Hurts so good; at POW school the Navy locked me in a box. Here's why I'm grateful - prisoner of war

Washington Monthly, May, 1988 by Scott Shuger

Hurts So Good

At POW school the Navy locked me in a box. Here's why I'm grateful.

This box I was locked in made me more uncomfortable than I'd ever been. Its dimensions had been calculated to prevent the average-sized man from lying down or sitting up. Instead of either of those luxurious postures, the box forced you into a miserable muscle-straining compromise that made sleep impossible. Even when I was lucky enough to daydream--about my family or food or some other good thing--I was cut short by the periodic pounding of a rifle butt on my door.

In mid-afternoon, when I was stripped down to my underwear and put in the box, it had been in the mid-eighties and the cool darkness was welcome. But it had been forever since the slit in front of me had gone black--near midnight I bet--and I had been shivering for hours. The shakes started soon after a guard yanked open my door and then slammed it just as suddenly, spilling my piss-pot all over me.

This was one of those situations where what you knew didn't matter much in light of what you felt. I knew I was in a school, on an American military base, that my snarling captors were fellow members of the U.S. Navy, and that this whole thing would be over a day from now. But none of that was worth a thing to me shaking in the dark.

As a navy aviation officer, the last special training I attended before I got ready to deploy overseas with my squadron in 1980 was Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape--SERE--school. That's where the boxes were. The acronym is pronounced "sear," and for me it always conjures up an image of being shoved on a spit and slowly turned over an open flame.

The existence of such a school probably strikes life-long civilians as intolerably barbaric--yet another proof that the U.S. military has gone stone haywire. But my reaction is more typical of SERE graduates: it was the best war training I got. If more of our military preparation were this focused and effective, our readiness would be improved exponentially.

The at-sea scenario exercises that the Navy depends on to ready its forces tend to lack realism. For one thing, they don't involve much live weapons firing (too expensive--the F-14's chief weapon, the Phoenix missile, goes for $1 million a copy). For another, aboard a ship underway, there is no safe way to set off explosives, fill compartments with smoke and sparks, or set up catastrophic power failures. As a result, what is supposed to simulate an all-out war at sea with the Red Navy all too often ends up as just more routine. But SERE school was an example of how the mayhem of combat can be re-created on land.

SERE stands out from the great gray routine of the hundreds of hours of canned drills, exercises, lectures, and briefs now bemiring U.S. forces. It has no use for message traffic, or viewgraphs, or computers. Instead, its pivotal learning tools are nature's greatest teachers and combat's only constants--pain and fear.

The Manchurian Candidate

For all that, SERE started off mundanely enough. About 40 officers and men trudged into the classroom at the North Island base in San Diego, most of us in a trance befitting the ungodly hour. We were given the usual "Welcome Aboard" by various instructors--including the always-popular Coffee Mess rules and base traffic regulations. (If the Joint Chiefs ever have to brief the president about an incoming wave of Soviet ICBMs, they'll still have Petty Officer Flaherty come up first and explain the JCS Coffee Mess.)

Next we were told a little bit about the school. For most of its history, the U.S. military didn't have any explicit doctrine about how its members should behave once they were taken prisoner. Everybody knew that the Geneva Convention required POWs to give captors only their name, rank, and serial number. What else was there to learn? After all, we were in the business of taking prisoners, not making them. Why dwell on getting captured? This view was shaken when the Chinese "brainwashed" some captured soldiers during the Korean War. It wasn't quite like The Manchurian Candidate, but American officers, psychologists, and political scientists were startled to learn that "normal" troops could be trained, often in a relatively brief period of confinement, to identify and collaborate with the enemy--even to the point of refusing peacetime repatriation. This background led to the establishment in the mid-fifties of the American Fighting Man's Code of Conduct--the first explicit statement of requirements for captured American servicemen. The poster on the wall by my seat quoted the key words--"If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. If senior, I will take command. I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape." In the prison camps of Vietnam the Code went to war for the first time. At SERE school, the Navy teaches it to aviation personnel, SEAL commandos, and others whose jobs make them most liable to be captured.

The first week of SERE was all classroom. There were lectures about the Code of Conduct and about covert communications. There were films. One of them, "Here There Are Tigers," portrayed the capture of a downed American pilot by the North Vietnamese. Some of the details were reasonably authentic, but it was eerie to see the film's naive depiction of the relationship between the POW and the interrogator--strained at times but always absurdly "professional." Strictly Richard Loo and Stalag 17 stuff.