Fearlessness: 3 Things You Can Learn From Special Ops and Navy SEALS

For the next seven hours, Cafferata became a one-man fighting force. With moonlight and flares providing illumination, he hustled up and down the wash, taking out advancing Chinese troops. In his left hand, Cafferata carried an entrenching tool, which he used to bat away any Chinese grenades that flew in. “I was the world’s worst baseball player, so I don’t know how I hit them,” he told me… Cafferata fired his rifle so much that night that the barrel began to blacken and catch fire; he had to cool it down with snow. Late in the battle, he tried to fling a grenade back manually but it blew too soon, badly damaging his nearly frozen left hand. He kept fighting. Sometime after dawn, marine reinforcements arrived to find a single man holding off an entire enemy unit, as if possessed by supernatural energy. It wasn’t until this point, when he could relax a little, that Cafferata discovered that he’d fought all night in his socks, and without his parka.

I always felt that if you wanted my ass, you better bring your lunch.

In one of the first interviews he conducted, Klein asked a seasoned firefighter commander to describe a few examples of how he made difficult decisions under stress in the past, and the man replied with a jaw-dropper: “I don’t make decisions. I don’t remember when I’ve ever made a decision.”

…the elite firefighters had seen so many fires over the years that a web of patterns had been etched into their subconscious minds, lending them incredibly solid instincts… When a fire commander sees a building with a billboard affixed to the side go up in flames, for example, experience immediately reminds him of the times he’s seen billboards suddenly plummet to the ground below, and he gives orders to clear out the area without having to think.

According to Johnson and Leach, the sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time. They’ve done the research, or built the shelter, or run the drills. They look for the exits and imagine what they will do. They were in a fire as a child or survived a typhoon. These people don’t deliberate during calamity because they’ve already done the deliberation the other people around them are just now going through.

The effect of neuropeptide Y is so pronounced, Morgan says that he can tell if a soldier is Special Forces or not simply by taking a look at a blood test.

How you frame something in your head has a great deal to do with your neurobiological response to it… when you say to yourself, I know what to do here, or see things as a challenge, then that turns into a much more positive response.

It’s largely a matter of beliefs: survivors are those who think they have some control over external circumstances, and who see how even a negative experience might lead to growth. Overconfident people, who overestimate their powers, do particularly well.

Whereas the heart rates of all the operatives remained stable, something quite incredible happened with the ones who’d been decorated. Their heart rates actually went down. As soon as they entered the danger zone (or the “launch pad,” as one guy I spoke with put it), they assumed a state of cold, meditative focus: a mezzanine level of consciousness in which they became one with the device they were working on.

Follow-up analysis probed deeper, and revealed the cause of the disparity: confidence. The operatives who’d been decorated scored higher on tests of core self-belief than their non-decorated colleagues.

Barney liked to accompany Venanzi to interrogations wherein Venanzi staged debates with the animal — “I can’t tell them that! They’ll beat the hell out of me!” — as his questioners looked on in shock. (Once, the camp commander tried to mollify the discord by offering Barney tea, but Venanzi had to relay a polite no; Barney didn’t like tea.) Venanzi’s Barney Google stories provided limitless amusement to the Americans. Ultimately, the guards summoned Venanzi once more and told him he’d have to release his chimp into the wild: he was getting new roommates, and Barney’s presence might upset them.

In tense moments, explains the clinical psychologist Rod Martin, the purpose of pranks like Venanzi’s isn’t merely to elicit a chuckle; joking actually reformats your perception of a stressor. “Humor is about playing with ideas and concepts,” said Martin, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario. “So whenever we see something as funny; we’re looking at it from a different perspective. When people are trapped in a stressful situation and feeling overwhelmed, they’re stuck in one way of thinking: This is terrible. I’ve got to get out of here. But if you can take a humorous perspective, then by definition you’re looking at it differently — you’re breaking out of that rigid mind-set.”

It occurred to me, I said “You know what? If I can laugh once a day, every day I’m in Ranger School, I’ll make it through. That was one of the things that I’d say to myself and I make sure I can laugh. There’s always humor around. Given that the root of all comedy is misery there’s plenty of humor in Ranger School because people are constantly miserable.

The other thing I would tell myself in Ranger School, they say this a lot: “The only easy day was yesterday.” My Ranger Buddy and I always said: if tomorrow yesterday looks as bad as it does right now then we’ll quit. But by tomorrow, looking back on yesterday, it was over. We survived it, we can go one more day, so, we would continue on. That was another method we used to sort of help us limp along.