## Two Types of Courage: The Crash and the Streets of Belgrade
It is worth pausing on the comparison between the two kinds of extraordinary experience that define Vesna Vulović’s public profile: surviving the crash and opposing Milošević. The two are connected in the narrative of her life, but they are different in nature.
Surviving the crash required nothing from her except the specific biological and physical facts of her situation. She did not choose to survive. She did not demonstrate courage in surviving because courage requires choice, and she had no memory of the event in which she survived. She was unconscious; her body survived because of the food trolley and the snow and the slope and her blood pressure and whatever else contributed. The survival was not an act of will.
Opposing Milošević was an act of will. It was a choice she made with full consciousness, in full knowledge of the consequences, sustained over years during which the consequences became concrete. She attended demonstrations that were met with riot police. She aligned herself publicly with the Democratic Party in a media environment where pro-government newspapers ran campaigns against opposition figures. She continued to speak when it was professionally and personally costly to speak.
The courage required for these two things is not the same kind of courage. The first is a fact about her body. The second is a fact about her character. The historical record of Vesna Vulović that reduces her to the survivor of the crash — the Guinness record, the height, the extraordinary fact — is recording the first kind of fact. The historical record that notes her political activism during the Milošević years is recording the second kind.