any high-end, landmark office building, whispering into walkie-talkies and nodding curtly to the executives who pass by in clicky shoes. They are generally overqualified for their jobs.

But Rescorla was the wisest investment Morgan Stanley has ever made. Born in England, Rescorla joined the American military because he wanted to fight the communists in Vietnam. When he got there, he earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart in battles memorialized in the 1992 book by Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway,
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young.
The book is considered required reading for Army officers. That’s a picture of Rescorla on the cover, clutching an M-16 rifle and looking wary, exhausted, and most of all, young.

Although he eventually moved to New Jersey and settled down into the life of a security executive, Rescorla still acted, in some ways, like a man at war. Morgan Stanley occupied twenty-two floors of Tower 2 and several floors in a nearby building. After the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Rescorla worried about a terrorist attack on the Trade Center. In 1990, he brought one of his old war buddies up to New York City to take a tour of the towers. He wanted to know how his friend, who had counterterrorism expertise, would attack the building if he were a terrorist. After his friend saw the Trade Center’s garage, he pronounced the task “not even a challenge,” as James B. Stewart writes in his 2002 biography of Rescorla,
Heart of a Soldier.
If he were going to attack the Trade Center, he would drive a truck full of explosives into the garage and walk out.

Rescorla and his friend wrote a report to the Port Authority explaining their concerns and insisting on the need for more security in the parking garage. Their recommendations, which would have been expensive, were ignored, according to Stewart. (The Port Authority did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this book.)

Three years later, Ramzi Yousef drove a truck full of explosives into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, just as Rescorla had predicted. After the bomb went off, sending vibrations through the tower, Rescorla stood in Morgan Stanley’s large, open trading floor and shouted. Everyone ignored him, just as they had when he had tried to run fire drills before the bombing. So he stood on a desk and yelled, “Do I have to drop my trousers to get your attention?” The room quieted down, and he handed out flashlights and directed the employees down the darkened stairways.

After the 1993 bombing, Rescorla had the credibility he needed. Combined with his muscular personality, it was enough to get Morgan Stanley employees to take full responsibility for their own survival—something that happened almost nowhere else in the Trade Center. He understood the danger of denial, the importance of aggressively pushing through the denial period and getting to action. He had watched the employees wind down the staircase in 1993, and he knew it took too long. He had made sure he was the last one out that day, so he saw the stragglers and the procrastinators, the slow and the disabled.

Rescorla also had an unusually keen sense of dread. He knew that the risk of another terrorist attack did not diminish with each passing, normal day. And he knew it was foolish to rely on first responders to save his employees. His company was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, a village nestled in the clouds. Morgan Stanley’s employees would need to take care of one another.

From then on, no visitors were allowed in the office without an escort. Rescorla hired more security staff. He ordered employees not to listen to any instructions from the Port Authority in a real emergency. In his eyes, the Port Authority had lost all legitimacy after it failed to respond to his 1990 warnings.

Most impressive of all, Rescorla started running the entire company through frequent, surprise fire drills. He trained employees to meet in the hallway between the stairwells and, at his direction, go down the stairs, two by two, to the forty-fourth floor. Not only that, but he insisted that the highest floors evacuate first. As the last employees from one floor reached the floor below them, employees from that floor would fall in behind.

Only someone with an advanced understanding of human behavior in evacuations would know to do this. Without specific training, people become bizarrely courteous in an emergency, as we’ve seen. They let those from the floors below them enter the stairwell in front of them. The end result is that people from the upper floors—who have the farthest to walk and therefore face the most danger—will get out last. Training people to resist this gallantry was smart and wonderfully simple.

The radicalism of Rescorla’s drills cannot be overstated. Remember, Morgan Stanley is an investment bank. Millionaire, high-performance bankers on the seventy-third floor chafed at Rescorla’s evacuation regimen. They did not appreciate interrupting high-net-worth clients in the middle of a meeting. Each drill, which pulled the firm’s brokers off their phones and away from their computers, cost the company money. But Rescorla did it anyway. He didn’t care whether he was popular. His military training had taught him a simple rule of human nature, the core lesson of this book: the best way to get the brain to perform under extreme stress is to repeatedly run it through rehearsals beforehand. Or as the military puts it, the “Eight P’s”: “Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”