Chosen To Live by Jerry Schemmel
Excerpts
How do I describe the impact? It felt, for the lack of a comparable experience, exactly like you’d expect to feel if you’d dropped thousands of feet out of the sky and hit the ground. The sound matched the force of the jolt, seeming to come at once from both inside and outside of my head. At that moment, there would have been no way to even subconsciously put words to the event, but the feeling in my gut was that this was no crash landing. In fact, it was no kind of landing at all. It was simply an airplane slamming to the earth.
For all the painful clutching of the seat-back in front of me, my hands immediately lost their grip and my head, wedged against the same cushion, popped straight up like a some character in an arcade game. The irresistible momentum moved me forward and upward from my seat until I had the sensation of floating in the air, held back only by my seat belt.
Gradually, the momentum slowed until I could feel myself easing back into my own seat cushions. Though my eyes were squeezed tightly shut, afraid to look at the havoc unfolding around me, I somehow some how became aware that the cabin lights went out. Screams cut though the thunderous sounds of the impact. I reached out to brace again against the seat back in front of me. My hands groped in the darkness but felt only by a void; there was nothing there anymore. The seat in front of me was already gone. I tried in vain to clutch something, anything, to help fight the unbelievable force trying to wrench me from my seat. But the crash had instantly rearranged the cabin in ways too horrible to imagine.
With no seat-back to grab, I fumbled for my own arm rests and managed to pull myself back into my seat, as deep into the cushions as I could. For a split-second I felt I was making headway, that I was winning the battle against the laws of physics; and then, in the next instant, I heard more screams and moans. I let my eyes open in the near darkness of the careening cabin and saw a human body fly past me, upside down. A woman, still strapped in her seat, flew past me on the other side. A storm of debris seemed to whirl around me, as if I were sitting in the eye of a hurricane. When a ball of fire shot past on my right, from front to back of the cabin, I remember thinking it was just a matter of time before something hit me. I ducked my head and tried to cover my face. For all my mental preparation for this moment, there was nothing left to do but react instinctively to the raw physical chaos. It was a helpless feeling, a sensation of total vulnerability.
Once again, time moved in slow, elastic increments. The plane, too, seemed to be slowing slightly, though in reality it was still screaming across the ground at a frightening clip. But there was a steadiness to the motion, and the thought occurred that the worst was over, that we would simply coast to a stop and – miracle of miracles – I might even walk away from this experience. That’s when we flipped over.
A sharp pain rippled though my back as I felt myself, still strapped into my seat, roll forward with the pitch of the cabin. A tremendous burning sensation that started in my lower back and traveled quickly up my spine to the back of my neck made me wonder, momentarily, if I’d been electrocuted.
A moment later, I hung upside-down in my seat, waiting for the momentum of the roll to right us. But it never did.
After only a few steps, I heard a sound that stopped me in my tracks. It was a human voice, a muffled cry that could only be a baby. And clearly, it was coming from inside the wreckage.
What I did next – head back into the burning plane – would be seized and exaggerated by the media over the following months and years into something remarkable and heroic. But at that moment, there was no weighing of options or gauging of danger. There was no clear realization of risk that might have resulted in a conscious decision to act heroically. There was no premeditation. A baby’s cry of distress strikes a chord in every human ear, and I simply happened to be within earshot.
As I wheeled around and headed back toward the plane, the man just ahead of me, who I’m sure could not have heard the cries himself, must have thought I was crazy.
“No!” he shouted. “We’ve got to go!” “There’s a baby!” I screamed back.
I can’t recall much of the next few seconds. I obviously followed the sound of the crying and reentered the wreckage. I really don’t know which direction I went or how far into the smoke my steps took me. I know I couldn’t see anything and I do remember homing in on the cries. “Keep crying,” I remember saying to myself. “Please, keep crying.”
I kept moving until I seemed to be standing right over the cries. Feeling the floor in front of me with my hands, I realized that the child was buried beneath debris. I grabbed whatever lay between me and the sound. Because of the smoke, I could see nothing. It was now completely blank inside the cabin. I pulled away what felt like a duffel bag. Then a blanket. Then a large piece of metal. That opened up what appeared to be a hole in the floor – really the ceiling of the upside-down plane – that I would later guess to be an overhead storage compartment. I reached into the hole, grabbed an arm and lifted the child out. I held the child’s head against my white dress shirt so as to try to keep the choking smoke away from the infant’s nose and mouth.
I don’t remember anything about getting back out of the plane. The next thing I recall is stepping back into the cornfield and running away from the wreckage. The thought of an explosion returned and I didn’t break stride until my distance from the plane began to feel comfortable.
Perhaps 50 yards away from the downed plane, I stopped to look at the child. It was a little girl in a light blue dress. She had stopped crying and I scanned her tiny body for signs of injury. I saw none –no blood, no abrasions, no burns. There was only a small cut beneath one eye. She didn’t seem to be hurt but there was no way for me to know for sure – at least not until she confirmed my diagnosis with a big, beautiful smile.
