But Churchill was undeterred. Few knew that in his early life, Churchill had been one of those calamities himself. He was “hardly the stuff of which gladiators are made,” The Last Lion biographer William Manchester would note. “Sickly, an uncoordinated weakling with the pale fragile hands of a girl, speaking with a lisp and a slight stutter, he had been at the mercy of bullies. They beat him, ridiculed him, and pelted him with cricket balls. Trembling and humiliated, he hid in a nearby woods.” Young Winston was so far from rugged, he could only tolerate silk underwear and even in winter had to sleep naked beneath silk sheets. “I am cursed with so feeble a body,” he’d complain, “that I can hardly support the fatigues of the day.” But over time, Churchill managed to transform himself from that bullied wisp into the dashing war correspondent and army officer who’d become Great Britain’s cigar-chomping, bulldog-tough defender of freedom. If he could do it, Churchill was certain, so could his fellow misfits.
And his misfits believed him—because some of them had already seen a real superhero in the flesh. All they had to do was look out the window and wait for Thomas Edward Lawrence—winner of dagger fights, conqueror of evildoers, chieftain of desert bandits—to come roaring across the Dorset countryside on his big Brough Superior motorcycle. Lawrence of Arabia was more than their idol; he was their evolutionary road map, a guide to the transformation he’d followed from them into him. Back at the start of World War I, T. E. Lawrence had been just as bookish and inept as they were now; as an Oxford scholar with the build of a preteen girl and an aversion to rough sports, let alone brawls, Lawrence was originally assigned to draw maps and military postage stamps and was so out of place on the battlefield that one superior dismissed him as “a bumptious young ass” who “wants a kicking and kicking hard.”
Then something happened. Lawrence rode into the desert, and someone else rode back out. Gone was the “little silk-shirted man,” as Lawrence described himself; in his place was a turbaned warrior with a scimitar on his hip, bullet scars on his chest, and a battered infantry rifle notched with kills slung across his back. No one expected him to still be alive, let alone commanding a band of Arab raiders. Lawrence had managed to marshal these nomadic tribesmen into a camel-mounted attack squad, leading them on hit-and-run raids against the forces of the Ottoman Empire. The Oxford graduate student could now leap astride a fleeing camel, throw burning sticks of dynamite at pursuers, and vanish into a sandstorm, only to reappear a thousand miles away as he galloped from the twisted wreckage of another sabotaged train. The same colonel who’d wanted to boot Lawrence’s bumptious behind was now amazed by his “gallantry and grit,” while Lawrence’s enemies paid him an even greater compliment: the Turks put a dead-or-alive bounty on his head of fifteen thousand pounds, the equivalent today of more than half a million dollars.
Out there in the wilderness, Lawrence had learned a secret. He’d gone back in time, to a place where heroes weren’t a different breed—they just had different breeding. They were ordinary people who’d mastered extraordinary skills, who’d found that by tapping into a certain body of primal knowledge, they could perform with remarkable amounts of stamina, strength, nerve, and cunning. The ancient Greeks knew this; their entire culture was built on the premise that everyone is tinged with a touch of the godly. To be a hero, you had to learn how to think, run, fight, and talk—even eat, sleep, and crawl—like a hero.
Which was excellent news if you were a one-eyed archeologist like John Pendlebury, or a penniless young artist like Xan Fielding, or a wandering playboy-poet like Patrick Leigh Fermor—three men whose fates would become intertwined on Crete. Churchill might have been offering misfits like them a death sentence—and to many, he was—but he was also offering a new way to live. If Lawrence of Arabia could learn the art of the hero, so could they.
This was their chance.
CHAPTER 5
The right man in the right place is a devastating weapon.
—MOTTO OF U.S. SPECIAL FORCES
MY LAWRENCE OF ARABIA—the person who first made me realize heroism was a skill, not a virtue—was a middle-aged woman with big round glasses who ran a small elementary school in the Pennsylvania countryside. On February 2, 2001, Norina Bentzel was in her office when a man with a machete went after her kindergartners. It’s been ten years since I heard what happened next, and only now am I beginning to understand the answer to one question:
Why didn’t she quit?
How does a forty-two-year-old grade school principal who’s never been in a fight take on a frenzied Army vet and keep battling him—relentlessly, with her bare hands, at only five foot three—as he’s slashing at her with a blade that can cut through a tree branch? It’s remarkable that she had the tenacity to confront him, but the real mystery is how she persisted when, very quickly, she must have realized she was doomed to lose. Because that’s the ugly truth about heroism: the tests don’t start when you’re ready or stop when you’re tired. You don’t get time-outs, warm-ups, or bathroom breaks. You may have a headache or be wearing the wrong pants or find yourself—the way Norina did—in a skirt and low heels in a school hallway becoming slick with your own blood.
Michael Stankewicz was a social studies teacher at a Baltimore high school who began simmering with rage and paranoia after his third wife left him. His violent threats got him fired, hospitalized, and eventually jailed. After he was released, he picked up a machete and drove to the school his stepchildren once attended—North Hopewell–Winterstown Elementary, in sleepy, rural York County, Pennsylvania. Just before lunch, Norina Bentzel happened to glance out her window and see someone slip through the front door behind a mother with two children. She went to find out who he was and discovered a stranger peering into the kindergarten.
“Excuse me, sir,” Norina said. “Is there someone I can help you find?”
Stankewicz wheeled, yanking the machete out of his left pant leg. He slashed at Norina’s throat, missing by a hair and slicing off the plastic ID tag hanging around her neck. A sad and strangely articulate thought ran through her mind: There is no one in my environment who can help. She was alone in this. Whatever she did in the next few seconds would determine who made it out of that school alive.
Norina could have screamed and fled. She could have curled up in a ball and begged for mercy, or lunged for Stankewicz’s wrist. Instead she crossed her arms in front of her face in an X and backed away. Stankewicz kept chopping and slashing, but Norina rolled with the blows, never taking her eyes off him or allowing him to close the gap and get her on the floor. Norina led Stankewicz away from the classrooms and down the hall toward her office. She managed to slip inside, bolt the door, and hit the lockdown alarm with her gashed and blood-soaked hand.
She was a second too late. Some of the kindergartners were just exiting their classroom as the alarm sounded. Stankewicz went after them. He gashed the teacher’s arm, sliced off a girl’s ponytail, broke a boy’s arm. The children fled toward the office, where Norina once again faced Stankewicz. The machete slashed deep into her hands, severing two of her fingers. Norina looked done for, so Stankewicz turned to seek fresh victims—and that’s when Norina leaped. She wrapped him in a bear hug, hanging on with the last of her strength as he thrashed and lunged and—