Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (32 page)

At that point, Olian was just halfway there. He’d been in the water for about fifteen minutes. If it took another fifteen minutes to get to them, and it would probably take more since he was exhausted now, what would he do next? If he somehow summoned the strength to carry even one of them back across the football-field length of water, it would take yet another thirty minutes at least. Realistically, there was no way his body—or the survivors—could last another forty-five minutes in that water. He remembers staring at the tail section of the plane and noticing how smooth it was. Even if he made it out there, there might be nothing to hold on to, he thought. “I was pretty sure I was gonna die,” Olian says in a quiet voice. “But that was OK. I had an internal calm and good feeling about that. I was not going to turn my back on those folks.”

Stiley and Olian both felt the helicopter before they saw it. The
whoomp, whoomp
of the blades broke through the sky like thunder. That afternoon, the Park Police helicopter had been grounded at its home base a few miles away. Chief pilot Donald Usher had ruled out flying in the storm conditions—until he got the call from the airport about a downed plane. He and rescue technician Melvin Windsor decided to lift off. Flying in a near whiteout with periods of freezing rain, Usher and Windsor found their way to the bridge by following the roadways below.

Olian watched the chopper get closer. “I knew instinctively that this was a Vietnam pilot,” he says, smiling. “Because those guys, they were great. They would do anything.” The windshield was iced over and the helicopter’s downdraft was blowing debris dangerously close to the rotor system. But Usher, indeed a Vietnam veteran, delicately lowered the chopper toward the water.

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.”

So are heroes accidental? Is Olian a mutation, genetically speaking? And what about cases of even more extreme risk-taking? There have been Carnegie Heroes who could not swim—but who jumped into bodies of water to save people anyway. Some of them died doing it. Is this not insanity, from a natural selection point of view?

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.