Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 5

The right man in the right place is a devastating weapon.

—MOTTO OF U.S. SPECIAL FORCES

MY LAWRENCE OF ARABIA—the person who first made me realize heroism was a skill, not a virtue—was a middle-aged woman with big round glasses who ran a small elementary school in the Pennsylvania countryside. On February 2, 2001, Norina Bentzel was in her office when a man with a machete went after her kindergartners. It’s been ten years since I heard what happened next, and only now am I beginning to understand the answer to one question:

Why didn’t she quit?

How does a forty-two-year-old grade school principal who’s never been in a fight take on a frenzied Army vet and keep battling him—relentlessly, with her bare hands, at only five foot three—as he’s slashing at her with a blade that can cut through a tree branch? It’s remarkable that she had the tenacity to confront him, but the real mystery is how she persisted when, very quickly, she must have realized she was doomed to lose. Because that’s the ugly truth about heroism: the tests don’t start when you’re ready or stop when you’re tired. You don’t get time-outs, warm-ups, or bathroom breaks. You may have a headache or be wearing the wrong pants or find yourself—the way Norina did—in a skirt and low heels in a school hallway becoming slick with your own blood.

Michael Stankewicz was a social studies teacher at a Baltimore high school who began simmering with rage and paranoia after his third wife left him. His violent threats got him fired, hospitalized, and eventually jailed. After he was released, he picked up a machete and drove to the school his stepchildren once attended—North Hopewell–Winterstown Elementary, in sleepy, rural York County, Pennsylvania. Just before lunch, Norina Bentzel happened to glance out her window and see someone slip through the front door behind a mother with two children. She went to find out who he was and discovered a stranger peering into the kindergarten.

“Excuse me, sir,” Norina said. “Is there someone I can help you find?”

Stankewicz wheeled, yanking the machete out of his left pant leg. He slashed at Norina’s throat, missing by a hair and slicing off the plastic ID tag hanging around her neck. A sad and strangely articulate thought ran through her mind: There is no one in my environment who can help. She was alone in this. Whatever she did in the next few seconds would determine who made it out of that school alive.

Norina could have screamed and fled. She could have curled up in a ball and begged for mercy, or lunged for Stankewicz’s wrist. Instead she crossed her arms in front of her face in an X and backed away. Stankewicz kept chopping and slashing, but Norina rolled with the blows, never taking her eyes off him or allowing him to close the gap and get her on the floor. Norina led Stankewicz away from the classrooms and down the hall toward her office. She managed to slip inside, bolt the door, and hit the lockdown alarm with her gashed and blood-soaked hand.

She was a second too late. Some of the kindergartners were just exiting their classroom as the alarm sounded. Stankewicz went after them. He gashed the teacher’s arm, sliced off a girl’s ponytail, broke a boy’s arm. The children fled toward the office, where Norina once again faced Stankewicz. The machete slashed deep into her hands, severing two of her fingers. Norina looked done for, so Stankewicz turned to seek fresh victims—and that’s when Norina leaped. She wrapped him in a bear hug, hanging on with the last of her strength as he thrashed and lunged and—

Clink.

He dropped the machete. The school nurse grabbed it and ran out to hide it in the hall. Stankewicz staggered to the desk, Norina still clinging to his back. Soon sirens and thundering footsteps were approaching. Norina had lost nearly half her blood but was rushed to the hospital in time to save her life. Stankewicz surrendered.

“Luck” and “courage” were mentioned often in the days following the attack, but of all the factors involved, luck and courage were the least significant. Courage gets you into predicaments; it doesn’t necessarily get you back out. And unless he slips and falls, there’s nothing lucky about outfighting a man coming at you with a machete. Norina Bentzel survived because she made a series of decisions, instantly and under extraordinary pressure, and her success rate was the difference between life and death.

When she crossed her arms and retreated, she instinctively seized on exactly the posture recommended in pankration, the ancient Greek art of no-rules fighting, later adopted in World War II by the “Heavenly Twins”—Bill Sykes and William Fairbairn—whose close-combat technique is still used by Special Forces today. Norina didn’t stumble frantically or bolt into a dead end, but maneuvered backwards with purpose. If she’d allowed her adrenaline to redline, she’d have burned through her energy and been left helpless. Instead it was Stankewicz who ran out of gas, allowing Norina to wait for her opportunity and seize it.

When it came to strength, bulk, and savagery, Norina was hopelessly outmatched. So instead of going muscle-to-muscle, she found a better solution. She relied on her fascia, the fibrous connective tissue that encases our bodies beneath the skin. Your upper body has a belt of fascia running across your chest from one hand to the other. By wrapping her arms around Stankewicz, Norina closed the fascia loop; she turned herself into a human lasso, essentially banding Stankewicz’s arms with a thick rubber cable and neutralizing his force.

But for any of that to happen, Norina first had to master her amygdala: the fear-conditioning portion of the brain. The amygdala accesses your long-term memory, scanning whether anything you’ve done in the past resembles something you’re about to attempt in the present. If it hits a match, you’re good to go: your muscles will relax, your heart rate will stabilize, your doubts will vanish. But if the amygdala finds no evidence that you’ve ever, say, climbed down a tall tree, it will lobby your nervous system to shut down the operation. The amygdala is what causes people to burn to death instead of stepping onto a firefighter’s ladder, or drown by refusing to release their grip on a lifeguard’s neck. It’s also what makes riding a bike so hard when you’re five, yet so easy after a five-year break; once learned, your amygdala recognizes the behavior and gives the go-ahead. Your amygdala doesn’t reason; it only responds. It can’t be tricked, only trained.

For most of us, no matter how strong or brave, the bizarreness of a machete attack would overwhelm our amygdala and freeze us in our tracks. Norina’s genius was finding a strategy that suited her skills: she wasn’t a fighter, but she was a hugger. Wrapping her arms around someone was a movement so familiar, her sensory system didn’t object. Norina managed that hug because she’d had a flash of insight: she couldn’t conquer Stankewicz’s rage, but maybe she could calm it.

“I put my arms around you,” she would tell Michael Stankewicz from the witness stand on the day he was sentenced. “To comfort you.”

Stankewicz stared at her. Then he silently mouthed “Thank you” and was led off to serve a 264-year term in prison.

So how do you prepare for an attack by a maniac with a machete?

The question feels stupid coming out of my mouth and almost indecent, given the circumstances. I’m at Norina’s school, and it’s been barely a year since the attack. But privately, Norina has been wondering the same thing herself.

“Let’s talk outside,” she suggests. She’s gracious and good-humored, and so charmed by children that after seventeen years as an educator she still likes spending her breaks watching the kids tear around at recess. Her arms are now covered with lightning-bolt scars. After four reconstructive surgeries, her hands have recovered a good bit of function, but they don’t feel like her hands anymore; they’re so cold and numb all the time that even on this warm autumn afternoon, she’s clutching heat packs. But she can hold hands with her husband and children again and play her alto sax at Penn State Blue Band reunions and tousle the hair of the schoolkids who come charging up as soon as they see us on the playground.

Strange as it sounds, Norina says, she was ready that day. She must have been. She was calm, rational, strong. She wasn’t panicking or preparing to die; she was running through her options and planning her next move. Her reactions weren’t random; they were natural and deliberate. So deliberate, in fact, she felt “guided from above.” But for practical purposes, she was guided from within: she knew what to do, and her body knew how to do it.

“If you want to call me a hero because I treasure these children, that’s fine, but I do that every day in my job,” Norina says. It’s an interesting clue. Was she poised because she’s a lifelong teacher who’s trained herself to stay cool when things get hot? Did she hold eye contact because she deals with tantrumy children and agitated parents that way every day? Was it a coincidence that her hands came up in the same position she’d practiced for decades as a saxophonist, and she likewise had the ambidexterity to deflect and defend with both arms?

All it takes is a few minutes with her on the playground to understand why she’d fight to the death for these kids. What’s still baffling—to Norina most of all—is why she won.

“What I find fascinating is how rare it is today for even a hero to understand his own heroism,” says Earl Babbie, Ph.D., a professor emeritus in behavioral sciences at Orange County’s Chapman University whose research focuses on heroics. “I’ll bet you won’t find a single example of a person who says, ‘Yes, I’m a hero.’ A few years back, a hijacker on a plane pointed a gun at a passenger. The flight attendant got between the gun and the passenger and said, ‘You’ll have to kill me first.’ Afterward, the flight attendant said, ‘No, no, I’m no hero.’

“And I thought, For Christ’s sake! If that doesn’t qualify, what does?” Babbie continues. “I don’t think it’s modesty. I think it’s bewilderment.”

Babbie has a dream experiment he’d love to perform. “I wish it were possible to interview heroes the day before they risk their lives for someone else,” he says. “I bet you won’t find anyone who can tell you with assurance what he or she would do in a life-threatening situation.” Just the opposite, in fact: Babbie has found that the art of the hero has been neglected for so long, most people are uncomfortable even discussing it. He likes to read the Boy Scout Oath and Law out loud in class and watch his students squirm when he comes to the parts about being trustworthy, loyal, helpful, and friendly.

“Virtue isn’t respectable these days, and we’ve certainly seen enough hypocrisy among so-called moral leaders to question what they tell us to do,” Babbie says. “But at some deeper level, we still instinctively idolize the kind of heroic behavior we claim is foreign to us, and keep acting on the heroic urges we claim we don’t have.”

Even Charles Darwin found heroes bewildering. Darwin’s great gift to science was simplifying all life to pure mathematics: your one and only goal on earth is multiplication. Everything you do, every instinct you have, is an evolutionary urge to make babies and leave behind as many copies of yourself as possible. From that perspective, heroism makes no sense. Why risk the grave for someone else if there’s no guarantee of a biological payoff? Dying for your own kids: smart. Dying for a rival’s? Genetic suicide.

Because no matter how many virile, healthy heroes you raised, it would take just one selfish bastard with a hearty sex drive to wipe out your entire bloodline. Selfish Bastard’s kids would thrive and multiply, while Hero Dad’s kids would eventually follow their father’s example and sacrifice themselves into extinction. “He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades,” Darwin concluded, “would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.”

So if natural selection eliminates natural heroism, why does it still exist?

Andrew Carnegie was just as stumped as Darwin. The nineteenth-century steel baron built his fortune on his ability to read human nature, but heroism was one personality quirk he couldn’t crack. When he arrived in the United States from Scotland at age thirteen, Carnegie was a penniless, barely educated immigrant who was lucky to land work in a railroad yard, but his skill at outmaneuvering the most ruthless sharks of his time—including that notorious man-eater J. P. Morgan—helped speed his rise to the top of the steel industry. He wanted money, so he worked hard and gambled well. No voodoo there. But how do you explain someone who strives harder and risks more for free?

Carnegie was so intrigued by heroes, he began hunting them. In 1904, he set up the Carnegie Hero Fund, as much a research tool as a reward. Only pure altruists are eligible, not firemen or police officers or parents rescuing their own children. Every year, the fund collects tales of heroics from across the country, cataloguing them by gender, region, age, and incident and awarding a cash prize to the heroes or their surviving families. Carnegie was soon hearing about Thelma McNee, the teenage girl who leaped from her apartment roof onto the burning building next door to rescue two children trapped inside by the flames. A submission came in for Wava Campredon, a seventy-year-old New Mexico woman who was mauled but kept battling two savage dogs with her garden hoe to save her neighbor. Mary Black, a twenty-five-year-old Oregon housewife, was “encumbered by four skirts” but still swam twice into a flood-engorged river to save a pair of drowning sisters.

Was there some kind of pattern at work? Carnegie couldn’t figure out if he was looking at a performance model that could be reproduced or just a happy string of accidents in which the right person turned up at the right time, sometimes with a hoe. Because if he could boil heroism down to a formula—to an art—then good God! He’d go down as one of the world’s great peacemakers, a name spoken in the same breath as Christ. Once everyone became protectors, who’d be left undefended? Every classroom would have a hero like Norina Bentzel, every home a Thelma McNee, every riverbank a Mary Black. Carnegie had a reputation as a brass-knuckled fighter, but he was actually a pacifist who believed that violence was a disease that someone—maybe even Carnegie himself—could cure.

But in the end, he gave up. Carnegie would continue rewarding heroes, although he’d never understand them. “I do not expect to stimulate or create heroism by this fund,” he conceded, “knowing well that heroic action is impulsive.”

Impulsive. That was Carnegie’s mistake.

Carnegie and Darwin were men of science, but they were approaching the problem like poets. Sacrifice … betray … noble … impulsive … Those are judgments of intent, not descriptions of behavior. Carnegie and Darwin were wondering about thoughts and feelings—the why?—when they should have been focusing on action, on the cold, hard facts of how? Detectives don’t begin a case by worrying about motive, an infinite onion you can peel forever and still end up with nothing. First pin down what someone did, and maybe then you’ll discover why they did it.

That’s how the Ancient Greeks went about it. They put heroes at the center of their theology, which for all its tales of godly feuds and magical transformations still stands alone as the most pragmatic of world religions. Instead of bowing down to saints and miracles, the Greeks worshipped problem solvers and hard how-to. They understood the difference between heroism and impulse, and they devised an easy, two-step test for telling them apart:

Would you do it again?

And could you?

Hercules didn’t have one Labor; he had twelve, plus plenty of mini-labors on the side. Odysseus’s to-do list was relentless: he not only came up with a way to win the Trojan War, but he battled his way home afterwards by outsmarting, outfighting, and outrunning typhoons, warriors, enchantresses, a Cyclops, the powers of the underworld, and the charms of a sex goddess. Atalanta, one of the Greeks’ rare female heroes, showed the boys she could beat up a pair of degenerate Centaurs, defeat a legendary wrestler, help Jason recover the Golden Fleece, and hunt down the monstrous Calydonian Boar. Perseus, who was “skilled in all manner of things, from the craft of the fisherman to the use of the sword,” had to brainstorm a plan for cutting off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, then rescue a chained and naked princess from a sea monster.

Luckily, one man appeared who could turn all that crazy drama into a hard, clear code of conduct: Plutarch, the great Greek umpire of all things heroic. Plutarch was fascinated by heroism the way nuclear scientists are fascinated by uranium: he saw it as a fantastic natural superfuel, powerful and abundant and just waiting to be harnessed. Plutarch spent his life analyzing heroes and threw his net wide: he believed even fantasy has its roots in real-life experiences, so he studied true stories and tall tales, Roman history and Greek myths. By the time he was ready to write his epic work, Parallel Lives, he’d heard it all, so you couldn’t dazzle him; even the most beloved heroes got a blasting from Plutarch if they stepped out of line.

He reconstructed the lives of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; he exposed the shortcomings of Pericles—a brilliant tactician who nonetheless blundered Athens into the Peloponnesian War—and the fatal flaw of Pyrrhus, “the fool of hope” who took awful losses whenever his imagination outstripped his might. Plutarch admired Romulus, the wolf-suckled founder of Rome, for remaining true to his humble birth and kind to his eight hundred mistresses. But he blistered Theseus, who defeated the Minotaur in the Labyrinth; just because you kill monsters and thwart tyrants, you don’t get a free pass for sex crimes. “The faults committed in the rapes of women admit of no plausible excuse in Theseus,” Plutarch scolded. “It is to be suspected these things were done out of wantonness and lust.”

Plutarch did such a remarkable job, Parallel Lives became the handbook for modern history’s heroes. “It has been like my conscience,” Henry IV of France commented, “and has whispered in my ear many good suggestions and maxims for my conduct and the government of my affairs.” Abraham Lincoln was a devoted reader, as were Teddy Roosevelt, George Patton, and John Quincy Adams. When England was rebuilding after the Great War, the hero’s bible was its guide. “Plutarch’s Lives built the heroic ideal of the Elizabethan age,” C. S. Lewis acknowledged.

And what Plutarch taught them is this: Heroes care. True heroism, as the ancients understood, isn’t about strength, or boldness, or even courage. It’s about compassion.

When the Greeks created the heroic ideal, they didn’t choose a word that meant “Dies Trying” or “Massacres Bad Guys.” They went with ἥρως (or hērōs)—“protector.” Heroes aren’t perfect; with a god as one parent and a mortal as the other, they’re perpetually teetering between two destinies. What tips them toward greatness is a sidekick, a human connection who helps turn the spigot on the power of compassion. Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.

The nearly indestructible Achilles had his loyal friend Patroclus. Odysseus fought his greatest battle with two loyal herdsmen by his side. Even Superman, who wasn’t human at all, kept Jimmy Olsen hanging around. Hercules had his twin brother and adoring nephew, and when things were darkest, his best bud, Theseus, was always there. And of course, brainy boy detective Encyclopedia Brown had two-fisted Sally Kimball. A sidekick is a hero’s way of looking into his soul, of drawing strength from his weakest side, not his strongest. He has to remember that even though he shares the blood of a god, he’s still human at heart. He’s not a Titan who will swallow a baby to get out of a jam, or a god who will never die. He has one shot at immortality, and it’s in the memories and stories of the grateful and inspired.

He has to care so much for what’s human, it brings out what’s godly.

You can hope an impulse or “noble nature” will spontaneously create those kinds of heroic skills. Or you can follow the lead of the Spartans, who went right to the source: Crete. Sparta’s founding father, Lycurgus, traveled to the island to soak up ideas and was so impressed he smuggled a Cretan back with him in disguise, pretending he was a poet while secretly relying on him as Sparta’s most influential law-maker. Sparta’s social code “is, in a very great measure, a copy of the Cretan,” Aristotle points out in Politics, and its defining spirit would become the foundation of both Greek theology and Western democracy: the notion that ordinary citizens should always be ready for extraordinary action.

The Greek myths are really the same performance parable, over and over; they’re showcases for underdogs using the art of the hero to deal with danger. Need to tame a savage bull? Wait for it to take a drink, then wrestle it down by the horns. Ordered to clean a toxic stable? Flood it. Up against a giant man-bull, a three-headed hellhound, or a lion with an impenetrable pelt? Get behind them and choke ’em out. These techniques weren’t just mythical make-believe; some were so spot-on, they’re still used today in the Greek fighting art of pankration. If you’re ever up against a guy who can tear your head off, take a lesson from Odysseus: “Odysseus knew a trick or two,” Homer notes in the Iliad. “He kicked Ajax hard in the back of his knee and toppled him backwards, falling on his chest.”

Because the way the Greeks looked at it, you have a choice: you can either hope a Norina Bentzel comes to the rescue when your kids are in danger, or you can guarantee it. Daredevils aren’t the answer; spinal rehab wards are full of daredevils. Fearlessness doesn’t really help, either: when your car breaks down, you don’t want the mechanic to say, “I’ve never done this before, but I’m willing to die trying.” What you want to hear is “Don’t worry. This is right up my alley.” Heroism isn’t some mysterious inner virtue, the Greeks believed; it’s a collection of skills that every man and woman can master so that in a pinch, they can become a Protector.

And for a long time, they were great at it. For centuries, the art of the hero thrived. But as the Greek empire faded, so did its influence, closing in on itself and disappearing….

Until the last place the art of the hero remained intact was the wild mountains of Crete, where a band of British Army rejects arrived during World War II for a crash course in wisdom from the past.