Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (16 page)

Special Forces Soldiers Are Not Normal

The U.S. military has spent millions of dollars trying to figure out how to profile people like Shacham—people who will stay lucid in life-or-death situations and then remain resilient afterward. Charles Morgan III is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University and the director of the human performance laboratory at the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. He has spent the past fifteen years studying differences in how people react to extreme stress. He started out studying Vietnam and Gulf War veterans. The ones with posttraumatic stress disorder behaved a lot differently from the ones without, as you might expect. The vets with posttraumatic stress disorder were jumpier. They also dissociated more, reporting that colors appeared brighter or things moved in slow motion, even in normal life. It was as if their brains, having once entered crisis mode, remained perpetually stuck there. They even had higher levels of certain stress hormones in their blood than other people.

In the 1990s, the consensus among most scientists was that these people had been damaged by their experiences. Their brains, their blood, and their personalities had been altered by trauma. But a handful of researchers were not satisfied with that theory. “We were making assumptions,” says Morgan. “We really didn’t know.” Which came first, these scientists wondered: the trauma? Or the person susceptible to being traumatized?

To find out, Morgan needed to study people
before
they were exposed to the trauma. At the Military Survival School at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he found a laboratory for stress. After a period of classroom training, soldiers at the school are released into the woods to try to avoid capture. They have no food, water, or weapons. Instructors hunt them down, fire on them with blanks, and, eventually, catch them. Then they take the soldiers, hooded and roped together, to a mock prisoner of war camp, where they are systematically deprived of food, control, and dignity. The conditions are meant to resemble the experiences of U.S. POWs in World War II Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. Over seventy-two hours, the soldiers are only allowed to sleep less than one hour.

Survival School is so realistic, it’s actually frightening. When Morgan took the soldiers’ blood, he found that their stress levels exceeded previously recorded averages taken in extreme situations. The soldiers had, for example, more cortisol in their system than people who are about to jump out of an airplane for the first time. On average, Survival School participants lose fifteen pounds during the course.

Right away, Morgan noticed big differences between the soldiers. The Army Special Forces soldiers, also known as Green Berets, consistently outperformed the other, general infantry soldiers. “They seemed to remain more mentally clear,” says Morgan. “They didn’t get as stupid as fast as the rest of us under stress.” That’s not surprising. Special Forces are an elite population; less than a third of those who try to join get selected.

What was more surprising was how different the Special Forces soldiers were
chemically
. When Morgan analyzed their blood samples, he found that the Special Forces soldiers produced significantly more of something called “neuropeptide Y,” a compound that helps you stay focused on a task under stress, among other things. Even twenty-four hours after a mock interrogation, the Special Forces soldiers had returned to normal levels of neuropeptide Y, while the other soldiers remained depleted. (In civilian life, people with anxiety disorders or depression tend to have lower levels of neuropeptide Y.) The difference was so marked that Morgan could literally tell whether someone was a member of the Special Forces unit just by looking at their blood results. So then the question was, which came first? Were Special Forces soldiers just inherently different? Or did their training make them that way?

Let’s pause to acknowledge that Special Forces soldiers are not normal. They seem to have certain immunities to extreme stress but, on average, Special Forces soldiers don’t tend to be the he-man types, either; they tend to be the ones with the beards who speak Arabic and can melt into a foreign population. “They like the challenge and the thrill but not in a thrill-seeking way. They’re pretty quiet and meticulous and focused as a group,” Morgan says. “If you’ve ever seen that movie
Black Hawk Down,
it really does portray Green Berets accurately. They really are different kinds of animals.”

But it was surprising how predictably—and even biologically—different they appeared to be from other soldiers. In fact, Morgan discovered, he didn’t even have to take their blood to tell the difference. It turned out a simple questionnaire could predict who would produce more neuropeptide Y.

He asked the soldiers questions from a standard psychological test measuring dissociative symptoms. For example, thinking back over the past few days, he asked, have you ever experienced any of the following symptoms?

1. Things seemed to move in slow motion.

2. Things seemed unreal, as if in a dream.

3. You had a feeling of separation from what was happening, as if you were watching a movie or a play.

That’s just a sampling of the questions, of course. If you answered yes to all of the questions above, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will perform poorly in a crisis. It depends, as is so often the case, on the crisis.

Over the past several years, Morgan has administered the questionnaire to more than two thousand soldiers before they began Survival School. He wanted to see which ones had a habit of dissociating—even under normal conditions. On average, about 30 percent scored high on the test. Even without extreme stress, about a third said they had felt some kind of detachment from reality. This is higher than Morgan might have expected, but he has repeatedly found the same ratio among military populations. And those soldiers who had scored high on the dissociation test were consistently less likely to make it through the school.

One day, soldiers may routinely pop pills to help them deal with extreme fear. Synthetic neuropeptide Y may be handed out to soldiers with their boots. The hormone oxytocin, released in mothers after they give birth and also available synthetically, has been shown to calm the brain’s fear hub and promote trust. In one study, men who sniffed oxytocin before undergoing a brain scan exhibited less amygdala activity than they did without oxytocin.

But before we get too carried away with the pharmaceuticals, it’s worth mentioning that dissociation is not always a bad thing. During the worst moments of the Survival School, all of the students—even the Special Forces soldiers—experienced dissociative symptoms. Some dissociated more than people taking hallucinogenic drugs. As Zedeño learned during her escape from the World Trade Center, dissociating can be a highly adaptive response to trauma. Jim Cirillo, a master gunslinger, dissociated as he shot a man for the first time. In Chapter 7, we’ll see how an extreme form of dissociation might actually be an ancient survival mechanism.

There are different kinds of resilience. If all you need to do is walk down the stairs, moderate dissociation might be a perfectly fine response. If, however, you need to manipulate equipment or solve problems, you might have more trouble. “Military folks have to actively engage in their environments to go find an enemy or do something. So the tendency to pull away impairs their performance,” Morgan explains. When we dissociate, the parts of our brains that handle spatial mapping, working memory, and concentration start to fail. If you are, say, a Special Forces soldier in a hostage rescue unit—tasked with entering buildings undetected, navigating in low light, and shooting the hostage-takers, not the hostages—losing these particular skills is problematic.

Before, during,
and
after the mock captivity, Special Forces soldiers reported fewer and less-intense dissociative symptoms than everyone else. The correlation was clear: the less a soldier dissociated—especially under normal conditions—the more neuropeptide Y he produced, and the better he performed.

Strangely, Special Forces soldiers also reported more trauma in their backgrounds overall. They reported a greater incidence of childhood abuse, for example. This was unexpected. Normally prior trauma predicts worse performance under stress. Among Special Forces soldiers, however, previous trauma hadn’t left them any less able to handle future trauma. In fact, it seemed to have left them more capable. How could this be? It was a sort of paradox. In one group of people, trauma led to an unraveling. In another, it seemed to instill coping mechanisms.

Every year, about nine hundred soldiers apply to join the Army Special Forces. They are weeded out through a three-week assessment program that tests physical endurance, problem solving, and leadership abilities under stress. It is more physically demanding than Survival School, but a little less psychologically stressful. Only about a third of the candidates actually finish the course.

Was it the training itself—or the confidence that comes with knowing you are a Special Forces soldier—that gave these guys the extra boost in performance? To find out, Morgan decided to study men before they got selected. When the candidates arrived at the course, Morgan gave them his questionnaire. He wanted to know which ones had dissociated the week
before
they came to the course. As with the Survival School participants, about a third of the Special Forces candidates reported experiencing some kind of dissociation before their arrival. Morgan has tested 774 men so far, and the results are stunning: anyone who reported dissociating during normal times turned out to be significantly less likely to pass the course. If someone responded positively to eleven or more of the questions, Morgan could predict with 95 percent accuracy that the person would fail out of the course.

With this simple test, then, Morgan could potentially save soldiers the trouble of even trying to endure the Special Forces selection process. “If you just screened those people out at the beginning, it would save the Army millions of dollars,” he says. But the generals aren’t keen on that idea for philosophical reasons. “The Army doesn’t like the idea that someone might be prevented from doing something he or she really wants to do,” Morgan says. So today, everyone still gets to try out for the Special Forces, regardless of chemistry.

Still, another mystery remained: if these individuals were different before they joined the Special Forces, then how did they get that way? Were they born resilient? Or had they all undergone some kind of childhood experience to make them that way?

Whenever a psychologist (or anyone else, for that matter) tries to identify causality, things can go badly. Nature and nurture just don’t divide cleanly, no matter how much we want them to. Both are intertwined, like strands of DNA. And still, we want to know. Even if we can’t entirely isolate nature or nurture, can’t we at least say which one matters more? Even a little bit?

When all else fails, there is one last way to find out. But it is a long shot. Subjects are few and far between. If it works, however, the twin study is a lovely thing to behold—as elegant and pure as pi.

The Thompson Twins

Even now, it’s hard to tell Jerry and Terry Thompson apart. They stopped dressing the same in the seventh grade, but they still sometimes meet somewhere and realize they’re wearing matching outfits. The identical twins live in Ardmore, Oklahoma, about fourteen miles away from each other. They both drive Toyota Tacoma pickup trucks. When I spoke to Jerry one summer Friday, he was waiting for Terry to help him pull his tractor out of the mud.

But the Thompson brothers have less in common outside of their DNA. “You can talk to us just briefly and know right off we’re two different personalities,” Jerry says. “I’m an on-time guy; he’s a late guy. I’m real picky about the inside of my truck; he throws his trash down on his floorboard.” Growing up in Southern California in a family of six children, they battled for supremacy. Their father bought them boxing gloves when they were two years old, and they’re still going at it. “He pushes my buttons,” Jerry says about Terry. “When we fight, he always lets me know how intelligent he is. He’s eight minutes older than I am, and you can tell ’cause he’s got his master’s, and I have a little associate’s degree.” Jerry is retired now, while Terry runs a business making and selling jerky.

Another difference between the brothers is that Jerry went to Vietnam. They both joined the Marine Corps after high school. “It was more or less to fight for our country,” Jerry says. “We had military on both sides of the family, so I couldn’t have been a draft dodger, and I didn’t really know enough about war to be one anyway.” But only Jerry was sent to war. He arrived in Vietnam on June 3, 1970. Seven weeks later, he got caught in an ambush. He was shot in his right arm and riddled with shrapnel. “They threw one grenade at me and blew me into the air, and then another blew me backwards.” He spent five weeks recovering and received a Purple Heart. Then he went back into combat. “You don’t know how much of an animal you turn into,” he says. “I cut some ears off and scalped some dudes.”

Jerry was sent back the States nine months after he left. His ear collection got confiscated at the Da Nang airport. When he got back to California, he moved home. But his parents couldn’t understand him. “I was in a different world when I came home.” He quit a series of jobs and then dropped out of college, too. Then he got married and divorced. “I couldn’t communicate with her or nobody else,” Jerry says. “I’m still sorta that way. That’s probably why I live out in the country and stay to myself. I got sorta numb.”

In 1975, Jerry was diagnosed with Vietnam Stress Syndrome. But no one seemed to know how to help him. After a bad experience at a veterans’ hospital in Waco, Texas, he didn’t seek out help again until 1992. He joined a program for vets with posttraumatic stress disorder, as it’s now called, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He drove two hours there and back for six weeks because he was finally getting the treatment he needed.