How To Survive
How To Survive, Self-Reliance In Extreme Circumstances, by John Hudson, The Countryman Press, W.W. Norton & Company 2020
Yes, says the author, a British military chief survival instructor, your survival instincts do kick in when threatened. But, says Hudson, our somewhat unused instincts will only take us so far. He advises more work, preparation, and new skills, the kind that he teaches, as well as developing good resources in what he calls The Survival Triangle, a combination of effort, hope and goal-setting, his framework for taking our natural survival abilities levels higher.
To illustrate, the author tells us stories that we will long remember - a young woman on a Peruvian airliner, flight 508 LANSA travelling from Lima to Pucallpa, along with 91 other passengers and crew drops out of sight. And eleven days later one seventeen year-old girl crawls out of the jungle, alive, bruised, with a broken collar bone, but alive. After a lighting strike that disassembled the aircraft Juliane fell an estimated two miles through turbulent air into a forest, parachute less, until she came to on the jungle floor. Being buckled into a three seat row initially saved her, but there was so much more ahead.
Juliane's mother, seated next to her on the flight, was nowhere to be seen, although the girl searched for a day. Vultures watched from the trees above, and no doubt other creatures crept about the thickly forested floor. It would have been so easy for the injured girl to surrender, to give up and wait for an unknown but inevitable end. She had no water, no food, no medical help to call on, but what she did have was what saved her - native jungle intelligence gained from two years of home schooling in the heart of the Amazon by her two research scientist parents, and what a gift that proved to be.
She knew, looking up, that there was no way that rescuers would spot her through the thick jungle canopy. She had no radio or cell phone to call in on, and the jungle stretched for miles all around her. But she remembered something her father had told her - that water would lead you to people. And if she listened carefully, she could hear a stream in the not too far distance. So she got up and without her glasses and wearing only one shoe, she started out. Two hundred hours later after having consumed her one bag of candy she collapsed in a loggers' hut, where she was found and transported via a 10-hour boat trip to the nearest village.
Of course Juliane lived with survivor's guilt - "Why was I the only one who made it?" - but turns out that she wasn't! Some 14 others fell to the jungle floor, only to expire alone, scattered at distant spots throughout the jungle. Somehow Juliane had made it when others failed.
"...whether its a shipwreck or a text message that changes your world forever, humans all have the same type of brain with which to process everything, and the way we respond to new situations hasn't really caught up with how vastly different life is for most of us in the developed world."
An F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter pilot under fire over Belgrade realized that the one-ton missiles being launched at his ship might connect, and for him that meant falling back on the ejection training fighter pilots underwent. He was hit, flipped upside down, and not even Chuck Yeager could have righted the craft as it dove out of the sky. He knew that it was time to pull the ejection-seat handle - at 500 mph there would be no other chance.
More survival stories presented throughout this book make it a winner. And the author's conclusions about human training and behavior are indeed applicable to non-combat situations (unless that is indeed your work atmosphere!). Hudson believes that we, or most of us, can in fact learn the survival skills we need to take us safely through most situations:
"Roughly speaking, we all fall into one of three groups during a dynamic crisis event. A few people will know what to do (roughly one in ten), the vast majority of us will not know what to do - we'll be stunned - and a minority of people will react badly. Whether you're in the top, middle or bottom group, we are all liable to behave in those ways unless we retrain ourselves. But this retraining isn't the mammoth task you might think."
Appendix 1,"Practical Advice for Coping During a Pandemic" was inserted after this book's first publication, and its a valuable resource, particularly the section entitled "Coping with indefinite isolation." We will still be working on these challenges long after thE crisis has moved on. Other precious sections include "How to light a fire," a method I haven't seen since Girl Scouts, and "How to build an igloo." How to Survive is just filled with brave eye-opening stories and basic smart survival skills. The Mill Girl rates this book an A++.!
Patricia E. Moody
FORTUNE magazine "Pioneering Woman in Mfg"
IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert
A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, patriciaemoody@gmail.com
How To Survive, Self-Reliance In Extreme Circumstances, by John Hudson, The Countryman Press, W.W. Norton & Company 2020
Yes, says the author, a British military chief survival instructor, your survival instincts do kick in when threatened. But, says Hudson, our somewhat unused instincts will only take us so far. He advises more work, preparation, and new skills, the kind that he teaches, as well as developing good resources in what he calls The Survival Triangle, a combination of effort, hope and goal-setting, his framework for taking our natural survival abilities levels higher.
To illustrate, the author tells us stories that we will long remember - a young woman on a Peruvian airliner, flight 508 LANSA travelling from Lima to Pucallpa, along with 91 other passengers and crew drops out of sight. And eleven days later one seventeen year-old girl crawls out of the jungle, alive, bruised, with a broken collar bone, but alive. After a lighting strike that disassembled the aircraft Juliane fell an estimated two miles through turbulent air into a forest, parachute less, until she came to on the jungle floor. Being buckled into a three seat row initially saved her, but there was so much more ahead.
Juliane's mother, seated next to her on the flight, was nowhere to be seen, although the girl searched for a day. Vultures watched from the trees above, and no doubt other creatures crept about the thickly forested floor. It would have been so easy for the injured girl to surrender, to give up and wait for an unknown but inevitable end. She had no water, no food, no medical help to call on, but what she did have was what saved her - native jungle intelligence gained from two years of home schooling in the heart of the Amazon by her two research scientist parents, and what a gift that proved to be.
She knew, looking up, that there was no way that rescuers would spot her through the thick jungle canopy. She had no radio or cell phone to call in on, and the jungle stretched for miles all around her. But she remembered something her father had told her - that water would lead you to people. And if she listened carefully, she could hear a stream in the not too far distance. So she got up and without her glasses and wearing only one shoe, she started out. Two hundred hours later after having consumed her one bag of candy she collapsed in a loggers' hut, where she was found and transported via a 10-hour boat trip to the nearest village.
Of course Juliane lived with survivor's guilt - "Why was I the only one who made it?" - but turns out that she wasn't! Some 14 others fell to the jungle floor, only to expire alone, scattered at distant spots throughout the jungle. Somehow Juliane had made it when others failed.
"...whether its a shipwreck or a text message that changes your world forever, humans all have the same type of brain with which to process everything, and the way we respond to new situations hasn't really caught up with how vastly different life is for most of us in the developed world."
An F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter pilot under fire over Belgrade realized that the one-ton missiles being launched at his ship might connect, and for him that meant falling back on the ejection training fighter pilots underwent. He was hit, flipped upside down, and not even Chuck Yeager could have righted the craft as it dove out of the sky. He knew that it was time to pull the ejection-seat handle - at 500 mph there would be no other chance.
More survival stories presented throughout this book make it a winner. And the author's conclusions about human training and behavior are indeed applicable to non-combat situations (unless that is indeed your work atmosphere!). Hudson believes that we, or most of us, can in fact learn the survival skills we need to take us safely through most situations:
"Roughly speaking, we all fall into one of three groups during a dynamic crisis event. A few people will know what to do (roughly one in ten), the vast majority of us will not know what to do - we'll be stunned - and a minority of people will react badly. Whether you're in the top, middle or bottom group, we are all liable to behave in those ways unless we retrain ourselves. But this retraining isn't the mammoth task you might think."
Appendix 1,"Practical Advice for Coping During a Pandemic" was inserted after this book's first publication, and its a valuable resource, particularly the section entitled "Coping with indefinite isolation." We will still be working on these challenges long after thE crisis has moved on. Other precious sections include "How to light a fire," a method I haven't seen since Girl Scouts, and "How to build an igloo." How to Survive is just filled with brave eye-opening stories and basic smart survival skills. The Mill Girl rates this book an A++.!
Patricia E. Moody
FORTUNE magazine "Pioneering Woman in Mfg"
IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert
A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, patriciaemoody@gmail.com