The hidden cost of heroism

A riddle in the wreckage
"He seemed sort of middle-aged and, uh, maybe balding?" That was all the chopper pilot could say about the mystery hero, which really wasn't much. Given that it was Washington, D.C., the description fit just about half the passengers on any flight.

Millions of TV viewers had been riveted to the rescue as it was beamed live from the banks of the Potomac, but they couldn't see the hero from behind the wreckage. Not even the people he saved had a good look; all they saw was a hand wrapped around a rescue ring.

But just when it seemed the hero would forever be an unknown soldier, the D.C. coroner made a crucial discovery: Of the 74 bodies, only one had lungs filled with water. That man was the only person who made it out of the plane but not out of the river. He was Arland Williams Jr., a 46-year-old federal bank examiner whose life had been a monument to playing it safe — until the moment he lost it.

"Danger" wasn't Arland Williams Jr.'s middle name. "Chub" was, and was he ever a Chub. Not that he was especially heavy; his Chubness was more about personality than pants size, about being a grinning, gosh-golly, aw-shucks kind of guy who wasn't even riled by everyone calling him Chub. His college roommate never heard his real name till the day they received their diplomas.

"Arland never called a lot of attention to himself," says Peggy Fuesting, his girlfriend from high school in Mattoon, Illinois. "But he liked to have a good time. If you've ever seen Happy Days, that's exactly the way we were. We were all a group who went to high school together, went to the football games and the hops. After lunch, we'd play records and dance. We all knew who the good dancers were. Chub was certainly a good dancer."

When he wasn't jitterbugging in the gym, Chub was drilling with the Mattoon High School ROTC. That small taste of Army life helped him figure out a way to succeed in the eyes of his father, the Big Man around Mattoon and the president of the local bank. Chub decided to go to the Citadel, one of the most exclusive and demanding military colleges in the country. Peggy understood the decision, but she also knew something about Chub that had her worried.

"He had to pass a water-safety and swimming requirement, and it made him very uneasy," Peggy says. "He'd had that fear of water his whole life, and he didn't know if he could overcome it to push through that test."

Actually, Chub would be lucky if he lasted long enough to get his head wet. The Citadel is so grueling that in an average year, a quarter of the new cadets become ex-cadets in the first week. More than a third never graduate.

"They make a man out of you," says Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Webster, Chub's Citadel roommate. "The job of the upperclassmen is to remake you from a boy to a man in 1 year. They push you, physically and mentally. We lost 30 cadets before we even started classes."

The kind of men the Citadel makes typically come in two varieties: On one side, you have the real fire-eaters like William Westmoreland (Class of  '39), who ripped through the ranks to become commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam, and Micah Jenkins (Class of 1854), who was already so badly wounded before one Civil War battle that he had to be carried to the front lines in a medical wagon, and who not only picked himself up to fight but also kept yelling for his troops to "carry the day" after he was later shot in the forehead.

Then there are men like Frank Webster and Chub, who finished the job without thrusting themselves any deeper into the action than they had to. Many of their classmates ended up in Vietnam, including one who was imprisoned with John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton and another who became legendary by defying torture and writing patriotic songs on toilet paper in his own blood. But Chub was more of a take-it-as-it-comes kind of guy.

"He was always fun, always laughing," Webster recalls. "Pretty normal, really. Just quietly went about what he had to do."

Chub finished his 4 years of college, did his 2 required years of military service in a stateside post, and then followed his dad's comfortably familiar footsteps into banking. There he found a way to retreat even further from the line of fire; he shifted from running a bank to becoming a bank examiner, meaning he wouldn't even have the face-to-face hassle of dealing with customers. Instead, he'd spend the next 20 years sitting quietly in an office and checking the math of other bankers.

Survival of the selfish
Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher.

"He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature," observed Darwin, who consequently couldn't figure out how to crowbar heroism into his survival-of-the-fittest theory.

Die for your own kids? Perfectly logical. According to Darwin, your only reason to exist is to pass your genes along to the next generation. But to die for a rival's kids? It seems totally counterproductive. No matter how many virile, healthy heroes you bore, it would take just one selfish bastard with a hearty sex drive to spoil the whole species. Selfish Bastard's kids would thrive and multiply, while SuperDad's kids would eventually follow their father's example and sacrifice themselves into extinction.

So if all the forces of evolution seemed to be aligned against heroism, why does it still exist?

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