1995, Ft. Bragg, North Carolina
John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School
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| SERE School POW Camp (sfahq.com image) |
I was required to attend and successfully complete SERE School (Level C) as part of my special operations aviation position, flying the MH-6 Little Bird. SERE is an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. The purpose of this 3 week course is to teach personnel, in positions with a high risk of capture, or a high likelihood of operating behind hostile borders, a set of skills allowing them to survive with a minimum of survival gear, in a hostile environment. If captured, the course gives you training in resistance to multiple types of interrogation techniques as well as give the student a very basic exposure to some of the hardships a captor will impose on them to achieve their goals. The course also covers escape techniques and helps the student envision a way to return home with honor. Much effort is made into making this course as realistic as possible, within the bounds of humanity, and the uniform code of military justice. The techniques and procedures utilized to build these skill sets are, of course, classified. (I will say, some of the things we endured there were more harsh that the treatment the terrorist prisoners at Guantanamo Bay received)
Located in a secluded area of the Ft. Bragg military reservation, the school is set far away from curious and prying eyes. SERE school is broken into several segments. There are classroom exercises to educate the student on survival, plant recognition, food and shelter, and close quarters hand to hand combat techniques. There is a phase involving survival and evasion skills. An evading soldier can hide in any place you can imagine. Opportunities were given in which we did have to hide in the worst conditions allowed.
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| Defeating attack and trailing dogs (sfahq.com image) |
Food and water procurement is a high priority for the evading soldier. A person dies in 3 days without water. It is possible to survive 3 weeks without food, but it would greatly depend on body fat composition and calorie expenditures. To ensure we were able to capture and eat food, everyone was required to kill a live animal with their bare hands. Having already made sure we were quite hungry for the exercise, and while not pleasant or fun, nearly everyone accomplished their goal of killing and preparing their rabbit for a meal. I dispatched my rabbit with no undue torment to the creature. Most people seemed to have done the same. However, one guy, a member of my evasion team, a guy that was going to eventually quit under stress in the POW phase, had trouble securing his rabbits life. After failing in the coup-de-gras, a karate-style chop to the neck, the rabbit starts bleating like a cat and with my team member now in a panic, he starts to bash it against a tree. This only increased its bleating. Now everyone, including our Special Forces (Green Beret's) instructors, are looking at this guy. 3 instructors now descend on him. "Kill it," they intone. "You're doing it wrong!" Finally, unable to watch this rabbit abuse any long, an instructor delivers the blow. The student is a fail at this station. He gets another chance at it later, and apparently succeeds.
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| These are some rabbits that some trainees turned into a meal. But a running joke is that "food is a crutch" because survival school teaches soldiers how to overcome physical stress like hunger by using mental strength. (sfahq.com image) |
Later in the course, during the evasion phase, after nearly 5 days on the run, my team and I had managed to procure a Halloween pumpkin and some deer corn with wild onions thrown in. After trying to eat this shit, I was fine with starving; although the pumpkin wasn't bad roasted over a fire. Tensions were high on my 5 man evasion cell. On my team was another pilot, two army Rangers, and the guy who couldn't kill the rabbit. We were tense because we knew, after so many days on the run, that we would soon be captured and moved into the final and hardest part of the course, the POW phase. As we were stumbling through a swampy area, cold and wet, miserable and pissed off, we found a turtle. No one had the energy to kill it and dig it out of its shell so we decided the rabbit fucker should perform the task. Again, fail. He tried smashing it open w a little rock. Then cutting on it with a knife, and finally gave up.
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| (sfahq.com image) |
No one liked him, not just because of the rabbit, but because he was slowing us down so much during our night moves to our rally point, and because he had a total claustrophobia event during an earlier phase, while we were crawling head to toe through a tiny sewer pipe. Of course, he was in the middle of the group and came to a dead stop when we couldn't see light at either end of the sewer. He began to freak out. After he was done freaking out I yelled at him, "What are you gonna do? There's no where to go but forward, so let's go! Put your head down and follow the man in front of you."
Our handlers advised us, during a routine radio check-in, that we were to meet some "partisans" and they would convey us to safety after evading. Shit. We all knew what that meant. Everybody knows that in SERE school you eventually get captured and so begins your final and most difficult phase. Sure enough, during our extraction with the "partisans" we were sold out and ambushed. I never saw the attackers because we were hiding under tarps in the back of a van. Machine gun fire pierced the morning air intermixed with shouting in a foreign language. The tarp was pulled off us and we were gruffly yanked to our feet. A heavy black hood was thrust over my head and would remain there for most of the day, tied off around my neck.
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| Captured SERE students are hooded, searched and stripped then marched to the POW camp (sfahq.com image) |
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After much physical torment, mental anguish and humiliation, our hoods were removed and I was assigned my number. Criminal 36. I will never forget that. A lot happened during this part of the training. I will not go in the brutal details and techniques, but suffice it to say I learned more about myself in that period, than in any time in my life. I had already learned I didn't need food or sleep to survive....I learned that to survive sometimes all you have to do is just simply survive. Yes, I knew I was in a school environment....my biggest fear was to lose it, or get hurt and have to repeat the course. At least at some high level I understood that. But now, after days with no food or sleep, I was hallucinating. Seeing things where there was nothing.....reaching out to touch thin air. There is a great deal of stress in not knowing when your next beating is coming, or what interrogation technique they will use on you next time. I distinctly remember multiple sessions with the interrogators. I won't say how many, but one stands out because I was only asked one question. "What are you smirking about Criminal 36!!!" I got my ass whipped by one big guard because he thought I was smirking. Apparently I do this all the time. I know that now. And yep, they thought I was smirking and took me down to China Town!! That took the smirk off my face.
I have no sense of time during this phase. I remember the days being light and dark, warm and cold, during that October in North Carolina. One day, while we were locked in our individual 3'x3' concrete cells, I hear the rabbit fucker say he can't take it anymore. He quits right then and there due to claustrophobia. He is removed from the cell, taken out the gates and whisked away. No harm will come to him, many people quit and there is no shame, except the shame you put on yourself. We tried hollering at him to not do it....don't quit...but his mind was already out the gates. There were about 40 of us in the concrete cell row house and we were feeling kinda bad that another guy just quit. It was at that point, a good friend of mine, we shall call him John, shouts out, "First man to rub one out wins!" W T F? I'm screaming in my mind, "Good God!" As expected, he drew swift and immediate attention from the guard staff...was taken outside for some rough criminal punishment, and finally returned to his cell.
Once back in his cell, a few minutes later, he shouts, "I guess I win!" Slowly at first, you hear snickering, and finally half the cell block is laughing out loud hysterically. In a humorous fashion typical of special forces personnel, that sick puppy came up with just the right kind of morale booster we all needed when things were getting pretty hard. Survival is more than food and shelter.
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| The final moments of SERE school (sfahq.com image) |
See the following link for more info:
http://www.training.sfahq.com/survival_training.htm
