Let no man's ghost return to say ...

Most first responders are familiar with the “fight and flight” principle - our sympathetic reaction to a stressful stimulus, like fear.  Anatomically speaking, the amygdala, an almond shaped mass of nuclei located in the temporal lobe, is the structure at the very center of this fear response.  Its function includes arousal, memory, hormone secretion and emotional regulation, especially autonomic responses to fear.  It has been indicated in disorders like Post Traumatic Stress Disorders and panic attacks, to name a few.

The amygdala and our fear response are vital.  It prepares us to avoid or ward off danger; however, it can easily overcome our rational senses and ability to perform critical thinking.  After all, the amygdala is an “emotional” system.  The good news is that the amygdala’s complex circuitry is directly connected to our higher regions of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, where decision making takes place.  The constant feedback loop embedded in our system allows for us to control our emotions - if we have practiced to do so.

As an example, pilots use a technique called “deliberate calm.”  When everyone else is panicking from fear of crashing, the well trained pilot remains calm and performs the necessary actions to avoid or reduce casualties.  Remember Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the US Airway Pilot that successfully crash landed flight 1549 in the Hudson River? This is a perfect example of “deliberate calm.”

An interesting case study that more emergency services persons can relate to is the Mann Gulch Fire of 1949.  On August 5^th that year, smoke jumpers where dispatched to Helena National Forest in Montana for a small wild land fire. Of the 19 man crew, only three survived that day.  View this link to the Forest Service report written by Richard C. Rothermel in 1993. A must read for all firefighters.

The long story short, the fire conditions changed rapidly and pursued the smoke jumper crew up a hill.  The crew could not out run the advancing fire and 16 of the men perished. This tragedy was a severe blow to the Forest Service, which had not experienced a fatality during a decade of smoke jumping.  One of the survivors was the foreman, Wag Dodge. This excerpt from the fore mentioned report explains Wag Dodge’s actions:

“Dodge must have realized they could not reach safety and conceived the idea of burning away a small clearing. This escape fire, as it has come to be called, would quickly clear an area where the crew could go, after the fine fuels burned away, giving them a chance to escape the flames of the main fire. … Dodge sized up the situation better than most of his crew … No one stayed with Dodge.”

This ingenious idea of Wag Dodge to burn the fuel away from around him, giving him an island of safety, saved his life.  In more modern times, this technique is used by Wildland firefighters.  The escape fire technique was used by 73 firefighters who avoided injury and death after being trapped on the Butte Fire in 1985.  “The crews were well disciplined; no one attempted to run from the fire. They stayed together and followed orders even though they were badly frightened” (Rothermel).

The point of this post is this: Fear is a natural and vital emotion build into our neural circuitry. It can be helpful and detrimental.  As first responders, we walk into situations other people run away from; therefore, we have to train to control our response to the amygdala’s emotional input.

A quote from my first department’s training philosophy: "Let no man's ghost return to say, ‘My training let me down’."

“How about it!”