Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [36]
As he huddled behind the sofa, the gunfight escalated. A bullet grazed the head of one of the female hostage-takers. But she kept shooting, blood streaming down her face. Another guerrilla fighter, a seventeen-year-old high school student standing near the front door in a green sweatsuit, took a bullet to the head and crumpled to the ground. Asencio stared at the boy’s head, covered in blood, and felt oddly detached. “It was unreal,” he says. “Here was this young man, dead, right in front of me, and it just seemed surrealistic somehow.”
This curious sense of aloofness, called “dissociation,” can feel subtle. In a study of 115 police officers involved in serious shootings, 90 percent reported having some kind of dissociative symptom—from numbing to a loss of awareness to memory problems. At its most extreme, dissociation can take the form of an out-of-body experience. That’s when people describe feeling as if they were watching themselves from above. The exact same phenomenon is reported by patients with epilepsy, depression, migraine, or schizophrenia, which tells us that the sensation probably has something to do with a breakdown in the brain’s ability to integrate a flood of data. (In at least one case, scientists have even been able to induce an out-of-body experience by electronically stimulating part of a patient’s brain.) Extreme dissociation seems to be the brain’s last line of defense, and it is particularly common among victims of childhood sexual abuse. “It’s a way to survive,” says Hanoch Yerushalmi, an Israeli psychologist who has worked with many victims of trauma. “People are saying, ‘You have my body, but you don’t have my soul.’” Like all defense mechanisms, dissociation exacts a cost. A series of studies has found that the more intense the dissociation during the crisis, the harder the recovery will be for the person who survives.
Asencio thinks the fiercest part of the gunfight went on for at least thirty minutes. But to this day, he’s not really sure how long it lasted. “It seemed interminable to me,” he says. As the shots became more sporadic, he could hear the groans of the casualties scattered around him. Continuing his internal dialogue (which psychologists call “self-talk”), he decided he would behave with honor, if he possibly could. “I knew there was no way I could return to my wife and children, to my friends and colleagues in the Foreign Service after collapsing in a heap and saying, ‘I can’t cut it.’” With that decision made, Asencio felt slightly better.
People in life-or-death situations often think of their children or how others will perceive them after the crisis is over. Gasping for air in turbulent seas or groping their way out of a burning plane, they hear the voices of their family members in their heads. Sometimes the voices are even mocking. In Guests of the Ayatollah, a book about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, writer Mark Bowden describes one Marine major’s conversation with himself as his helicopter curled into flames around him during a doomed rescue effort. The passage illustrates just how compelling these conjectures can be: “The pilot shut down the engines and sat for a moment, certain he was about to die. Then for some reason an image came into his mind of his fiancée’s father—a man who had always seemed none too impressed with his future pilot son-in-law—commenting during some future family meal about how the poor sap’s body had been found cooked like a holiday turkey in the front seat of his aircraft, and something about that horrifying image motivated him. His body would not be found like an overcooked Butterball; he had to at least try to escape.” He ejected from the window and ran, burning, from the wreckage.
In Colombia, the gunfire finally stopped altogether. The leader of the guerrillas gathered Asencio and the rest of the captives together. He was a serious young man with glasses who called himself “Commandante Uno.” He