To Do the Right Thing Fast
When I am angry I can pray well and preach well.
Martin Luther, Tischreden (Table Talk)
Lucky, what are you doing? Get your butt up here and let’s go!”
Heather “Lucky” Penney was a twenty-six-year-old D. C. Air National Guard lieutenant stationed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Jolted by urgency, she aborted the methodical checklist, climbed in, ignited the engines, and screamed for her ground crew to pull the wheel chocks. Within minutes the petite blonde was piloting the F-16 fighter jet screeching at top speed through the crystal-blue sky with her commander, Col. Marc Sasseville, piloting his own jet on her wing. The date was September 11, 2001.
Both of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had just been hit, but there was a fourth passenger jet commandeered by Islamic terrorists targeted at the United States Capitol or the White House.
Obviously Heather knew there was no chance that any of the men, women, and children on board the United Airlines 757 passenger jet she was intent on intercepting would survive. In an improbable twist of fate, there was a good chance that Heather Penney’s own father could be the captain on United Flight 93, which she was determined to destroy.
“This sounds coldhearted; I mean, that was my daddy,” Penney said in an interview afterward. “I couldn’t think about it. I had a job to do,” she said later to her mom.
“We don’t train to bring down airliners,” Colonel Sasseville said, describing the gut-wrenching, unthinkable act he and Heather Penney were about to commit.
Training would have been useless in any case. Neither of their jets was armed. No one had anticipated the need to have fully armed fighter jets at the ready to protect against an aerial attack originating from within the United States.
“I’m going to go for the cockpit,” Sasseville said.
“I’ll take the tail,” Penney replied without hesitation.
“I genuinely believed that this was going to be the last time I took off,” she said, now a single mom with two girls. “I had already given myself up, knowing what my duty was.” She was fully committed to ramming her jet into the passenger plane to bring it down.
As fate would have it, her father, Col. John Penney, was not piloting Flight UA 93 that morning; it was his good friend Jason Dahl. “With Jason on the plane, it would have been an additional level of grief,” John Penney said later.
But Lieutenant Penney and Colonel Sasseville never had to execute their kamikaze mission.
“Let’s roll!” said thirty-two-year-old Todd Beamer, a passenger on the hijacked flight. Those were the last words of the soon-to-be father ending his conversation with telephone switchboard operator Lisa Jefferson, whom he had been relaying information to for the last thirteen minutes of the hijacking. They had just finished reciting the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 together. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.”
Beamer and other passengers stormed the hijackers. Jeremy Glick was a six-foot-one judo champion; Mark Bingham was a rugby player; Tom Burnett had been a college quarterback, Louis Nacke was a weightlifter, and William Cashman was a former paratrooper. The cockpit recorder captures the sound of food carts ramming the cockpit door and the cries of the terrorists screaming at one another to hold the door closed.
The door bursts open. “Let’s get them!” is heard on the recording as the passengers overwhelm the terrorists.
“They were the true heroes,” Heather Penney says. “These were average, everyday Americans who gave their lives to save countless more. The selflessness reminds us that we are part of something greater than ourselves, that there are things in this world more important than ourselves.”
Today there is a memorial on the green pastures of southwestern Pennsylvania, and the White House and United States Capitol stand spared from destruction.
This is the power of the Tribe trigger to life-risking violence. Gangs, wars, and racism are its ugly dark side, but this bit of neural circuitry is very much a part of what makes us human. It can unleash the best in human nature; selfless sacrifice for others. It is the trigger of heroism, and as the monument now standing in the field in Pennsylvania reminds us, it is a vital part of every one of us.
—
“I believe it’s a human instinct. I didn’t weigh it or think about it. I just did it,” Leonard Skutnik said.
On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 took off from Washington National Airport on a miserably cold and snowy morning. Its wings laden with ice, the aircraft failed to gain altitude and the Boeing 737 passenger jet with seventy-four people on board crashed onto the Fourteenth Street Bridge, which spans the Potomac River. The aircraft crushed six cars, killing four motorists as it skidded off the bridge and crashed into the ice-covered river. The aircraft broke apart on impact and sank beneath the icy surface with everyone aboard strapped into their seats, but a piece of the tail section bobbed on the surface, slowly sinking with six passengers clinging to it for their life. The water temperature was one degree above freezing, which gave the hypothermic survivors, many of whom were badly injured, only thirty minutes at best to survive. Blocked by the fractured ice, rescue crews were unable to reach the survivors in inflatable rafts and they crowded helplessly along the shoreline. It took nineteen minutes for a rescue helicopter to arrive, leaving only about ten minutes to extract the six survivors from the Potomac.
The helicopter hovering above whipped the frigid, icy slush into a frothy gale as rescuers dangled a lifeline to the wreckage. Arland Williams Jr., a forty-six-year-old federal bank examiner, grasped the line with one hand while clinging to the aluminum tail section with his other, and he handed it to the woman next to him. She was hoisted to safety.
“He seemed sort of middle-aged and, uh, maybe balding,” was all the chopper pilot could describe afterward. Williams had spent the last twenty years sitting quietly in a bank office reviewing accounts. He was father to a teenage son and daughter, and he was his parents’ only child.
The life ring dropped again and once again it was Williams who grasped it. With only a few desperate minutes before all of them would perish of hypothermia, he passed the lifeline to another person.
Meanwhile, Lenny Skutnik, who had witnessed the crash while on his way home from his job in the Congressional Budget Office, had rushed to the site and was watching the desperate rescue in horror from the side of the bridge. Priscilla Tirado looped her numb arm through the life ring as rescuers tried to haul her to safety, but she was too badly injured, too cold and weak to hold on. She splashed back into the freezing water helplessly. The life ring was trailed back to within her reach again several times. Each time she made feeble attempts to hang on but failed. The last of her strength now fully sapped, she began to flounder and drown beneath the tempest driven by the helicopter blades hovering above her.
Leonard Skutnik tore off his warm winter coat, kicked off his winter boots, and plunged into the freezing water, kicking and splashing with all his strength to swim out to the stranger slipping beneath the surface in the middle of the Potomac River. Reaching her, he threw his arm around her and towed her back through the river currents and icy slush to safety on the shore, where he collapsed in exhaustion, shivering violently.
Flight attendant Kelly Duncan, who had given her own life vest to one of the passengers, and Arland Williams were the last survivors still clinging to the tail section of the wreckage. The helicopter returned and dropped the lifeline to them. Williams reached it and, for the third time, passed it on. He handed the life ring to Kelly and she was pulled to safety.
Returning immediately, the helicopter crew dropped the lifeline for the last time onto the tail section, but Williams was gone. He had slipped beneath the surface. When the bodies were recovered and examined at autopsy, Williams was the only one of the passengers to have water in his lungs. He had drowned saving the lives of three complete strangers, leaving his own family without a father.
The Fourteenth Street Bridge is now officially named the Arland Williams Bridge.
—
On January 25, 2011, seventeen-year-old Nicole Bean and her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, Kevin Minemier, were shopping at a Wegmans grocery in Henrietta, New York. Sixteen-year-old high school student Christopher Patino and his friend Mustafa Said were shopping one aisle away when they heard Nicole’s bloodcurdling screams. They rushed around the corner to the frozen-food aisle and saw Kevin Minemier stabbing his girlfriend in the face and eye.
Christopher instantly rushed to the assailant and slugged him in the face, battling the knife-wielding attacker with his bare hands. Mustafa joined in, grasping the knife and flinging it away, severing tendons in his hand in the process.
“Chris took the dude and put him on the ground and I took the girl to safety. I told her that no one was going to hurt her. . . . I was terrified for my own life and my hand was gushing out bleeding and her eye was bleeding also,” Mustafa said afterward.
Christopher struggled with the assailant on the ground and held him down until police arrived. “I was just like, Oh wow! She’s really hurt. I’m not just going to stand here and watch her possibly die. So I just ran up as quick as I could and tried to get the knife out and try to make sure she didn’t die there. She was screaming. She was literally dying right there. I felt horrible.”
Other shoppers, most of them adults, watched the vicious attack immobilized in fear, but the sixteen-year-old and his buddy snapped reflexively to action with selfless heroism.
“It was just like, It’s now or never,” Christopher said. “I had to do it just because he had a knife. I’ll admit I was like, What if he stabs me? But then I was like, I don’t care. I got to do this. So I went for it.” Christopher was battered and bruised and Mustafa’s hand required surgery, but both eventually recovered and Nicole’s life was saved.
“There were people watching and, well, I don’t have that kind of heart to stand there and watch while a girl gets killed,” Christopher said. “He was sucking the life out of her and some guy was taking pictures and we were like, We can’t just stand there. It’s time to act.”
—
Alexander Travis, seventeen, and his five-year-old sister were riding in their grandfather’s car returning on a twisty rural road from an overnight visit to his home on August 15, 2013. As they rounded a bend they saw a car had skidded off the road and was sinking in the Bradley Brook Reservoir with ninety-three-year-old Stuart Deland trapped inside. His grandfather had barely pulled the car to the side of the road before Travis unbuckled his seat belt and leaped from the car. “I didn’t really think. It was just like an instinct,” he said.
He sprinted to the reservoir, where he stripped off his shoes, threw down his cell phone, hurled himself down the steep embankment, and dove into the water. The front end of the car was already submerged and the vehicle was sinking quickly.
“I opened the back door and it just pulled me into the car because it was sinking,” Travis said. Travis stayed with the car as it sank beneath the surface, descending into the muddy reservoir. “I was so deep my ears were ringing and there was a lot of pressure.”
Travis struggled in the murky water to pull the driver out of the front seat into the backseat to escape, but it was impossible. His lungs bursting, Travis shot to the surface for a quick gulp of air and dove back down to the submerged vehicle. He managed to wedge his fingers through the partly opened driver’s-side window. Planting his feet against the door he pulled with all his strength and snapped the window glass into shards. Reaching in with both hands he grabbed the man and wrenched him out of the front seat through the window and brought him to the surface.
He did not notice the cuts on his hands and arms until it was all over.
He admitted that he was afraid, but said, “I would rather die trying to save someone’s life than live with the guilt of watching someone die when you could have done something about it.”
—
Don Holler, sixty-five, could fix anything. He enjoyed the outdoors: gardening, hunting, and fishing. A friendly person, Holler was one of the regulars at Fat Daddy’s Place in Pennsylvania, arriving to socialize every afternoon at four thirty.
“This is a neighborhood watering hole. He knew a lot of people and a lot of people knew him,” a patron said of Don.
On July 11, 2011, golfing buddies Kirk Haldeman, a fifty-one-year-old insurance agent, and Michael Ledgard, fifty-three, were rained out, so they headed to the pub for a drink instead. Don Holler was sitting at the bar watching the TV screen.
Stephen Fromholz, a forty-three-year-old Army veteran from San Antonio, entered the bar. The six-foot man stood out from the local crowd in his black-fringed leather vest, knee-high moccasins, and big black cowboy hat.
Fromholz asked the bartender to change the television channel, which was showing scenes from the war in Afghanistan. Holler said he was watching the news, and that if he didn’t like what was on TV, there were a lot of other bars in town.
Fromholz glared back.
“I don’t want any trouble,” Holler said.
Fromholz put down his half-finished beer and walked out.
“Within thirty seconds, I could see him coming back in the dining room door,” Haldeman said. “He had a semiautomatic rifle on his side [an AR-15]. He took three steps inside the bar and said, ‘I’ll show you what war feels like.’” Fromholz raised the rifle and shot Don Holler.
There were ten people in the bar when the shot was fired. The exit door was closer to Haldeman and Ledgard than the gunman, but rather than run for cover or escape, Haldeman attacked the man firing the assault rifle. “I jumped out of my seat, grabbed him, and drove him back into the corner of the bar,” Haldeman said.
“I took a deep breath and tackled them both,” his golfing buddy said, explaining how he joined in to help Haldeman, who was struggling with the rifleman. “I was really afraid what would happen next.”
Another earsplitting shot rang out but missed. The golfing buddies who had only moments earlier been consoling themselves with a cold beer now held the gunman pinned to the floor until the police arrived. In an instantaneous reflex that beat out a rapid-fire semiautomatic rifle, the golfers had rushed to the aid of a stranger neither of them knew, risking their own lives. They probably had saved the lives of many others in the bar, but by the time the police arrived, Don Holler was dead.
Such acts of heroism happen every day. This selfless reflexive response is never referred to as snapping, but from a neuroscience perspective, both heroic behaviors and rage behaviors are driven by exactly the same brain circuits. We would not have these circuits and LIFEMORTS triggers that set them off if they were not of benefit to our species. As peculiar as it seems that the human brain is wired to set aside reason and self-interest and instantly engage in violence at the risk of death for another human being, this nobility is at the core of humanity.
—
“The shark was around me and she’s bleeding,” Richard Irvin Moore, age fifty-seven, said after jumping into the ocean to save a stranger from a shark attack. “We look out and there was blood everywhere in the white water around her.” The shark had bitten off the twenty-year-old woman’s arm.
After swimming out 100 yards from shore Moore reached the woman and began towing her back to the beach, backstroking through the strong ocean currents. “It dawned on me—I was in danger now,” he said. “I start praying out loud. God, God protect us. . . .
“She said ‘I’m dying. I know I’m going to die.’”
Despite Moore’s heroic actions in rescuing her from the shark and getting her into an ambulance, the young woman did not survive.
—
The Family trigger: Family members escape in the middle of the night from a burning home in Gloucester, Virginia, on January 16, 2013, only to realize that Gabriel, six months old; Michael, age two; and Thomas, age seven, are still inside the blazing home that is fully engulfed in flames. The children’s grandmother, fifty-four-year-old Virginia Grogan, who had just escaped with the others, realizing the children were still inside, rushed back into the inferno to rescue them, only to die in the flames alongside them.
—
On an outing with his family to Yosemite Park, sixteen-year-old student Alec Smith was hiking along the Mist Trail above the 317-foot Vernal Fall when he heard a mother’s screams.
“Save my baby! Someone save my baby!”
A nine-year-old boy had fallen into the rapidly flowing torrent just before it spilled over the precipice of Yosemite’s roaring falls.
“When I heard the scream and saw the boy, I thought, ‘Oh, no! Oh my God, no,’” Alec’s mother said. “Then I blinked and saw [my son] going after him.”
In a flash, Alec had leaped over the guardrail and rushed toward the deafening torrent.
“Nobody has ever survived going over the fall,” said Yosemite park ranger Kari Cobb.
Alec sprinted out into the river over the rocks on a beeline trajectory to intercept the child at the lip of the falls.
“I got half my body in the water and kept the other half out,” Alec said. “I grabbed the kid twenty feet from the edge of the waterfall and pulled him back onto the bank.”
“If he’d hesitated, the kid would have been gone,” said Alec’s uncle.
Alec said he didn’t think of the danger. It had been an instant reflex, but he now realizes how lucky he was. Many rescuers have gone to their deaths in precisely the same situation at that treacherous spot.
“Don’t think about what could have happened,” he said. “Be grateful for what did happen.”
—
The LIFEMORTS triggers define the best in human beings: struggling to the death to preserve life and limb, intolerance to insult from others or to one’s expectations of themselves, selfless protection of family, preserving our home environment, willingness to sacrifice anything for our mate, placing our social organization above our self-interest, keeping what is rightfully ours from the hands of thieves, defending our own people against any threat, never giving up—the struggle against an overwhelming impediment. These things, which well up inside us in an explosive emotion we call rage, are the noblest characteristics of humanity.
“I have forty dead contacts in my cell phone, all good friends of mine,” a veteran of SEAL Team Six told me.
I think about that often when I look at the contacts on my own cell phone.