Teaching Stress-Resilience: How Times Have Changed
A Desert Storm Memory
In January of 1991, my platoon was to conduct one final reconnaissance mission a few nights prior to the start of the Desert Storm air war campaign. The Port of Ras al Mishab, Saudia Arabia, served as our forward operating base. Our mission brief was like any other - it included a plan for infiltration to the target, a plan for actions on the target, and a plan for ex-filtration from the target. Then, we briefed for contingencies, or what we would do if any variables took us off our original plan.
Our medical plan was always part of our contingencies brief because although you don’t like to plan on being injured, you need to know the plan of action if someone is. On this night, the medical brief included a Navy Psychologist who we had never met before and who we would never see again. He gave a 10-minute presentation on the physiological and cognitive effects of stress. We learned how to recognize and deal with a teammate shutdown by acute stress. His words would stick in my head forever. “Don’t judge him, he can’t help it.”
In sports, resilience has long been an attribute required by many coaches when trying to recruit the right players for their programs. But what does resilience look like, and how does a recruiter measure for it? Resilience is defined as, “the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress; or an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”
The ability to recover from compressive stress or to come back from misfortune or change. Resilience is complex. It’s about coming back from being down. On that 1991 January night, the Dr. explained that once the war started, we would be put into more stressful situations than we’d ever been exposed to prior. He wanted us to understand that once extreme stress kicks in, our body has a physiological and psychological response to stress preparing the body to react to the danger. He explained the “fight or flight” phenomenon coined in the 1920's by American physiologist Walter Cannon. In the face of danger and acute stress some people will step up and face it head on performing in ways otherwise unimagined, while others might completely shut down becoming immobilized. He told us not to judge those who might shut down, but to recognize and understand what was happening and keep them safe. He also said that after the threat is gone, it takes between 20 to 60 minutes for the body to return to its pre-arousal levels.
That very same evening during the infiltration leg of the mission, our platoon took mortar fire without injury. Stressful but not incapacitating so we carried on. Once on target we passed undetected directly under some enemy lookouts, another stress spike for sure. With our observations on target complete, we began our ex-filtration in two 1,000 lb Zodiac boats each weighted down with an additional 1,000 lbs of gear. The surf zone was one hundred yards off the beach. The outboard motor was at full-throttle, helping us to pierce through the waves. We punched through the first wave, but as we prepared to meet the second both boats slammed into a massive coral reef destroying our primary engines and propellers.
With both engines dead in the water and waves continuing to crash over us, all of the men from each boat launched over the sides to try and free their boat from the reef. That’s when we began to hear the faint whine of an unknown craft coming towards us. As we fought the surge of the waves and the unsteady footing the reef provided, the officer in charge gave the command, “ready…up…heave…” but the boat remained stuck on the coral head beneath. Again, he called out, “ready…up…heave…”
The whine of the engine heading toward us got louder and louder. Then, I realized the guy directly across from me had shut down. A blank stare and limp arms were the only accompaniment he provided to the “ready… up… heave…” commands. I remember thinking “Wow, that’s what the Dr. was talking about. This is some crazy sh*t…” With the high pitch sound of the engine finally on our position, the five of us who could drew our weapons ready to confront the enemy. But, before we could see anything, the noise began to fade as if it drove right past us.
It was truly a twilight zone moment because we never saw anything. After finally freeing ourselves from the coral, my teammate was back to normal. We missed the timeline for each of our contingency plan pick up points and drove our boats all night long only to run out of fuel 500yards from the Ras al Mishab Pier. So, we paddled ourselves in. During our mission debrief, we learned that the whining engine that mysteriously came and went was a US Army drone flying out to do its own recon. To give you an example of how far we’ve come technologically, one of the guys in the platoon asked, “What’s a drone?” Funny, now, but a fair question back then, as we had never been exposed to or briefed on that capability being used in our area of operation.
The point is my education on resilience to acute stress came in the form of a short brief on how to recognize and react if one of my teammates was shutting down. However, if that Dr. had educated and worked with us earlier in our deployment on the understanding and application of mental training tools and strategies we could employ in this stressful environment, maybe we would have had better control of our individual responses to acute stress.
Much like the advances in technology, the military has also made improvements in the focus on the mental aspect of training. Today, the U.S. Army leads the way with its Ready and Resilient Campaign. The goal is to “Build and Maintain Ready and Resilient Soldiers, Soldier Families, and Army Civilians and Ready Units”.
This preemptive approach towards developing stress-based resilience skills includes targeting physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual aspects of the human condition. Some of their courses include: Hunt the Good Stuff, Avoid Thinking Traps, Energy Management, and Active Constructive Responding. Mental Skills Foundations, Sustainment Training, and Goal-Setting. The need for resilience training extends well beyond the military and into other high-stress performance environments prompting the development of performance psychology fields. As a Head Coach, if you have access to a Sport Psychologist, talk to him/her and get the conversation started on developing a resilience program for your program.
