Down Around Midnight (23 page)

The plane crash is a textbook example of the traumatic events Pitman talks about, the salient emotional events Elissa Koff, citing the work of McGaugh, says you must remember to ensure your survival. For everyone who lived through it—the copilot, my fellow passengers, and me—the memory of that night is inerasable. Hence the permanence of our association, even if fate, or I, were never again to bring us together. All of us, as a result of our shared experience, are heirs to a common destiny. At those times when remembrance of the past imposes itself on the present, it is we, as ghosts on the periphery, who haunt one another's dreams.

 

 

Understanding this, I understood why, when sitting with Suzanne in that first hour of our reacquaintance, I felt as though she and I had known each other all our lives. It was a feeling that also expressed itself in my meetings with the others. The connection we shared had some of the outward qualities of the bond that exists between siblings, observable in, if not measured by, the things that are left unspoken.

“You share something with these people that no one else shares with them. You share something very deep together,” Richard Morrill told me.

I'd known Dick Morrill for years in a kind of run-into-him-around-town kind of way. I wouldn't have said we were pals—I was much better acquainted with his brother—but I'd certainly spent enough time with him and talked to him often enough to like him.

Recently I got to know him a lot better.

Not only is Morrill bright, he has terrific performance skills. He knows how to command an audience. He is one of those guys who smiles when he talks, not like you and me, but like Harold Hill in
The Music Man,
albeit with much more sincerity, one of those engaging, outgoing characters who talk and smile at the same time. He can converse intelligently on a range of subjects. There isn't a lot you can't talk to him about, but it's always more fun to listen, and he is remarkably forthcoming with information about himself. And so it came as something of a surprise when, after knowing him for so many years, I learned how much about him I really didn't know.

“Have you talked to Dick Morrill yet?” a friend of mine inquired, when I explained that I was doing research on posttraumatic stress.

“Why would I talk to Dick?”

“He's studied it pretty thoroughly. He can probably direct you to the right sources.”

I knew Dick Morrill as a carpenter. I wasn't familiar with his educational background. Out here, at the end of the Cape, you stop asking questions about things like that after you run into your third or fourth Fulbright scholar with a commercial fishing license, your second or third career bartender with a background on Wall Street. These are the escapees I mentioned earlier—I can introduce you to an Eastham stonemason who can translate Virgil without breaking a sweat—the people I like to think of as refugees, men and women who visited the Outer Cape and decided they wanted to stay, learning to do, as Morrill himself would tell me later, “whatever they could that would allow them to make a living here,” learning in his case “to be a carpenter . . . and an innkeeper . . . and a musician . . . and an actor.” They show up here from all over the country, trading in their career goals for—and they all use the same expression—“quality of life,” which means that, more than punching a clock, they like living on Jimmy Buffet time. That's the secret of life on the Outer Cape: Nobody has any money, and we're all living as though we've got trust funds.

Morrill could easily have been an academic in an earlier life, a psychology professor like Elissa Koff. He was clearly a studious fellow, and he certainly had the visual attributes of at least one notable scholar. Lean and bespectacled, ranging over six foot three and exhibiting the excellent, upright posture that teachers and parents encourage, he brought to mind, somewhat vaguely and minus the lugubrious trappings, the classic renderings of the schoolmaster Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

The first time I saw him, I was new to the Cape, and he was rising to address the town meeting, calling for a vote to direct the federal government to recognize the community as a nuclear-free zone. “As I remember, some other people wrote it and asked me to stand up and make the motion,” he told me, when I reminded him of it recently. “It must have passed, since there is not one single nuclear weapon in our town.”

Before calling him, I asked my friend where it was that Morrill came by his expertise.

“It's something Dick's been into forever,” he told me.

Well, not quite forever, I discovered, but at least since 1968.

In 1968, Dick Morrill was twenty-seven years old, living in Saigon, and working as a flight mechanic for Air America, the civilian airline owned and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency that supported covert military operations in Southeast Asia.

“We did stuff the military couldn't do,” Morrill told me, when he and I sat down to talk. “As far as we were concerned, there were no rules. Our motto was Anything, Anytime, Anywhere.”

In June of that year, the year of the Tet offensive, he was aboard a helicopter training flight with an instructor pilot and two first officers being checked out for promotion to captain, one of whom was sitting with him in the back of a Bell 204B, known in its military configuration as the UH-1 Iroquois, and more famously by its GI nickname, the Huey. They were practicing emergency landings between Saigon and Long Binh, “not an area where, if you went down, they'd come and shoot you,” Morrill said, so there was no fear of that when the helicopter crashed.

Morrill isn't an academic. He is a graduate of the school of horrible experience.

“It was really flaring . . . knees up . . . the tail rotor was hitting . . . at sixty miles per hour, it took only about eight seconds . . . the chopper flipped . . .
No, no, no, no!
. . .” The helicopter went into a skid.
“No, this can't happen
. . .
I don't want to die
. . .” pinning him facedown beneath it.

“I automatically went into prayer. . . .”

There was no pain, he said, but there was terror.

“I knew I was gonna die, I knew it was gonna explode. . . .”

He knew the fuel in the line would keep the machine running for three minutes, and he kept yelling instructions on how to shut the engine down, screaming out the location of the emergency fire handle to his fellow crew members. Only two of them were alive, and the one who was conscious was in far worse condition than Morrill.

“I was trapped, and I was pissed. I was so pissed at God. . . .”

What if it's not Jesus? What if it's Buddha?
Morrill found himself wondering, excited in a strange way that he was now about to learn the answer. All the while shouting instructions.

The engine quit after three minutes, and he remained pinned for another twenty, until he finally heard the voices of the U.S. military patrol that saved him.

His posttraumatic stress was severe. “For a year, I could never be alone,” he told me. “I could never be above the fourth floor in a building.” It stayed with him, in one form or another, for twenty-eight years.

“Whenever I talked about the crash, I could feel tension,” he said. “I spoke in a way that was different. It takes energy to suppress these things.” In an innovative acupressure procedure, he found a trauma therapy that finally cured him.

 

 

A final word about memory and emotion:

Memories laid down in detail during significant emotional events have a vivid, photographic quality that has led psychologists to coin the term
flashbulb memory.
Every memory is slightly altered every time you retrieve and refile it; not only are you calling up the original memory, but you are also calling up the last time you remembered it. The difference between normal memory and flashbulb memory is not accuracy, but
perceived
accuracy. People
believe
their flashbulb memories to be more accurately and vividly laid down.

“They're vivid,” says Elissa Koff, “but not necessarily accurate. The information you put in is not the same as you pull out.”

My memory of the crash is of coming around kneeling on the deck with the seat strapped to my back. I also remember, immediately after the crash, describing it that way to others: the seat coming forward with me, ripping free of the fuselage. According to the NTSB report, “The seat in position 1A [that of the eldest sister] was separated from its aft floor and wall attachments when trees penetrated the area,” a failure due to impact damage. “The tie-down chain . . . was actually severed at only one seat location due to decelerative forces,” and that was where Suzanne had been sitting. “Seat unit 4BC was found collapsed on the floor,” its anchor bolts “sheared in a forward-inboard position.”

In the report, no mention is made of my seat collapsing. I asked Suzanne what she remembered. She told me her seat “collapsed into the seat in front of it. . . . When I stood up, you were still in your seat . . . I do not remember you being on the floor.”

Scientists who study memory will tell you, as Dr. Koff explained the paradox to me, “The safest, purest memory is the memory that's never retrieved.”

 

 

I didn't talk to the copilot after our brief exchange of words that night, after our shouting at each other in the darkness as we were evacuating the airplane. I caught a glimpse of him in the hospital, but only fleetingly, a few days later. We passed each other on gurneys as I was being wheeled out of X-ray after my surgical consult. I can't explain how I knew it was he. I saw only the top of his head, and I would not have recognized his face had I seen it.

His testimony before the NTSB was corroborated by that of others, and he was exonerated by the board. I don't know if I saw the transcript of his testimony, and thus I cannot explain why, but my tendency had always been to ascribe to him a palpable measure of bitterness, a rancor unalleviated by time. That may have been a mistake, an insinuation of the anger I witnessed that night—anger I shared—into something I read much later.

The one time he and I had talked to each other, he was disgorging blood and slipping into clinical shock. I was looking for leadership, calling out to him in the dark, only to learn I was on my own. I'll never forget what he said or the chill that came over me when he said it.

He shouted, “Copilot's doing his job!”

An awful emptiness rose in my stomach, an emptiness that revisits at night when I hear him say it in my sleep.

While there is no upside to victimization, there is a certain purity in the victimization that comes with surviving a plane wreck, for it is unclouded by any suggestion of contributory negligence. It's not like crashing your car. A plane crash survivor is never troubled by questions of what he might have done to avoid or prevent it. Unless, of course, he is a member of the crew. The airplane's first officer did not benefit from that purity, and it is not hard to believe that he struggled for months, as the investigation of the crash dragged on, with the simultaneous challenges of asking himself those troubling questions while defending himself against blame for errors that were not his.

“Apart from [his] being horribly wounded, I got the feeling he was fighting his own internal sense of, Oh, my God, I'm the copilot . . . wrestling with trying to get through the emotional side of accepting the fact that he'd just crashed his airplane. . . . There was a lot of talk about ‘This wasn't my fault. . . .' ”

Jonathan Ealy, not because of anything that transpired after the crash, but because of the view he'd had into the cockpit from where he was sitting before it happened, was called to testify at the two-day NTSB hearing held in Cambridge in mid-September:

“Remember when Sears used to sell the double-knit suits where you could reverse the pants and the jacket and make it real sporty . . . ? Yeah, I had to get the chocolate brown double-knit three-piece. . . . I got done testifying, and I think it was the second hearing I testified at, and a big guy on crutches came up,” introduced himself by name, “and said, ‘Can I buy you a roast beef sandwich?' I don't think we ended up going to lunch, I think I had to [get back to campus]. But I got to see him. And after all the unreality of testifying, that was sort of like a real . . . Oh, yeah, there really
is
a guy, it really
did
happen.”

It was the last time he saw the man whose life he had saved, but not the last time he heard of him.

“Alaska's full of pilots, and one of the bars I liked to go to was full of pilots,” he told me. One night with a friend who knew them, he found himself drinking with a group of pilots who worked with the copilot at Delta Airlines. “He flew for Delta apparently. That was back in ninety-four or ninety-five. They knew him real well and had heard about the plane crash and had heard about me.”

Aviators belong to a community in which scuttlebutt is highly valued, and in the conversation Jon had with the Delta pilots fifteen years after the crash, they alluded to circumstances only speculated on at the time of the accident. The fact that the underlying information might have been provided to them by the copilot makes their remarks worth considering.

In their understanding, Air New England at the time of the crash had been the target of a job action, afflicted by an outbreak of what they referred to as “pilot flu,” a work slow-down in which numerous pilots had collectively called in sick. Alleged at the time, but not pursued by the press, it was why Parmenter had been assigned to fly.

Parmenter's recent flying time, his actual time in the air, according to the accident report, “had been limited to 12 hours in the last 90 days” leading up to the day of the crash. He had flown most of that time in clear weather, and it was possible, said the NTSB, “that the captain's proficiency, particularly in instrument meteorological conditions, was degraded by the lack of recent experience.”