Learn and Live
Survival is the ability of a person to live through a hardship or adversity, which can be anything from a dangerous incident at a fire scene to a financial crisis. To know what it is to survive, you must have faced some degree of threat, peril or danger that you overcame. In our field of work, chances are you have heard a story or two about people who have faced some sort of adversity and survived. Maybe you are one of these people?
Sometimes who lives and who dies in survival situations appears to be a matter of chance. However, two people in a similar situation could make very different decisions that result in life or death. You may not be able to control your physical world, but you can control your mental world. Everybody has different perspectives and experiences that inform their decisions. What threatens one person may excite another.
To understand the psychology of survival, you first need to understand yourself. You must examine what happens in your head and heart when you are in unpredictable and uncomfortable situations. What matters is not how you got into that situation, but what you choose to do next. Your critical decisions will make the difference.
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In the book Survive, Carl Warland says that in a survival situation, "The outlook is not whether you will make it another five years, but rather five seconds, minutes, hours, days or weeks, depending on your predicament." I understand his point completely.
A few years ago on a fire, I heard a loud noise behind the crackle of flames. I knew that sound meant a tree was coming down, yet when I looked above the wall of flames dancing next to me for a sign of it, I couldn't see anything. My senses were on full alert as they strained to save me from death.
Out of nowhere, a tall, flaming lodge-pole pine appeared high above looking like a mighty torch bearing down. I only had a split second to determine where it would fall as it accelerated downward, heading straight for me. With no time to move, all I could do was bend away and brace for its impact, knowing that it was really going to hurt. The burning tree slammed into me, hitting my hard hat and flinging it off my head. I felt my ribs snap beneath my pack as I was driven painfully downward, first onto my knees and then face down into the forest floor.
I was knocked unconscious by the sudden impact. Upon waking up, all I could feel was the weight of the tree across my back. Although the trunk was still burning, the impact must have put most of the flames out. My adrenalin surged as I reached back and rolled the burned tree off my body. Once I was clear, I lay face down gathering my thoughts and listening to the pop and sizzle of the nearby flames that would soon reach me.
I started with a physical assessment: As an EMT, I knew my body must be in shock from the hit. I could move my arms and toes, but a sharp pain was rising across my back. With those swaying flames moving ever closer, I decided I had to get up and find help before the situation worsened. I forced myself to get up slowly, realizing in the process that I was having trouble breathing. Straining to gain momentum, I began saying to myself, "I'm OK, I'm OK." I kept repeating these words while I stumbled along, knowing that every single step brought me closer to survival.
I got clear of the rapidly approaching fire by heading back toward where I last saw the other firefighters. Although I knew there was a risk with moving, I decided that by staying put I would be burned more severely. My choice to take one step at a time resulted in my survival. Survival often requires taking a risk. But what is needed is a calculated risk — a conscious decision that accounts for the context of different survival situations.
Years later, I was in the passenger compartment of a Bell 212 Twin Huey helicopter flying high above the barren, rugged mountains of Afghanistan when a grinding noise began to radiate down from the blade hub system. An armed reconnaissance mission had suddenly turned into an emergency. The metal grinding sound coming from the gearbox meant something was wrong: If the assembly locked up, the blades would stop turning and the Huey would fall out of the sky like a rock. A quick conversation with my pilot over the intercom prompted the decision to put the aircraft down immediately. The pilot swung the helicopter into a downward corkscrew maneuver, rapidly dropping us toward the remote valley floor.
I was sitting on a row of webbed bench seats between my flight engineer and two shooters. We assumed our crash positions and prepared mentally for the impact that was soon to come. First I noticed the change in the pitch of our blades and then — WHAM — we hit the ground so hard that the Huey bounced and was airborne again. We hit a second time, and then slid forward on our skids as if the helicopter were skiing. When we finally stopped, I looked around to check if the helicopter was still intact. We were resting near a river beneath some high rocky peaks, and now it was time for my security team to earn its money.
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