WAR MAKES YOU AN ANIMAL

LIKE A LOT OF BOYS I PLAYED WAR WHEN I WAS YOUNG, and like a lot of men I retained an intense and abiding curiosity about it. And like a lot of people, my family was deeply affected by war and probably wouldn’t have existed without it. One of my mother’s ancestors emigrated from Germany in order to fight in the American Revolution and was given a land grant in Ohio in return. His last name was Grimm; he was related to the great folklorists who recorded German fairy tales. One of Grimm’s descendants married into another frontier family, the Carrolls, who were almost wiped out by Indians during a raid on their remote Pennsylvania homestead in 1781. The Carroll wife managed to hide in a cornfield with her four-year-old son, James, while the Indians killed her two teenage sons and her dog. The husband was off in town that day. I’m descended from James.

My father was half Jewish and grew up in Europe. He was thirteen when his family fled the Spanish Civil War and settled in Paris, and seventeen when they left Paris ahead of the German army and emigrated to the United States. He tried to sign up for military service but was turned down due to asthma, so he eventually helped the war effort by working on jet engines in Paterson, New Jersey. Later he got a degree in fluid mechanics and worked on submarine design. When I turned eighteen I received my selective service card in the mail, in case the United States needed to draft me, and I declared that I wasn’t going to sign it. The Vietnam War had just ended and every adult I knew had been against it. I had no problem, personally, with fighting a war; I just didn’t trust my government to send me to one that was completely necessary.

My father’s reaction surprised me. Vietnam had made him vehemently antiwar, so I expected him to applaud my decision, but instead he told me that American soldiers had saved the world from fascism during World War II and that thousands of young Americans were buried in his homeland of France. “You don’t owe your country nothing,” I remember him telling me. “You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life.”

The way my father put it completely turned the issue around for me: suddenly the draft card wasn’t so much an obligation as a chance to be part of something bigger than myself. And he’d made it clear that if the United States embarked on a war that I felt was wrong, I could always refuse to go; in his opinion, protesting an immoral war was just as honorable as fighting a moral one. Either way, he made it clear that my country needed help protecting the principles and ideals that I’d benefited from my entire life.

In many tribal societies, young men had to prove themselves by undergoing initiation rites that demonstrated their readiness for adulthood. In some tribes, such as the Mara of northern Australia, the tests were so brutal that initiates occasionally died. Those who refused or failed these tests weren’t considered men and led their lives in a kind of gender twilight. Modern society obviously doesn’t conduct initiations on its young men, but many boys still do their best to demonstrate their readiness for manhood in all kinds of clumsy and dangerous ways. They drive too fast, get into fights, haze each other, play sports, join fraternities, drink too much, and gamble with their lives in a million idiotic ways. Girls generally don’t take those kinds of risks, and as a result, boys in modern society die by violence and accidents at many times the rate that girls do. These deaths can be thought of as one generation after another trying to run their own initiation rites because they live in a society that no longer does that for them. To the extent that boys are drawn to war, it may be less out of an interest in violence than a longing for the kind of maturity and respect that often come with it.

That, at any rate, was how I came to understand my own curiosity about combat when I was young. That was how I came to understand why I found myself, broke and directionless, on the tarmac of the Sarajevo airport at age thirty-one, listening to the tapping of machine-gun fire in a nearby suburb named Dobrinja.

Sarajevo was under siege by Serb forces that had overrun most of Bosnia during the civil war that started when the former Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991. I had almost no experience as a journalist, but going to a war was surprisingly easy: I flew to Vienna, took a train to Zagreb, and pulled into a station that had field guns lined up on flatbed carriages and soldiers standing around with long knives in their belts. It was a soft summer night and the atmosphere felt electric—exactly what I’d been looking for since I was a teenager. I took the same backpack that I’d had out West a decade earlier, and in it I’d put a block of field notebooks, a box of pens, a manual typewriter, and a change of clothes. I’d heard there was no electricity in Sarajevo, so the typewriter would guarantee that I could always write and file assignments if I were lucky enough to get any. I also had a sleeping bag and a letter from a magazine editor whom I’d convinced to vouch for me so that I could at least get a press pass when I arrived.

I eventually got into Sarajevo on a UN relief flight from Italy. Sarajevo had once been a gorgeous Hapsburg-era city filled with cafés, art galleries, and theaters, but now it was sweltering in the July heat and permeated by the smell of burning garbage. Destroyed cars littered intersections where street battles had taken place, and almost every building was spattered with shrapnel. The bombed-out Oslobodjenje newspaper building oozed its guts out a lower floor as if someone had just pulled a huge plug on the inside. People hired taxis to drive close to the front lines so they could talk by radio to friends on the other side, who were also in taxis. At night the city was completely, absolutely dark and you could walk through it as if you were the only human left on earth. During the day, the streets were filled with people carrying jugs of water or dragging branches for firewood or walking to work in their office clothes, some semblance of life the way it was before. Open areas around apartment buildings had been planted with summer vegetables, and there was even a little turbine made out of tin cans and a bicycle wheel in the Miljacka River that could charge a car battery in a day.

The city stretched east to west along a narrow valley surrounded by mountains, and once the Serbs took the high ground—which they did almost immediately—it was close to indefensible. Tanks could drill buildings with flat-trajectory shots that easily punched through exterior walls, and mortars shrieked down into places, like courtyards, that seemed otherwise protected. Snipers took up positions on the steep hillsides south of the Miljacka and around the nearly encircled suburb of Dobrinja and dropped civilians at will. It was not uncommon to see the body of an older person crumpled in the street with a bullet in their forehead and the contents of a shopping bag spilled out over the pavement. A public spectacle until dark, when someone could run out and pull the body off the street.

The Serbs controlled every road out of the city and most of the mountaintops around it and allowed just enough food in to keep people alive. The Serb mafia did business across the front lines with the Sarajevo mafia—who also fought to defend the city—and both made an enormous amount of money. A main road that ran the length of the city was so exposed to gunfire that it became known as Sniper Alley. The few people with cars drove at seventy miles an hour on gas that cost fifty dollars a gallon, and still, many of them didn’t make it. A year into the siege the Bosnians dug a tunnel under no-man’s-land at the airport, but until then, the only way out of the city was to sprint across the runway past Serb machine-gun positions. A lot of those people didn’t make it, either. Every morning, French UN troops at the airport would drive out in armored personnel carriers to pick up the bodies.

Over the course of the three-year siege almost 70,000 people were killed or wounded by Serb forces shooting into the city—roughly 20 percent of the population. The United Nations estimated that half of the children in the city had seen someone killed in front of them, and about one in five had lost a family member in the war. People intentionally exposed themselves to snipers just to be put out of their misery. One year into the siege, just before I got to the city, a teenage couple walked into no-man’s-land along the Miljacka River, trying to cross into a Serb-held area. They were quickly gunned down, the young man falling first and the woman crawling over to him as she died. He was a Serb and she was a Muslim, and they had been in love all through high school. They lay there for days because the area was too dangerous for anyone to retrieve their bodies.

I saw a lot of strange things in that city, the kinds of contortions that only war can bring to a people, but maybe the most startling was this: a middle-aged man in a business suit crouched over some small project in the courtyard of a modern high-rise. The building could have been any bank or insurance company in Europe, except that the windows were blown out and the walls were scarred with shrapnel. I looked closer and saw that the man was arranging dead twigs into a pile. When he was done, he positioned an aluminum pot on top of the pile and lit the twigs with a cigarette lighter. Then he stood up and looked at me.

If there’s an image of the Apocalypse, I thought, it might be a man in a business suit building a fire in the courtyard of an abandoned high-rise. In different circumstances it could be any of us, anywhere, but it had happened to him here, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. I nodded to him and he nodded back and then I left him in peace.

The one thing that might be said for societal collapse is that—for a while at least—everyone is equal. In 1915 an earthquake killed 30,000 people in Avezzano, Italy, in less than a minute. The worst-hit areas had a mortality rate of 96 percent. The rich were killed along with the poor, and virtually everyone who survived was immediately thrust into the most basic struggle for survival: they needed food, they needed water, they needed shelter, and they needed to rescue the living and bury the dead. In that sense, plate tectonics under the town of Avezzano managed to re-create the communal conditions of our evolutionary past quite well. “An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain,” one of the survivors wrote. “The equality of all men.”

As Thomas Paine labored to articulate his goals for a free society, he could have easily taken his inspiration from earthquake survivors instead of from the American Indians. Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals. (Despite erroneous news reports, New Orleans experienced a drop in crime rates after Hurricane Katrina, and much of the “looting” turned out to be people looking for food.) The kinds of community-oriented behaviors that typically occur after a natural disaster are exactly the virtues that Paine was hoping to promote in his revolutionary tracts.

The question of societal breakdown in the face of calamity suddenly became urgent in the run-up to World War II, when the world powers were anticipating aerial bombardments deliberately calculated to cause mass hysteria in the cities. English authorities, for example, predicted that German attacks would produce 35,000 casualties a day in London alone (total civilian casualties for the country were not even twice that). No one knew how a civilian population would react to that kind of trauma, but the Churchill government assumed the worst. So poor was their opinion of the populace—particularly the working-class people of East London—that emergency planners were reluctant to even build public bomb shelters because they worried people would move into them and simply never move out. Economic production would plummet and the shelters themselves, it was feared, would become a breeding ground for political dissent and even Communism.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. “We would really have all gone down onto the beaches with broken bottles,” one woman remembered of the public’s determination to fight the Germans. “We would have done anything—anything—to stop them.” On September 7, 1940, German bombers started hitting London in earnest and did not let up until the following May. For fifty-seven consecutive days, waves of German bombers flew over London and dropped thousands of tons of high explosives directly into residential areas, killing hundreds of people at a time. Throughout the Blitz, as it was known, many Londoners trudged to work in the morning, trudged across town to shelters or tube stations in the evening, and then trudged back to work again when it got light. Conduct was so good in the shelters that volunteers never even had to summon the police to maintain order. If anything, the crowd policed themselves according to unwritten rules that made life bearable for complete strangers jammed shoulder to shoulder on floors that were at times awash in urine.

“Ten thousand people had come together without ties of friendship or economics, with no plans at all as to what they meant to do,” one man wrote about life in a massive concrete structure known as Tilbury Shelter. “They found themselves, literally overnight, inhabitants of a vague twilight town of strangers. At first there were no rules, rewards or penalties, no hierarchy or command. Almost immediately, ‘laws’ began to emerge—laws enforced not by police and wardens (who at first proved helpless in the face of such multitudes) but by the shelterers themselves.”

Eight million men, women, and children in Greater London endured the kind of aerial bombardment that even soldiers are rarely subjected to. Often the badly wounded were just given morphine and left to die in the rubble while rescue crews moved on to people they thought they could save. The tempo of the bombing was so intense, one woman recalled, that it sounded like an enormous marching band stomping around the city. Another recounted being flattened by an explosion and finding herself “clutching the floor as if it were a cliff face that I had to hang onto.” A food manufacturing plant named Hartley’s was bombed and the dead were carried out covered in marmalade. A hat factory was hit and the dead were brought out bristling with sewing needles. One underground shelter took a direct hit and 600 people were killed instantly. Another was hit by a bomb that severed a water main, and more than 100 people died when their shelter flooded in minutes.

On and on the horror went, people dying in their homes or neighborhoods while doing the most mundane things. Not only did these experiences fail to produce mass hysteria, they didn’t even trigger much individual psychosis. Before the war, projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down. Emergency services in London reported an average of only two cases of “bomb neuroses” a week. Psychiatrists watched in puzzlement as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids. Voluntary admissions to psychiatric wards noticeably declined, and even epileptics reported having fewer seizures. “Chronic neurotics of peacetime now drive ambulances,” one doctor remarked. Another ventured to suggest that some people actually did better during wartime.

The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped. Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty during both world wars, and that remained true even as the German army rolled into the city in 1940. Researchers documented a similar phenomenon during civil wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. An Irish psychologist named H. A. Lyons found that suicide rates in Belfast dropped 50 percent during the riots of 1969 and 1970, and homicide and other violent crimes also went down. Depression rates for both men and women declined abruptly during that period, with men experiencing the most extreme drop in the most violent districts. County Derry, on the other hand—which suffered almost no violence at all—saw male depression rates rise rather than fall. Lyons hypothesized that men in the peaceful areas were depressed because they couldn’t help their society by participating in the struggle.

“When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health,” Lyons wrote in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 1979. “It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.”

During the London Blitz, the sheer regularity of the air raids seemed to provide its own weird reassurance, and the intense racket of the antiaircraft batteries—however ineffective—helped keep Londoners from feeling completely vulnerable. The total amount of beer consumed in the city did not change much, and neither did the rate of church attendance. People did resort to superstition and magic, however, carrying talismans or sprigs of heather and refusing, for some reason, to wear green. One woman felt that the Germans were targeting her specifically and would go out only if she could blend into a crowd. Another man found his service pistol from the First World War and tried to teach his wife how to kill Germans with it. Men reported smoking more. Women reported feeling depressed more—though statistically, they attempted suicide less. In March 1941, perhaps in an attempt to demystify the enemy, British authorities deposited a German Junkers 88 dive bomber in one of the most severely damaged neighborhoods of Plymouth. The plane sat there—unlabeled, unguarded, and unexplained—while citizens wandered up to examine it and observers quietly took notes.

“The overwhelming effect was of mild pleasure, interest, and relief,” one researcher noted of people’s reactions. “Men were more interested in the material, engine, craftsmanship, all of which were elaborately praised. Women noticed especially the size. Some evidently thought of an enemy bomber as a remote thing, a specter in the sky… the reality was somehow reassuring, almost friendly.”

The reactions of thousands of civilians to the stresses of war were recorded in detail by something known as Mass-Observation, which was a mostly volunteer corps of Britons who were asked to observe their countrymen “as if they were birds.” Some volunteers went out every day and wrote down everything they saw or heard; others were told to keep journals and to fill out questionnaires about their experiences and feelings. The project proved controversial because it documented what was already obvious: the air raids failed to trigger the kind of mass hysteria that government officials had predicted. That, ironically, was an unwelcome bit of news once the tide of war had turned and Allied forces adopted the same strategy of apocalyptic air raids against the Germans.

The Blitz, as bad as it was, paled in comparison to what the Allies did. Dresden lost more people in one night than London did during the entire war. Firestorms engulfed whole neighborhoods and used up so much oxygen that people who were untouched by the blasts reportedly died of asphyxiation instead. Fully a third of the German population was subjected to bombardment, and around one million people were killed or wounded. American analysts based in England monitored the effects of the bombing to see if any cracks began to appear in the German resolve, and to their surprise found exactly the opposite: the more the Allies bombed, the more defiant the German population became. Industrial production actually rose in Germany during the war. And the cities with the highest morale were the ones—like Dresden—that were bombed the hardest. According to German psychologists who compared notes with their American counterparts after the war, it was the untouched cities where civilian morale suffered the most. Thirty years later, H. A. Lyons would document an almost identical phenomenon in riot-torn Belfast.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey posted observers in England to evaluate the effectiveness of their strategy, and one of them, Charles Fritz, became an open critic of the rationale behind the bombing campaign. Intrigued by the fact that in both England and Germany, civilian resilience had risen in response to the air raids, Fritz went on to complete a more general study of how communities respond to calamity. After the war he turned his attention to natural disasters in the United States and formulated a broad theory about social resilience. He was unable to find a single instance where communities that had been hit by catastrophic events lapsed into sustained panic, much less anything approaching anarchy. If anything, he found that social bonds were reinforced during disasters, and that people overwhelmingly devoted their energies toward the good of the community rather than just themselves.

In 1961, Fritz assembled his ideas into a lengthy paper that began with the startling sentence, “Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?” His data was compiled by a team of twenty-five researchers who worked for the National Opinion Research Center, based at the University of Chicago. Their job was to rush to disaster sites and interview the inhabitants about how they were adapting to their new circumstances; by 1959, NORC researchers had compiled roughly 9,000 survivor interviews. Fritz also scoured academic publications for anything related to natural or man-made disasters. His study was conducted during the height of the Cold War, when the Russian nuclear threat was foremost in the minds of civil defense planners. Never mentioned in the report—though impossible to ignore—is the possibility that the study was intended to assess whether the United States could continue to function after a nuclear exchange with Russia.

Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group. It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that, Fritz felt, is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from mental illness.

Fritz’s conclusions were later borne out in a study of the city of Yungay, in central Chile, which was struck by a devastating earthquake and rockslide on May 31, 1970. Ninety percent of the population of Yungay died almost instantly, and 70,000 people were killed throughout the region—roughly equivalent to a nuclear strike on that area. The rockslide that buried the city put so much dust into the air that helicopters couldn’t land, and the survivors of Yungay were left completely on their own for days. Into this terrifying vacuum, a new social order quickly sprang up. “Concepts of individual private property temporarily submerged,” anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith later wrote in his paper “Brotherhood of Pain.” “The crisis also had an immediate status-leveling effect on the nascent community of survivors it had created. A sense of brotherhood… prevailed as Indian and mestizo, lower and upper class, collaborated in the collective efforts to obtain immediate necessities and survive.”

As soon as relief flights began delivering aid to the area, class divisions returned and the sense of brotherhood disappeared. The modern world had arrived.

If there are phrases that characterize the life of our early ancestors, “community of sufferers” and “brotherhood of pain” surely must come close. Their lives were probably less labor-intensive than lives in modern society, as demonstrated by the !Kung, but the mortality rate would have been much higher. The advantages of group cooperation would include far more effective hunting and defense, and groups that failed to function cooperatively must have gradually died out. Adaptive behavior tends to be reinforced hormonally, emotionally, and culturally, and one can see all three types of adaptation at work in people who act on behalf of others.

Humans are so strongly wired to help one another—and enjoy such enormous social benefits from doing so—that people regularly risk their lives for complete strangers. That risk-taking tends to express itself in very different ways in men and in women. Men perform the vast majority of bystander rescues, and children, the elderly, and women are the most common recipients of them. Children are helped regardless of gender, as are the elderly, but women of reproductive age are twice as likely to be helped by a stranger than men are. Men have to wait, on average, until age seventy-five before they can expect the same kind of assistance in a life-threatening situation that women get their whole lives. Given the disproportionately high value of female reproduction to any society, risking male lives to save female lives makes enormous evolutionary sense. According to a study based on a century of records at the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, male bystanders performed more than 90 percent of spontaneous rescues of strangers, and around one in five were killed in the attempt. (“Hero” is generally defined as risking your life to save non-kin from mortal danger. The resulting mortality rate is higher than for most US combat units.) Researchers theorize that greater upper-body strength and a predominantly male personality trait known as “impulsive sensation seeking” lead men to overwhelmingly dominate this form of extreme caretaking.

But women are more likely than men to display something called moral courage. The Righteous Among the Nations is an award given to non-Jews who helped save Jewish lives during the Holocaust and by its very nature selects for people who have a deep moral conviction about right and wrong. In Poland, the Netherlands, and France, providing refuge to Jews who were trying to evade the German authorities was a crime punishable by death, and while the decision to do so didn’t require the same kind of muscular action that men excel at, it could be just as deadly.

There are more than 20,000 names in the Righteous Among the Nations records, and an analysis conducted in 2004 found that if married couples are excluded, women slightly outnumber men in the list of people who risked their lives to help Jews. The greater empathic concern women demonstrate for others may lead them to take positions on moral or social issues that men are less likely to concern themselves with. Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows about it—donating more kidneys to nonrelatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment’s notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group.

In late 2015, a bus in eastern Kenya was stopped by gunmen from an extremist group named Al-Shabaab that made a practice of massacring Christians as part of a terrorism campaign against the Western-aligned Kenyan government. The gunmen demanded that Muslim and Christian passengers separate themselves into two groups so that the Christians could be killed, but the Muslims—most of whom were women—refused to do it. They told the gunmen that they would all die together if necessary, but that the Christians would not be singled out for execution. The Shabaab eventually let everyone go.

Sexual division of risk-taking would seem to suit the human race particularly well. We evolved, and continue to exist, in a physical world that assaults us with threats, but we also depend on a strong sense of morality and social justice to keep our communities intact. And intact communities are far more likely to survive than fragmented ones. When a woman gives shelter to a family because she doesn’t want to raise her children in a world where people can be massacred because of their race or their beliefs, she is taking a huge risk but also promoting the kind of moral thinking that has clearly kept hominid communities glued together for hundreds of thousands of years. It is exactly the same kind of altruistic choice—with all the attendant risks and terrors—that a man makes when he runs into a burning building to save someone else’s children. Both are profound acts of selflessness that distinguish us from all other mammals, including the higher primates that we are so closely related to.

The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good. Protected by police and fire departments and relieved of most of the challenges of survival, an urban man might go through his entire life without having to come to the aid of someone in danger—or even give up his dinner. Likewise, a woman in a society that has codified its moral behavior into a set of laws and penalties might never have to make a choice that puts her very life at risk. What would you risk dying for—and for whom—is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss. It is a loss because having to face that question has, for tens of millennia, been one of the ways that we have defined ourselves as people. And it is a blessing because life has gotten far less difficult and traumatic than it was for most people even a century ago.

The gender differentiation of courage during life-and-death situations is so vital to group survival that it seems to get duplicated even within same-sex groups. Like most dangerous jobs, coal mining is an almost exclusively male activity that generally draws its workers from a particularly undereducated, blue-collar population. Disasters happen with appalling regularity in the industry, and when they do, groups of men are often trapped miles underground for days or weeks at a time. These incidents have offered social scientists a way to examine how men react to danger and organize themselves to maximize their chances of survival.

At 8:05 on the evening of October 23, 1958, the Springhill Mine in Nova Scotia experienced what coal miners know as a “bump”: a sudden contraction and settling of sedimentary layers deep underground that generates the forces of a massive explosion throughout the complex. Springhill was one of the deepest coal mines in the world, and the bump of 1958 was so powerful that it was felt 800 miles away. There were 174 men in the mine at the time, and 74 were killed immediately as strata compressed and the passageways collapsed. Of the survivors, 81 men were able to make their way to safety and 19 found themselves trapped more than 12,000 feet down the mine shafts. Several were badly injured, and two were pinned by debris and unable to move.

The men had almost no food or water and only a few days’ worth of battery power in their headlamps. There was a group of six miners in one area, a group of twelve in another, and a lone miner who was partially buried at a third location. There was no contact between the groups and no way for them to communicate with the outside world. Within minutes of the bump, off-duty miners and specially trained draegermen were converging on the mine. Draegermen wear gas masks and breathing apparatus—invented by a German named Alexander Dräger—that allow them to survive the methane and carbon dioxide gas that seep out of coal strata. Another group, “barefaced miners,” can work harder and faster than the draegermen but have to be confined to areas that don’t have any gas.

The rescuers began digging their way through the collapsed passageways, working in spaces so cramped that they were forced to cut the handles off their pickaxes in order to swing them. Even a strong man could last no more than three or four minutes on a pickax in such circumstances, so they worked in four-man teams and kept rotating positions so that “the pick never stopped,” as one report put it. After several days, they started digging past the crushed bodies of dead miners. The effect of encountering a putrefying body in the close confines of the passageways was devastating, and almost everyone vomited when they encountered one. Often the dead were known personally to the men who were digging them out. Some rescuers couldn’t take the psychological trauma and asked to be taken off the job, and others were able to suppress their reactions and continue digging. There was no dishonor for those who couldn’t take it and tremendous admiration for those who could.

“The miners’ code of rescue meant that each trapped miner had the knowledge that he would never be buried alive if it were humanly possible for his friends to reach him,” a 1960 study called Individual and Group Behavior in a Coal Mine Disaster explained. “At the same time, the code was not rigid enough to ostracize those who could not face the rescue role.”

Meanwhile, two miles down the mine shaft, nineteen men sat in absolute darkness trying to figure out what to do. One of the groups included a man whose arm had been pinned between two timbers, and, out of earshot, the others discussed whether to amputate it or not. The man kept begging them to, but they decided against it and he eventually died. Both groups ran out of food and water and started to drink their own urine. Some used coal dust or bark from the timbers to mask the taste. Some were so hungry that they tried to eat chunks of coal as well. There was an unspoken prohibition against crying, though some men allowed themselves to quietly break down after the lamps died, and many of them avoided thinking about their families. Mostly they just thought about neutral topics like hunting. One man obsessed over the fact that he owed $1.40 for a car part and hoped his wife would pay it after he died.

Almost immediately, certain men stepped into leadership roles. While there was still lamplight, these men scouted open passageways to see if they could escape and tried to dig through rockfalls that were blocking their path. When they ran out of water, one man went in search of more and managed to find a precious gallon, which he distributed to the others. These men were also instrumental in getting their fellow survivors to start drinking their own urine or trying to eat coal. Canadian psychologists who interviewed the miners after their rescue determined that these early leaders tended to lack empathy and emotional control, that they were not concerned with the opinions of others, that they associated with only one or two other men in the group, and that their physical abilities far exceeded their verbal abilities. But all of these traits allowed them to take forceful, life-saving action where many other men might not.

Once the escape attempts failed, different kinds of leaders emerged. In what researchers termed the “survival period,” the ability to wait in complete darkness without giving up hope or succumbing to panic became crucial. Researchers determined that the leaders during this period were entirely focused on group morale and used skills that were diametrically opposed to those of the men who had led the escape attempts. They were highly sensitive to people’s moods, they intellectualized things in order to meet group needs, they reassured the men who were starting to give up hope, and they worked hard to be accepted by the entire group.

Without exception, men who were leaders during one period were almost completely inactive during the other; no one, it seemed, was suited to both roles. These two kinds of leaders more or less correspond to the male and female roles that emerge spontaneously in open society during catastrophes such as earthquakes or the Blitz. They reflect an ancient duality that is masked by the ease and safety of modern life but that becomes immediately apparent when disasters strike. If women aren’t present to provide the empathic leadership that every group needs, certain men will do it. If men aren’t present to take immediate action in an emergency, women will step in. (Almost all the female Carnegie Hero award recipients acted in situations where there were no men present.) To some degree the sexes are interchangeable—meaning they can easily be substituted for one another—but gender roles aren’t. Both are necessary for the healthy functioning of society, and those roles will always be filled regardless of whether both sexes are available to do it.

The coming-together that societies often experience during catastrophes is usually temporary, but sometimes the effect can last years or even decades. British historians have linked the hardships of the Blitz—and the social unity that followed—to a landslide vote that brought the Labour Party into power in 1945 and eventually gave the United Kingdom national health care and a strong welfare state. The Blitz hit after years of poverty in England, and both experiences served to bind the society together in ways that rejected the primacy of business interests over the welfare of the people. That era didn’t end until the wartime generation started to fade out and Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979. “In every upheaval we rediscover humanity and regain freedoms,” one sociologist wrote about England’s reaction to the war. “We relearn some old truths about the connection between happiness, unselfishness, and the simplification of living.”

What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.

Twenty years after the end of the siege of Sarajevo, I returned to find people talking a little sheepishly about how much they longed for those days. More precisely, they longed for who they’d been back then. Even my taxi driver on the ride from the airport told me that during the war, he’d been in a special unit that slipped through the enemy lines to help other besieged enclaves. “And now look at me,” he said, dismissing the dashboard with a wave of his hand.

For a former soldier to miss the clarity and importance of his wartime duty is one thing, but for civilians to is quite another. “Whatever I say about war, I still hate it,” one survivor, Nidžara Ahmetašević, made sure to tell me after I’d interviewed her about the nostalgia of her generation. “I do miss something from the war. But I also believe that the world we are living in—and the peace that we have—is very fucked up if somebody is missing war. And many people do.”

Ahmetašević is now a prominent Bosnian journalist who has dedicated her life to understanding the war crimes that blossomed all around her when she was young. She was seventeen when the war broke out, and within weeks had been hit by shrapnel from an artillery round that crashed into her parents’ apartment. She was rushed to the hospital and underwent reconstructive surgery to her severely damaged leg without anesthesia. (“They hold you down and you scream,” she said when I asked about the pain. “That helps.”) The hospital was overflowing with wounded—they were laid out in the toilets, in the hallways, in the entranceways—and the staff didn’t even have the time to change blood-soaked sheets after people died. They just loaded the next person onto the bed and continued working. The first night, an old woman died next to Ahmetašević and somehow rolled onto her in her final agonies. Ahmetašević woke in the morning to find the woman on top of her, the first of many bodies she would see during the war.

After two weeks Ahmetašević was finally sent back to her parents’ apartment on crutches and resumed what passed as normal life during wartime. Her neighborhood had organized five apartment buildings—perhaps sixty families—into a huge cooperative that shared food and ovens and shelter. Vegetable gardens were planted around the buildings and everyone ate from the food they produced. Water was gathered individually from roof gutters or from hand pumps in town, but virtually everything else was shared. On her eighteenth birthday, Ahmetašević remembers being given a single egg by one of her neighbors. She couldn’t figure out how to share it with her friends, so she decided to use the egg to make pancakes so that everyone could have some.

The basement of one of the buildings was deep enough to serve as a bomb shelter, and teenagers from the neighborhood led a kind of communal life down there that was almost entirely separate from the adults above ground. The boys would go off to fight on the front line for ten days at a stretch and then return to join the girls, who lived down there full-time. Everyone slept on mattresses on the floor together and ate their meals together and fell in and out of love together and played music and talked about literature and joked about the war. “The boys were like our brothers,” Ahmetašević said. “It’s not like we girls were waiting for them and crying… no, we had a party. To be honest, it was a kind of liberation. The love that we shared was enormous. They’d come from the front lines and most of them were musicians and they would have small concerts for us. We didn’t believe in heroes. We were punk rockers. Our biggest hero was David Bowie.”

Six months into the siege, Ahmetašević’s parents managed to get her evacuated to Italy because they weren’t sure she was going to survive. She had lost a lot of weight after her surgery and never managed to put it back on. Although she was safe in Italy, and finally healing from her wounds, the loneliness she felt was unbearable. She was worried that if the war never stopped, everyone would be killed and she would be left alone in the world. She finally started trying to figure out how to get back into Sarajevo—something that almost no one did. From a bureaucratic standpoint it was even harder than getting out of the besieged city, but with her mother’s help, she finally did it. She flew into the blown-up, sandbagged airport and hitched a ride into town and back to her family.

“I missed being that close to people, I missed being loved in that way,” she told me. “In Bosnia—as it is now—we don’t trust each other anymore; we became really bad people. We didn’t learn the lesson of the war, which is how important it is to share everything you have with human beings close to you. The best way to explain it is that the war makes you an animal. We were animals. It’s insane—but that’s the basic human instinct, to help another human being who is sitting or standing or lying close to you.”

I asked Ahmetašević if people had ultimately been happier during the war.

“We were the happiest,” Ahmetašević said. Then she added: “And we laughed more.”