Follow these Four Tips to Avoid Panic and Pull through the Next Emergency Alive
I remember a sign at an oil well in northwestern Colorado that read: “Don’t do stupid shit and no one will get hurt.” Now, this is certainly wise advice, especially for an oil well, but, in the words of rap trio Cypress Hill, “when the shit goes down/you better be ready.” There are, unfortunately, times when life-threatening situations arise that are not caused by human error.
In all of my experiences out of doors, and sometimes even within, I’ve noticed when the shit hits the fan it does so with stunning rapidity, developing a chaotic and life-threatening vector that requires a specific set of character traits and psychological skills to pull through alive. Whether it’s a sudden ambush by enemy insurgents in Southwest Asia or a lightning storm crashing your family day at the beach, these four tips can help you survive your next episode of When the SHTF:
1. Do not be complacent: cocky and/or foolish.
Complacency kills.
This is a Marine Corps mantra that I have had the displeasure to see proven. It won’t happen to you, right? You’re such a macho stud you don’t need to dive for the deck when the yell of “incoming!” comes in.
People try to look cool in the face of danger all the time, whether it is an idiotic selfie with bears or other dangerous animals. But complacency is just another word for foolish cockiness and even laziness. Complacent people are the ones who continue to chunk streamers upstream when the afternoon lightning storm rolls in, blithely gripping a graphite pole (graphite is an EXCELLENT conductor of electricity, BTW).
Unfortunately, complacency is often cruelly rewarded by nature and circumstance, reinforcing itself in a vicious cycle by rewarding the complacent when nothing life-threatening materializes … until that fateful moment when it does, exposing complacency as the killer it is, too late for the victim.
Perhaps the most egregious examples of complacency are fed by a nice beer buzz. A particularly graphic depiction of complacency as foolish bravado was when 28-year-old Tommie Woodward shouted, “fuck the alligators!” before jumping into an East Texas swimming hole posted with “No Swimming, Alligators” sign in the summer of 2015. He was promptly killed and partly devoured by a 10-foot alligator that had likely caused the sign to be placed a few weeks earlier.
Another example of complacency was the six-man Marine Corps scout-sniper team that was ambushed and killed while sleeping in a “hide” on a combat mission near the Iraqi town of Haqlaniyah in 2005. They were shot point blank, their gear seized, and their bodies subjected to mutilation — all because they either failed to post a sentry, or worse, the posted sentry or sentries themselves went to sleep.
The cure for complacency is simple: take your life and the lives of your loved ones seriously enough to take precautions. For example, you may be a fantastically strong swimmer like me, but you opt to wear a life jacket when kayaking in open water. If I get caught by a sudden cold front or other storm, I know a lifejacket will keep me afloat if I get separated from my boat when my legs begin to cramp up.
2. Be decisive.
Much of what I learned about staying alive in emergency situations comes from the Marine Corps, and as they say in the Marines, a bad decision is better than indecision.
One fine summer day at the beach with my wife and children, a thunderstorm blew in off the Gulf of Mexico. With stunning speed, lightning bolts began striking within meters of us in every direction. My cool-headed wife and I got the kids to the van in a hurry, sans towels, blankets, and toys, but the situation reinforced how quickly things got nuts. While we sat in the relative shelter of our vehicle, watching channel marker towers being struck by lightning, people were still trying to round up their beach things or standing around like fools. When the storm blew over, we simply resumed our play day.
When I was in Iraq back in 2004 and 2005 as a sergeant in the Marines, every time the enemy initiated contact with my infantry unit, I simply did what I could to try to make sense of the situation. I went through a catalog of items in my mind to determine as quickly as I could who was shooting, or setting off explosives, where the danger zone was, where the available cover was, and so on. I tried to check off those boxes in my head as quickly as I could to keep from getting myself and my Marines killed. That checklist, which allowed us to stay, or get, out of harm’s way when the shooting and explosions started, was infinitely helpful, and serves as a nice segue into my next stratagem:
3. Have a mental trick to fight panic.
People talk about panic without really knowing what it is. Real panic is wildly different from what could be called fear, even quite profound fear. I would venture to say some people have never experienced panic, but I have — once — so I can speak about it. Panic is being pushed by a sudden shock of extreme fear into a total loss of self-control and the ability to employ reason.
My only experience with panic was highly instructive. I was in my early twenties, a very young father to my first son, who was then a toddler. We were at a family reunion on the beach, and after playing beach volleyball with some cousins near sunset, I walked back to the condo in the twilight and caught up with my wife, who was not with our son.
“Where’s Peter?” I asked.
“He’s with you!” she replied, her eyes getting wide.
“I don’t have him!” I yelled back.
At that moment, I panicked; I just lost it, somehow convinced that our child had wandered straight into the water and drowned, as unlikely as that actually was.
I succumbed to panic and ran, completely devoid of control, straight into the surf, not even seeing the child as I ran past him. He was walking happily with the family he had wandered over to on the beach and they were bringing him back to his parents after they saw me leave.
Meanwhile, I was standing waist-deep in the surf, looking around in utter despair for a floating two-year-old. The way I still retain that emotion is remarkable; the memory of the fear and anguish is so acute it is almost as if I had actually lost a child to drowning.
I vowed then and there never, ever to lose control like that again. In Iraq, in the middle of an enemy mortar barrage that had high explosive shells landing all around my platoon, I decided to fix my gaze on the boot heels of the Marine running in front of me, consciously reasoning that if I focused my eyes on those feet and avoided focusing on the mud blossoms of detonating rounds within mere feet and meters, I could avoid panic.
It worked. Yes, I was shitting bricks, but I never panicked, and I never got hit. Somehow we all made it out of that one intact, nothing more than a little mud flung around.
When Colonel James Ripley famously scuttled the highway bridge at Dong Ha, South Vietnam late in the Vietnam War, when the North Vietnamese Army was descending, he said he kept repeating to himself over and over “Jesus, Mary, get me there!” I believe Colonel Ripley, by that time a seasoned multi-deployment combat veteran, did it as much for panic deferral as for physical perseverance, hanging from the bridge to place the charges and having to monkey-bar hand-over-hand to get to the span where he could hoist himself up.
4. Keep your wits about you and formulate a plan as the threat event unfolds.
When my oldest two sons were about 10 and nine year old, we embarked on a sailing adventure with my father and half-brother, cruising downwind on a brisk south wind, northward in the Intracoastal Waterway in Texas’ Lower Laguna Madre, heading for the pass that divides South Padre Island from Padre Island National Seashore. Our plans to circumnavigate the southern part of the barrier island were cut short by an earlier-than-predicted cold front that caught us completely unprepared.
It was still daylight when the weather hit, and we were trying to avoid being blown far into the shallow-water flats. The 30-foot catamaran we were sailing had a very shallow draft, and we didn’t have the dagger boards with us. The damn boat acted like an out-of-control horse as my father tried to keep the helm pointed north, and to compound the situation, a huge tug pushing several massive barges was bearing down on us from the north. The tug captain, trying to avoid us, lost control of his entire barge, and we were on a collision course.
During that particular shit show, my father displayed remarkable indecisiveness at the helm, uncertain of how to avoid the barge and keep our northward progress in the face of the fierce north gale.
“Be ready to jump overboard with the boys,” he told me. This sent me uncomfortably close to panic, but because I knew if I panicked someone could die, I had to fight it.
Still in possession of the one tool that has kept entire hordes and generations of our survivor ancestors alive — reason — I deployed the faculty to determine that jumping overboard was the worst possible thing we could do. I reasoned, essentially, “fuck that, no one’s jumping overboard,” and frantically wracked my brain, thinking about what to do in case of a collision. I never came up with much a plan, but considering the best contingencies while I was otherwise helpless was better than panicking and dying in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fortunately, my older half-brother, a salty Coast Guard veteran and a pioneer of maritime oil spill control who was far more experienced at the helm than my father, had enough, took the helm from dad, and turned the boat around before we could collide, running south and increasing the distance between our boat and the barge.
Complacency, indecision, and panic are wildly effective killers when an emergency arises, as it undoubtedly does and will continue to do, at various intervals, for people who choose to incorporate adventure into their lives. Taking time to consider how we will react is a productive exercise equivalent to the visualization elite athletes take part in before a game. Good luck out there, keep cool, and Godspeed. #archeranglertribe
Ben Christensen is the editor of Archer Angler Unlimited, www.archerangler.com. A former Marine, he currently lives with his family in the Texas Hill Country. He can be reached at riskaverserebel@gmail.com.
