“It still seems to me one of the most spectacular moments of the war,” said a British Resistance operative whose own life was saved by the silence of those brave women. The story is so stirring, it’s easy to forget what it really required. Costi had to ignore self-preservation and propel his body toward danger; he had to cover miles of cross-country terrain at top speed without a stumble; he had to quickly master rage, panic, and exhaustion as he slowed his pounding heart to steady his gun. It wasn’t just an act of courage—it was a triumph of natural heroism and physical self-mastery.
The more I looked into Crete during the Resistance, the more stories like that I found. Was there really an American high school student fighting alongside the rebels behind German lines? Who was the starving prisoner who escaped a POW camp and turned himself into a master of retaliation known as “the Lion”? And most of all: what really happened when a band of misfits tried to sneak the German commander off the island? Even the Nazis realized that when they landed on Crete, they’d entered an entirely different kind of fight. On the day he was sentenced to death for war crimes, Hitler’s chief of staff didn’t blame the Nuremberg judges for his fate. He didn’t blame his troops for losing, or even the Führer for letting him down. He blamed the Island of Heroes.
“The unbelievably strong resistance of the Greeks delayed by two or more vital months the German attack against Russia,” General Wilhelm Keitel lamented shortly before he was led out to be hanged. “If we did not have this long delay, the outcome of the war would have been different…and others would be sitting here today.”
And nowhere in Greece was the Resistance more ingenious, immediate, and enduring than on Crete. So what exactly were they tapping into?
There was a time when that question wouldn’t be a mystery. For much of human history, the art of the hero wasn’t left up to chance; it was a multidisciplinary endeavor devoted to optimal nutrition, physical self-mastery, and mental conditioning. The hero’s skills were studied, practiced, and perfected, then passed along from parent to child and teacher to student. The art of the hero wasn’t about being brave; it was about being so competent that bravery wasn’t an issue. You weren’t supposed to go down for a good cause; the goal was to figure out a way not to go down at all. Achilles and Odysseus and the rest of the classical heroes hated the thought of dying and scratched for every second of life. A hero’s one crack at immortality was to be remembered as a champion, and champions don’t die dumb. It all hinged on the ability to unleash the tremendous resources of strength, endurance, and agility that many people don’t realize they already have.
Heroes learned how to use their own body fat for fuel instead of relying on bursts of sugar, the way nearly all of us do today. Roughly one-fifth of your body is stored fat; that’s all premium caloric energy, ready for ignition and plentiful enough to power you up and down a mountain without a bite of food—if you know how to tap into it. Fat as fuel is an all-but-forgotten secret of endurance athletes, but when it’s revived, the results are astonishing. Mark Allen, the greatest triathlete in history, made his breakthrough when he discovered a way to burn body fat in place of carbs. It revolutionized his approach to the sport and led to six Ironman titles, a top-three finish in nearly every race of his career, and recognition in 1997 as the “World’s Fittest Man.”
Heroes also didn’t bulk up on muscle; instead they relied on the lean, efficient force of their fascia, the powerful connective tissue that is like your body’s rubber band. Bruce Lee was a so-so martial artist until he became fascinated by Wing Chun, the only fighting art created by a woman. Wing Chun relies on fascial snap instead of muscular force. Lee became so adept at harnessing the power of his fascia that he perfected a one-inch punch, a blow from a barely moving fist that could send a man twice his size sailing across the room. Fascia power is an egalitarian and almost undepletable resource. It’s the reason Masai warriors, in their jumping rituals, can bounce along as high as a man’s head, and it’s the essence of both Greek pankration and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, two of the most lethal self-defense styles ever created.
Heroes had to be masters of the unpredictable. They trained their amygdalae by practicing “natural movement,” which used to be the only kind of movement we knew. Just to survive, humans had to be able to flow across the landscape, bending their bodies over and around any obstacle in their path, leaping without fear and landing with precision. Back in the early 1900s, a French naval officer named Georges Hébert dedicated himself to the study of natural movement; he watched the way children play—running and climbing and tussling around—and began to appreciate the importance of spontaneity and improvisation. When Hébert’s natural movement disciples were later tested for strength, speed, agility, and endurance, they scored on par with world-class decathletes.
That’s why the Greeks didn’t wait for heroes to appear; they built their own instead. They perfected a hero’s diet, which curbs hunger, boosts power, and converts body fat into performance fuel. They developed techniques for controlling fear and adrenaline surges, and they learned to tap into the remarkable hidden strength of the body’s elastic tissue, which is far more powerful and effective than muscle. More than two thousand years ago, they got serious about the business of releasing the hero inside us all. And then they were gone.
Or maybe not. When a middle school teacher in San Antonio, Texas, named Rick Riordan began thinking about the troublesome kids in his class, he was struck by a topsy-turvy idea. Maybe the wild ones weren’t hyperactive; maybe they were misplaced heroes. After all, in another era the same behavior that is now throttled with Ritalin and disciplinary rap sheets would have been the mark of greatness, the early blooming of a true champion. Riordan played with the idea, imagining the what-ifs. What if strong, assertive children were redirected rather than discouraged? What if there were a place for them, an outdoor training camp that felt like a playground, where they could cut loose with all those natural instincts to run, wrestle, climb, swim, and explore? You’d call it Camp Half-Blood, Riordan decided, because that’s what we really are—half animal and half higher-being, halfway between each and unsure how to keep them in balance. Riordan began writing, creating a troubled kid from a broken home named Percy Jackson who arrives at a camp in the woods and is transformed when the Olympian he has inside is revealed, honed, and guided.
Riordan’s fantasy of a hero school actually does exist—in bits and pieces, scattered across the globe. The skills have been fragmented, but with a little hunting, you can find them all. In a public park in Brooklyn, a former ballerina darts into the bushes and returns with a shopping bag full of the same superfoods the ancient Greeks once relied on. In Brazil, a onetime beach huckster is reviving the lost art of natural movement. And in a lonely Arizona dust bowl called Oracle, a quiet genius disappeared into the desert after teaching a few great athletes—and, oddly, Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers—the ancient secret of using body fat as fuel.
But the best learning lab of all was a cave on a mountain behind enemy lines—where, during World War II, a band of Greek shepherds and young British amateurs plotted to take on 100,000 German soldiers. They weren’t naturally strong, or professionally trained, or known for their courage. They were wanted men, marked for immediate execution. But on a starvation diet, they thrived. Hunted and hounded, they got stronger. They became such natural born heroes, they decided to follow the lead of the greatest hero of all, Odysseus, and attempt their own version of the Trojan horse.
It was a suicide mission—for anyone, that is, who hadn’t mastered a certain ancient art.
CHAPTER 4
When Hitler came to power Churchill didn’t use judgement but one of his deep insights…. That was what we needed.
—C. P. SNOW,
scientist and wartime spymaster, in his 1961 Harvard lecture “Science and Government”
FOUR YEARS EARLIER, England was doomed. That’s the reality Winston Churchill faced when he took over as prime minister in 1940.
/> “We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles,” Churchill announced. At that very moment, in fact, tank commander Erwin Rommel was bearing down on the Channel with his fabled “Ghost Division,” so known because it blasted through enemy territory with such supernatural speed—once thrusting nearly two hundred miles in a single day—that Rommel could be storming into London within twenty-four hours of rumbling up on British shores.
Clearly, surrender was England’s only hope. For every British plane, Hitler had three; for every British soldier, Hitler had two. U-boat wolf packs and magnetic mines had turned the Channel into a death trap, crippling all but eleven of the Royal Navy’s forty destroyers. British soldiers were bloodied and barely armed; tens of thousands had been captured or killed, and the survivors had ditched their guns and gear in the rush to escape. German troops, by contrast, were so disciplined, ferocious, and euphoric, Hitler actually wanted them to ease up and not overextend themselves by advancing so fast.
“Gentlemen, you have seen for yourself what criminal folly it was to try to defend this city,” Hitler said while touring the smoking remains of Warsaw, which had been bombed into a nightmare landscape of rubble and rotting corpses as its mayor was dragged off to Dachau. “I only wish that certain statesmen in other countries who seem to want to turn all of Europe into a second Warsaw could have the opportunity to see, as you have, the real meaning of war.”
But Churchill knew the real meaning of Hitler. During the chaotic early months of the Nazi onslaught, few were as quick as Churchill to pierce the Third Reich’s gun smoke and pageantry and see into the heart of the man behind it all. If you think you’re dealing with a fellow statesman, Churchill warned Parliament, or an empire builder, or even a run-of-the-mill megalomaniac, you’re making a terrible mistake. War wasn’t Hitler’s means to something greater; it was the greatest thing he knew.
“Nazi power,” Churchill said, “derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution.” Fear and pain were an erotic thrill for “these most sinister men.” By Hitler’s own telling, the most wonderful day of his young life was one of the darkest in history: he was “overcome with rapturous enthusiasm” when he heard that World War I had broken out. “I fell to my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart.” As a soldier, Corporal Hitler adored the ghoulish world of frontline fighting; he resisted evacuation from the trenches when his thigh was torn up with shrapnel, and on his first night back after recovering, he was too excited to sleep and stalked around with a flashlight, spearing rats with his bayonet, until someone hit him with a boot and told him to knock it off.
“When we see the originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays,” Churchill warned, “we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous maneuver.”
So Churchill came up with a novel maneuver of his own. This was a new kind of fight, so Churchill wanted a new kind of fighter: lone phantoms with the inventiveness and self-reliance to test “the unwritten laws of war,” as Churchill put it, and execute whatever havoc they could dream up. The British Army was outgunned and outnumbered, but maybe this way they could even the odds by tying up entire German regiments in pursuit of a single man. Or a single woman. Or a single woman who, in one recruit’s case, was actually a man. Anytime a German soldier tried to close his eyes and sleep, Churchill wanted him plagued—and trailed—by lethal shadows.
He couldn’t use seasoned soldiers for an operation like that; anyone fit enough to fight was needed on the battlefield. Instead, Churchill’s new operation began recruiting poets, professors, archeologists—anyone who’d traveled a bit and knew his or her way around foreign countries. Two middle-aged professors were so electrified when they got wind of Churchill’s scheme that they reversed their conscientious objector status and decided to fight instead. For British academics, this was their fantasy world come to life. The classics were their comic books; they’d grown up on Plutarch’s Lives—“the bible for heroes,” as Emerson declared—and came of age with their heads buried in the adventures of Odysseus and Richard the Lionheart and Sigurd the Dragonslayer. They understood that in ancient Greece, entire wars could pivot on the performance of one or two extraordinary individuals.
Hold on. British high command was appalled. Was Churchill really going to pit these oddballs against the most ruthless killers on the planet? The Nazis had just ripped apart the armies of nine European nations, and Churchill’s counterpunch was…this? They’re not commandos, Churchill’s general argued; they’re calamities. If their fake passports and ludicrous accents don’t betray them, the villagers will; as soon as these misfits are dropped behind enemy lines, they’ll have to depend for food and hideouts on the very people most likely to give them away. Why wouldn’t a farmer with a storm trooper’s gun in his face trade a British life for his own? Churchill’s adventurers will have no escape if pursued and no hope if they’re caught: by the code of combat, no uniform means no mercy. They won’t be marched into camps and visited by the Red Cross, like other prisoners of war; they’ll be beaten and tortured till they scream out every secret they know, then executed on the spot.
But Churchill was undeterred. Few knew that in his early life, Churchill had been one of those calamities himself. He was “hardly the stuff of which gladiators are made,” The Last Lion biographer William Manchester would note. “Sickly, an uncoordinated weakling with the pale fragile hands of a girl, speaking with a lisp and a slight stutter, he had been at the mercy of bullies. They beat him, ridiculed him, and pelted him with cricket balls. Trembling and humiliated, he hid in a nearby woods.” Young Winston was so far from rugged, he could only tolerate silk underwear and even in winter had to sleep naked beneath silk sheets. “I am cursed with so feeble a body,” he’d complain, “that I can hardly support the fatigues of the day.” But over time, Churchill managed to transform himself from that bullied wisp into the dashing war correspondent and army officer who’d become Great Britain’s cigar-chomping, bulldog-tough defender of freedom. If he could do it, Churchill was certain, so could his fellow misfits.
And his misfits believed him—because some of them had already seen a real superhero in the flesh. All they had to do was look out the window and wait for Thomas Edward Lawrence—winner of dagger fights, conqueror of evildoers, chieftain of desert bandits—to come roaring across the Dorset countryside on his big Brough Superior motorcycle. Lawrence of Arabia was more than their idol; he was their evolutionary road map, a guide to the transformation he’d followed from them into him. Back at the start of World War I, T. E. Lawrence had been just as bookish and inept as they were now; as an Oxford scholar with the build of a preteen girl and an aversion to rough sports, let alone brawls, Lawrence was originally assigned to draw maps and military postage stamps and was so out of place on the battlefield that one superior dismissed him as “a bumptious young ass” who “wants a kicking and kicking hard.”
Then something happened. Lawrence rode into the desert, and someone else rode back out. Gone was the “little silk-shirted man,” as Lawrence described himself; in his place was a turbaned warrior with a scimitar on his hip, bullet scars on his chest, and a battered infantry rifle notched with kills slung across his back. No one expected him to still be alive, let alone commanding a band of Arab raiders. Lawrence had managed to marshal these nomadic tribesmen into a camel-mounted attack squad, leading them on hit-and-run raids against the forces of the Ottoman Empire. The Oxford graduate student could now leap astride a fleeing camel, throw burning sticks of dynamite at pursuers, and vanish into a sandstorm, only to reappear a thousand miles away as he galloped from the twisted wreckage of another sabotaged train. The same colonel who’d wanted to boot Lawrence’s bumptious behind was now amazed by his “gallantry and grit,” while Lawrence’s enemies paid him an even greater compliment: the Turks put a dead-or-alive bounty on his head of fifteen thousand pounds, the equivalent today of more than half a milli
on dollars.
Out there in the wilderness, Lawrence had learned a secret. He’d gone back in time, to a place where heroes weren’t a different breed—they just had different breeding. They were ordinary people who’d mastered extraordinary skills, who’d found that by tapping into a certain body of primal knowledge, they could perform with remarkable amounts of stamina, strength, nerve, and cunning. The ancient Greeks knew this; their entire culture was built on the premise that everyone is tinged with a touch of the godly. To be a hero, you had to learn how to think, run, fight, and talk—even eat, sleep, and crawl—like a hero.
Which was excellent news if you were a one-eyed archeologist like John Pendlebury, or a penniless young artist like Xan Fielding, or a wandering playboy-poet like Patrick Leigh Fermor—three men whose fates would become intertwined on Crete. Churchill might have been offering misfits like them a death sentence—and to many, he was—but he was also offering a new way to live. If Lawrence of Arabia could learn the art of the hero, so could they.
This was their chance.
CHAPTER 5
The right man in the right place is a devastating weapon.
—MOTTO OF U.S. SPECIAL FORCES
MY LAWRENCE OF ARABIA—the person who first made me realize heroism was a skill, not a virtue—was a middle-aged woman with big round glasses who ran a small elementary school in the Pennsylvania countryside. On February 2, 2001, Norina Bentzel was in her office when a man with a machete went after her kindergartners. It’s been ten years since I heard what happened next, and only now am I beginning to understand the answer to one question:
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