Clink.
He dropped the machete. The school nurse grabbed it and ran out to hide it in the hall. Stankewicz staggered to the desk, Norina still clinging to his back. Soon sirens and thundering footsteps were approaching. Norina had lost nearly half her blood but was rushed to the hospital in time to save her life. Stankewicz surrendered.
“Luck” and “courage” were mentioned often in the days following the attack, but of all the factors involved, luck and courage were the least significant. Courage gets you into predicaments; it doesn’t necessarily get you back out. And unless he slips and falls, there’s nothing lucky about outfighting a man coming at you with a machete. Norina Bentzel survived because she made a series of decisions, instantly and under extraordinary pressure, and her success rate was the difference between life and death.
When she crossed her arms and retreated, she instinctively seized on exactly the posture recommended in pankration, the ancient Greek art of no-rules fighting, later adopted in World War II by the “Heavenly Twins”—Bill Sykes and William Fairbairn—whose close-combat technique is still used by Special Forces today. Norina didn’t stumble frantically or bolt into a dead end, but maneuvered backwards with purpose. If she’d allowed her adrenaline to redline, she’d have burned through her energy and been left helpless. Instead it was Stankewicz who ran out of gas, allowing Norina to wait for her opportunity and seize it.
When it came to strength, bulk, and savagery, Norina was hopelessly outmatched. So instead of going muscle-to-muscle, she found a better solution. She relied on her fascia, the fibrous connective tissue that encases our bodies beneath the skin. Your upper body has a belt of fascia running across your chest from one hand to the other. By wrapping her arms around Stankewicz, Norina closed the fascia loop; she turned herself into a human lasso, essentially banding Stankewicz’s arms with a thick rubber cable and neutralizing his force.
But for any of that to happen, Norina first had to master her amygdala: the fear-conditioning portion of the brain. The amygdala accesses your long-term memory, scanning whether anything you’ve done in the past resembles something you’re about to attempt in the present. If it hits a match, you’re good to go: your muscles will relax, your heart rate will stabilize, your doubts will vanish. But if the amygdala finds no evidence that you’ve ever, say, climbed down a tall tree, it will lobby your nervous system to shut down the operation. The amygdala is what causes people to burn to death instead of stepping onto a firefighter’s ladder, or drown by refusing to release their grip on a lifeguard’s neck. It’s also what makes riding a bike so hard when you’re five, yet so easy after a five-year break; once learned, your amygdala recognizes the behavior and gives the go-ahead. Your amygdala doesn’t reason; it only responds. It can’t be tricked, only trained.
For most of us, no matter how strong or brave, the bizarreness of a machete attack would overwhelm our amygdala and freeze us in our tracks. Norina’s genius was finding a strategy that suited her skills: she wasn’t a fighter, but she was a hugger. Wrapping her arms around someone was a movement so familiar, her sensory system didn’t object. Norina managed that hug because she’d had a flash of insight: she couldn’t conquer Stankewicz’s rage, but maybe she could calm it.
“I put my arms around you,” she would tell Michael Stankewicz from the witness stand on the day he was sentenced. “To comfort you.”
Stankewicz stared at her. Then he silently mouthed “Thank you” and was led off to serve a 264-year term in prison.
So how do you prepare for an attack by a maniac with a machete?
The question feels stupid coming out of my mouth and almost indecent, given the circumstances. I’m at Norina’s school, and it’s been barely a year since the attack. But privately, Norina has been wondering the same thing herself.
“Let’s talk outside,” she suggests. She’s gracious and good-humored, and so charmed by children that after seventeen years as an educator she still likes spending her breaks watching the kids tear around at recess. Her arms are now covered with lightning-bolt scars. After four reconstructive surgeries, her hands have recovered a good bit of function, but they don’t feel like her hands anymore; they’re so cold and numb all the time that even on this warm autumn afternoon, she’s clutching heat packs. But she can hold hands with her husband and children again and play her alto sax at Penn State Blue Band reunions and tousle the hair of the schoolkids who come charging up as soon as they see us on the playground.
Strange as it sounds, Norina says, she was ready that day. She must have been. She was calm, rational, strong. She wasn’t panicking or preparing to die; she was running through her options and planning her next move. Her reactions weren’t random; they were natural and deliberate. So deliberate, in fact, she felt “guided from above.” But for practical purposes, she was guided from within: she knew what to do, and her body knew how to do it.
“If you want to call me a hero because I treasure these children, that’s fine, but I do that every day in my job,” Norina says. It’s an interesting clue. Was she poised because she’s a lifelong teacher who’s trained herself to stay cool when things get hot? Did she hold eye contact because she deals with tantrumy children and agitated parents that way every day? Was it a coincidence that her hands came up in the same position she’d practiced for decades as a saxophonist, and she likewise had the ambidexterity to deflect and defend with both arms?
All it takes is a few minutes with her on the playground to understand why she’d fight to the death for these kids. What’s still baffling—to Norina most of all—is why she won.
“What I find fascinating is how rare it is today for even a hero to understand his own heroism,” says Earl Babbie, Ph.D., a professor emeritus in behavioral sciences at Orange County’s Chapman University whose research focuses on heroics. “I’ll bet you won’t find a single example of a person who says, ‘Yes, I’m a hero.’ A few years back, a hijacker on a plane pointed a gun at a passenger. The flight attendant got between the gun and the passenger and said, ‘You’ll have to kill me first.’ Afterward, the flight attendant said, ‘No, no, I’m no hero.’
“And I thought, For Christ’s sake! If that doesn’t qualify, what does?” Babbie continues. “I don’t think it’s modesty. I think it’s bewilderment.”
Babbie has a dream experiment he’d love to perform. “I wish it were possible to interview heroes the day before they risk their lives for someone else,” he says. “I bet you won’t find anyone who can tell you with assurance what he or she would do in a life-threatening situation.” Just the opposite, in fact: Babbie has found that the art of the hero has been neglected for so long, most people are uncomfortable even discussing it. He likes to read the Boy Scout Oath and Law out loud in class and watch his students squirm when he comes to the parts about being trustworthy, loyal, helpful, and friendly.
“Virtue isn’t respectable these days, and we’ve certainly seen enough hypocrisy among so-called moral leaders to question what they tell us to do,” Babbie says. “But at some deeper level, we still instinctively idolize the kind of heroic behavior we claim is foreign to us, and keep acting on the heroic urges we claim we don’t have.”
Even Charles Darwin found heroes bewildering. Darwin’s great gift to science was simplifying all life to pure mathematics: your one and only goal on earth is multiplication. Everything you do, every instinct you have, is an evolutionary urge to make babies and leave behind as many copies of yourself as possible. From that perspective, heroism makes no sense. Why risk the grave for someone else if there’s no guarantee of a biological payoff? Dying for your own kids: smart. Dying for a rival’s? Genetic suicide.