On his way to learn what the Navy SEALs know about Bravery (and How to Master It), reporter Bob Drury finds himself in a concrete bunker with a bunch of Marines:
“Grab that light, will ya?” I say to the marine next to me.He is a broad, blond sergeant named Bill Cullen from the First Battalion of the Fourth Marines. He is 26, from Walton, Kentucky, and wears a tan, fire-resistant, U.S. Marine-issue flight suit. He grabs the flashlight.
“Shine it in my face,” I say. He hesitates. I take off my wire frames. “It’s an experiment. Just do it, please.”
In the dark of the shelter my face illuminates; a score of eyes turn toward me.
“What do you see?” I ask. “What’s it look like? The color.”
“Pale,” someone says.
There’s a snicker. “Yeah, real white.” More laughter.
Sergeant Cullen agrees. “Pretty ashen, I would say.”
I take the flashlight and shine it in Cullen’s face. It’s nearly crimson, a much darker shade than the desert tan he’s acquired during his unit’s nearly completed 6-month tour. “What’s this supposed to mean?” he asks.
Over the sound of the air-raid siren, I explain: I’m a reporter for Men’s Health, traveling from Baghdad to Fallujah to embed with the Navy SEALs camped outside that central Iraqi city. One of the purposes of my assignment, I say, is to acquire some knowledge of the physiology of fear and stress — in this extreme case, the behavior of men struggling to overcome their innate instinct for self-preservation when other men are trying to kill them. Science stuff in a war zone.
Blank stares.
“Fight over flight. Running toward the sound of gunfire.”
Recognition.
I point to my face and explain: This is an example of what’s called vasoconstriction, and I have no control over it. The blood pumps from my heart through my arteries, but as my fear-induced heart rate rises, nonessential blood vessels automatically constrict. The capillaries drain. My brain is signaling my body, “Alert!” and stopping the superfluous blood vessels in my face from dilating. My brain needs to ration the oxygen in my blood to send elsewhere — to protect vital organs or into the muscles of my legs so I can run away.
“Then how come I’m not white?” Cullen shines the penlight on the face of a fellow marine.
“Or him?”
Training, I say. Habituation, the military calls it. It’s the difference between my heart rate rising after a workout — something I’m used to, when my vessels dilate and my face reddens — and being terrified during a rocket attack. The more you train, the more tricks you employ, the more you can program your body to adjust.
Essentially, you’re bending the body’s software to control its hardware. It works standing over a putt on the 18th green. It works shooting a final-second free throw. It works banging down a door with a bad guy on the other side.
There are a few seconds of silence. Someone says, “And you’re headed down to embed with the SEALs?”
I nod.
Cullen laughs. “You’re going to have plenty of opportunities to compare your white face with their red ones.”
Here’s the meat of the article:
Recent experiments at Harvard, Columbia, the University of California at Irvine, and other labs around the world have begun to unlock the mystery of both primal fear and remembered fear. Once an animal has “learned” to be afraid of something, that memory never vanishes from the animal’s amygdala. But Gregory Quirk, Ph.D., and researcher Kevin Corcoran, experimenting on lab rats at the University of Puerto Rico school of medicine, have uncovered a very interesting phenomenon. We can overlay those bad memories — and the emotions they evoke — by forming new memories in the brain’s prefrontal cortex that supersede those stored in the amygdala.The catch? Humans have to be intelligent enough to repeat an action, any action, over and over, with the knowledge that they are “unlearning” the bad memory. Lieutenant Commander Eric Potterat, Ph.D., a Naval Special Warfare Command psychologist, quotes Hamlet on the subject: “‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ That’s my favorite Shakespeare quote.”
I visited the slim, bespectacled, and well-pressed Potterat at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, California, before leaving for Iraq. A 12-year Navy man, the 39-year-old operation-psychology expert and former SERE (survival/evasion/resistance/escape) trainer was selected by the SEAL command 2 years ago to work with incoming candidates. “Intelligence-wise, we’re getting some absolutely amazing people at the door,” he says. “And those who complete the training go from amazing to elite from the neck up.”
To hone this SEAL initiation, Potterat reached out to the sports psychologists at a nearby U.S. Olympic training center to glean insights on the making of a world-class athlete. “It really opened my eyes,” he says. “Physically, there’s very little difference between athletes who win Olympic gold and the rest of the field. It’s like the SEAL candidates we see here. Terrific hardware. Situps, pushups, running, swimming — off the charts, superhuman. But over at the Olympic center, the sports psychologists found that the difference between a medal and no medal is determined by an athlete’s mental ability. The elite athletes, the Tiger Woodses, the Kobe Bryants, the Michael Jordans — this is what separates them from the competition. Knowing how to use information.”
Thinking makes it so.
During my research, many SEALs shared the mental tricks they use to instill what we might call bravery. A SEAL in Fallujah told me that a single 16-man platoon of SEAL candidates fires as many small-arms rounds in 2 weeks of training as an entire marine regiment fires in a year. “We push ourselves so far that we reach that level of fear where we think we’re going to die,” he said. “You’ve done it a thousand times, so when you do it for real, there’s less fear. You go and do it just like you trained for it.”
Another SEAL in Fallujah, a weapons instructor, pointed out that the same “adrenaline bombs” that involuntarily whiten your face and loosen your bowels (the brain deems the sphincter and bladder nonessential muscles, so SEALs always hit the john before a mission for what’s called a combat dump) also shut down the capillaries in your fingertips, causing a loss of fine motor control. (Try signing your name right after a rigorous workout.) To counteract these involuntary reactions, he teaches his charges to never pull back the slides of their automatic weapons with their fingers, but rather to use the edges of their hands, as if karate chopping.
This is, he added, the same muscle memory he teaches his family to utilize when dialing 911. “Unplug the phone and have everyone in the house, yourself included, do it a couple of hundred times,” he told me. “This may come in handy. You won’t be fumbling with the phone during a real emergency.”
A SEAL “breacher” named Brian A. emphasized that, before he blew open any door in Iraq or Afghanistan, he steadied his hands and the explosives he was handling “with four of the biggest, deepest, gut-filling diaphragmatic breaths a human being can possibly take, to flood my body with as much oxygen as possible.”
Says Potterat, “I don’t for a minute doubt that Tiger Woods does the same thing, over and over, when he’s practicing on the putting green.” Woods’s father, you might recall, was a Green Beret — the U.S. Army equivalent of a Navy SEAL.