This is an edited extract from The Resilience Shield by Dr Dan Pronk, Ben Pronk and Tim Curtis.
There was no real noise, just a sudden, forceful intake of breath and the vehicle in front of us disappeared, smoke and dust and slow-motion debris raining. It was just like in the movies: the soundtrack cut out abruptly, clattering vehicle noise and radio chatter replaced in an instant by a tinnitus monotone. A wheel, tyre still inflated, bounced – again in slow motion – out of the cloud, and still no sound but for the urgently whispered (shouted?) ‘F---!’ from inside my vehicle. Was it hours that passed before anything further happened? The reptilian automaton deep in my brainstem was already calling the incident in, requesting recovery, warning out medevac, but this was all reflex – my conscious self sat dumbly watching the dust bloom and bloom, the tan edge of its talc balloon now reaching the windscreen of my truck, gently enveloping us too.
Without realising I’d moved, I was outside our vehicle, stupidly moving forward, off the road, and the soundtrack suddenly caught up. The first noise I heard was the screaming that still lurks on the fringes of my foremind, occasionally making sudden and unexpected forays into my thought.
I was close before I could actually see. The vehicle was completely eviscerated, its entrails strewn in a blossom pattern radiating geometrically from the blast site. Carnage, both human and machine. Panning across this scene, my eyes were drawn to the fork of a nearby tree in which a Snickers bar and some underpants were wedged like some strange local fruit, and then to bins full of 40 mm grenades strewn carelessly on the ground like Easter eggs under the roadside trees.
The man who had been sitting at the rear of the car, facing backwards, had now propped himself up six metres away where he’d landed, silently and fastidiously applying a bandage to a small cut on his shin while torrents of blood poured unnoticed from his neck onto the front of his armour. And still the noise, the godless screaming – the top gunner its source, staring in disbelief at the pulp where his right thigh had been moments earlier. Our medic, quick to his side, working rapidly, asking him to rate the pain and him screaming, “10, 10, 10”, over and over and over like a broken mantra, and even the ampoules and ampoules of morphine couldn’t silence him.
All around the boys reacted as they’d been drilled, security posts out quickly, arcs of fire silently interlocked, daring a follow-up attack. The medics fetched sloppy bags of saline and established lines in constricted veins, reassuring their scared and broken friends. The driver of the mangled vehicle, somehow unhurt, wandered sobbing up and down the road, fixated on the minutiae of the carnage, paralysed by the guilt of the unscathed, until someone grabbed him by the shoulder and steered him away, making crude jokes about his driving and pretending his rifle was needed on the perimeter – taking his focus off the blast, handing him back some semblance of control and self-worth. And me, I contributed, although how I, how any of us, functioned in that time-stood-still Hades is lost to me now. What I do still possess, however, is the laminated medevac card graffitied with my child’s-scrawl description of the carnage – “Pri 1, multiple upper leg fractures, likely internal bleeding, facial lacerations, blood pressure falling” – studious dictations from the medics, none of which I recall writing, but which I must have relayed to get the helicopters there as fast as they came.
-Ben Pronk – Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, 2008
It’s fair to assume that anyone reading this has heard the word “resilience” before. But have you ever spent any time really considering what it means? For a long time, we certainly hadn’t. Sure, we thought we were pretty tough, but so were many of our mates who ended up suffering from stress-related illnesses. It started to become clear that there was more to the concept than we had initially thought, and so we began research to build a more thorough understanding of the historical and contemporary views on resilience.
The concept of resilience has been alluded to since the earliest times of civilisation. It wasn’t until the early 1970s, however, that the term “resilience” made its debut in the scientific literature, in a 1973 article on ecosystems by Canadian ecologist Crawford Holling. Holling used resilience to describe the amount of disturbance that an ecological system can withstand before it shifts into an alternative stable state. This early definition was primarily focused on the maintenance of function, even if that involved some form of underlying adaptation or fundamental change to the system.
In the latter decades of the 20th century, as more authors embraced the concept of resilience, other viewpoints on the definition of the term emerged. Many of these espoused the idea that the measure of a system’s resilience was related to the rate of return to the initial equilibrium, as opposed to Holling’s emphasis purely on maintaining function. In this respect, Holling’s definition of resilience emphasised stability while the subsequent interpretations focused on recovery.
The concept of psychological resilience as it relates to us humans started to gain momentum through the 1980s and 1990s. Stress, like resilience, has varied definitions in the literature, but it can be concisely defined as a “generalised set of physiological and psychological responses observed when an organism is placed under challenging circumstances”. The term “stress” almost exclusively evokes negative connotations. Fair enough, too – it has been linked to pretty much every ailment you could hope not to get, from Alzheimers to asthma and diabetes to depression. But before we go too hard on stress, it’s important to reaffirm that it is actually a vital part of any organism’s existence. Without stress, there can be no opportunity for adaptation and growth, stress is absolutely mandatory for building resilience. The key point is that it is not the stress per se, but the amount and timing of the stress that determines whether our response is going to be positive or negative. Too little stress leads to under-stimulation with no potential for positive adaptation, and too much stress will overwhelm the individual and leave them broken. Like so many things in life, there is a definite “Goldilocks effect” at play when it comes to stress.
Of course, resilience must also be considered in the context of the stressor(s) being faced. Dr Lies Notebaert, a psychologist at the University of Western Australia specialising in the field, emphasises that an individual’s resilience is not an absolute, but rather something that is relative to the adversity they are dealing with. Lies captures this relativity within her preferred definition of resilience, as “an outcome better than expected given the adversity being faced”.
The bottom line is that the jury is still out on a universally agreed definition of resilience. But while academics can fight over terminologies, they can all at least agree on the following two key points. Firstly, for resilience to exist there needs to be some form of stress. And secondly, you need to come out the other side of the stress event in one piece.
Our personal experiences on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq and Sierra Leone, combined with an ongoing research project conducted in conjunction with the University of Western Australia, have led to the development of the Resilience Shield. We believe that this is the most comprehensive model of resilience produced to date, offering value in the fact that it is dynamic, multi-factorial and modifiable. Dynamic in that it can change with time to suit the various stages – and pressures – of your life. Multi-factorial in that it recognises that you need multiple “layers” in your Resilience Shield – from mind to body, and social to professional. And modifiable in that you can (and should) actively build your resilience before a stress event to better prepare you to weather the storm – be that a global pandemic, unexpected retrenchment or roadside bomb.
Go ahead – build your shield.
The Resilience Shield by Dr Dan Pronk, Ben Pronk and Tim Curtis. Pan Macmillan Australia, RRP $34.99, out now.