Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [112]
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
IN 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