THERE WERE SIX OF THEM, FIVE YOUNG MEN AND ONE woman, dressed in brand-new desert camo and pristine combat boots, posing for a cell-phone photo at the terminal gate. They were the sort of soldiers you see everywhere in American airports these days: Guys with Oakley shades perched atop freshly shaved heads, women with hair tucked inside their caps, moving purposefully and a little furtively, separate from everyone else.
Their expressions seemed both confident and a little edgy. No one knows what the future holds, but it is seldom as obvious or meaningful as when a person sets off for armed conflict. From that moment on, anything can happen. The soldiers were documenting a true departure, the beginning of a very personal and potentially fatal group experiment: This is us leaving Atlanta, leaving the known world behind.
The scene has been repeated, in various incarnations, for as long as people have been going off to war. It would have been much the same for Romulus Tolbert, a soldier I was trailing, nearly a century and a half after the fact. In the fall of 1863, Tolbert was waiting with his fellow soldiers in the Indianapolis train station, in his own crisp uniform and unsullied boots, preparing to ship off to the American Civil War. He was about to step across a similar threshold, and he faced the same basic question: Will I make it back? He had no way of knowing how bad things would get, which was probably just as well.
I came across Tolbert’s story while researching a comparatively obscure historical episode that had made the local news two decades before, when a farmer and a Memphis lawyer reported finding what they believed to be the remains of a steamboat known as the Sultana buried beneath an Arkansas soybean field. The Sultana saga was by then largely forgotten, despite its epic proportions and the fact that it branched off into a network of intriguing subplots, one of which concerned Tolbert. The interwoven stories of the Sultana disaster have a lot to say about human survival, and they are particularly attractive to those of us eating frozen yogurt in Concourse E. They show us what a full onslaught is like, with everything the Fates can throw at you.
The Sultana disaster was remarkable primarily for its magnitude. More than seventeen hundred people died after the grossly overloaded boat exploded, burned, and sank in the flooded Mississippi River at the end of the Civil War, making it the worst maritime disaster in American history. It also represented the climax of a series of momentous trials for most of those aboard, including Tolbert, his friend John Maddox, and, among the more than two thousand recently released Union prisoners of war, two others from the same region of Indiana, J. Walter Elliott and Perry Summerville. Aside from Tolbert and Maddox, these four men had not crossed paths before the war.
Looking back now, when their lives can be considered of a piece, it is clear that they and most of the other Sultana survivors were capable of enduring almost anything, and for an extended period of time. The bar was continually being raised. At each level they watched stronger, smarter, and seemingly luckier people disappear from the frame. It would have been nice if they could have known that the bullets piercing the air at Chickamauga would not find them, that the diseases they suffered in prison would eventually abate, and that they could wake up on a burning boat on a flooded river and somehow make it to shore, but they could not know what the future held, nor how much they could survive. Only in looking back can the results of their experiment be known.
Survival is not an achievement. It is a process, and it is impossible to know, at any given moment, where you are in that process. The soldiers in the Atlanta airport could (or might) have been embarking on an uneventful tour, a dramatic sidebar of the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, set to an iPod soundtrack of Drowning Pool and Ludacris songs, or they might have been on their way to getting their throats slit, live on a streaming Internet video, and it would have been much the same for the soldiers aboard the Sultana. Even before they boarded the boat, Tolbert and most of the other recently paroled prisoners had burned through their reserves of physical, mental, and emotional calories in what was essentially a phased experiment in human survival, the results of which would not be revealed for decades, until the last of them lay on their deathbeds as old men. By the time the Sultana went down, they had endured pretty much everything the world can throw at you: Violence, deprivation, sickness, humiliation, loss of friends and brothers, betrayal by their own country and in some cases their own countrymen. All that was left was the specter of a sudden and complete disaster, and soon that came, too. At no point did they know the logarithm of their survival. The dangers were diffuse. Even after the disaster, they knew only that a crowning blow had been delivered at the precise moment when they had every reason to believe they had left their troubles behind. Under the circumstances, their survival must have come as something of a surprise, and even after they made it to shore, it would have been hard to breathe a sigh of relief.
A body and brain under extreme duress go through all sorts of chemical transformations, which influence how a person responds and, to varying degrees, what happens next. Faced with a mortal threat, an otherwise normal life can become so magnified, so pixilated that it may be hard to remember what it was like before or to imagine how it will be afterward, to even clearly recall that day in the Atlanta airport or in the Indianapolis train station when your boots were untainted by mud and blood, and when survival was just an idea for the very last time.