Courage – Part 2

In my last post I ended with a video of Deborah Cordner Carson from the 2012 CrossFit Games. Carson is seen crying at confronting an ocean swim. Carson is extraordinarily fit, probably in the top 1% of women on the planet by most metrics, and last year was DQ’d on the first event – a short ocean swim, much shorter than the one she was facing in 2012. I learned later that Carson has no fear of swimming; she’s a pretty good swimmer in the pool. She has a fear of the ocean… and like most fears, it’s not completely rational. (As a man who grew up at the time “Jaws” was popularized, by the way, I get it. I’m a good swimmer and the unknown below me in both oceans and lakes has always made me nervous; I got better once I learned to scuba dive. In fact, now I’m much more comfortable down below than splashing around on the surface looking like a wounded meal for most ocean predators.)

I have a good friend who has one the third highest award for bravery this nation can bestow. None of us who know him are surprised by this. He was/is a tough sonofabitch. I’ve been there for bar fights, physical predations, rappelling, and other ‘hairy’ happenings with him. Fear is never a word that entered into my mind. I can’t remember if he related to me the events in combat that led to his award, or one of our mutually close friends did, but his description was along the lines of, “I didn’t give it much thought. I just did it.”

It is easy to confuse “tough” with brave. My friend may have, way back in his youth, some physical fear, but that has long since receded, buried by years of conditioning and habit and the conquering of those fears. I take nothing away from his accomplishments and what he has done, but it seems to me that our awards for bravery – and the Marine Corps’ definition that I wrote about in my last post – are centered around a reverence for physical accomplishment in the face of possible death, with the (likely valid) assumption that no one wants to die, therefore acts in furtherance of the mission or saving a fellow warrior are worthy of canonization. But it is very easy to turn this on its head and render such acts ignoble: let us suppose that a soldier has tired of war in all of its brutality and he decides to commit ‘suicide by enemy.’ During the next engagement, he runs into the open, thereby drawing enemy fire away from trapped comrades, who are pulled out of the fray. He had no fear of death because he wanted to die. His acts were not borne of conquering any fear at all. Is he ‘courageous’? Let’s assume we can later talk to him because he doesn’t die – do we immortalize his ‘heroic’ actions? I can assure you that the military would do so under a model of “physical courage”, but my view is that would be both incorrect and not ethically sound.

If we define courage as the overcoming of fear, then courageous acts have nothing to do with physical risk, per se. They might, but they might not. The quantum of courage is the exact amount of fear the person had to overcome in order to complete the act that they could not because of their fear. I think this has interesting implications in everyday life.

I was on a kind of working-vacation last week in Montana and for the first time had my three biological daughters with me (wish I had had number four there, too). We decided to do some ziplining and then a “high ropes” course. I was a pilot for a number of years, but as a child I had a crippling fear of heights. years in the Marine Corps and flying made me numb to it. Being out of the seat and not consistently doing things “at altitude” let it creep back in; I didn’t realize how much until I had to ascent the telephone pole to almost 40′ and stand on a very tiny platform, clipped onto a wire by a harness, but otherwise blowing in the breeze. And forced to contemplate which of the several obstacles in front of me – that went off in 4 different directions – that I would pick in order to allow room for the people coming along behind me. Gulp.
     I managed to get to another platform so I could watch my daughters ascend behind me. The middle, M, climbed all the way to the platform… and then balked. She couldn’t quite get herself up onto the platform, and the fear and uncertainty of that final pull in order to get up over the edge, caused her to climb all the way back down, despite everyone’s words of encouragement. My heart broke for her. I knew – from years of experience – that she was very unlikely to make that ascent again.

I got busy with my other daughters and at some point, moving around obstacles, and I looked up and there was M – up on the platform! She had done it. I was so happy for her. A traveling companion – an older gentleman who works as a logger up in trees came up to me later and said: “I can’t believe she made it back up on the second try. I’ve had guys freeze up on the trees and once they go down, they don’t come back up. I’m so impressed. That was so courageous of your little girl.”
I knew he was right and the courage – the overcoming of fear – to go back up that same climb and get over that ledge – still impresses me. There is no doubt in my mind that the quantum – the measurement of the amount of fear she had to overcome to do that – would peg any such theoretical meter.
(Continued in Part 3).