SERE’s training is to develop a coping strategy. Mine was to turn the exercise into a game, and it kept me going. I reached the hut before dawn and joined five classmates inside. We had been scattered after the crash and had moved independently to the hut. Its owner, a burly Bosnian who was probably a Navy chief in real life, assured us that we were safe and suggested that we sleep for the day, since we would have a long movement that night. I drifted off on the dirt floor.
Barking dogs woke me. There was shouting in a foreign language, and a rifle bolt slammed home. We had been betrayed. The sun was high in the sky, and I knew we were captured. I felt crushed. SERE’s realism, and a thought-scattering week without food, made it easy to forget that this was only training. In my mind, on that morning, I was somewhere in the Balkans and had just been condemned to a prison camp.
Rough hands pushed me to the ground from behind. I saw a boot and nothing else. A burlap sack was dropped over my head, and I was half-led, half-dragged down a dirt road and into a clearing. I kept my bearings by looking downward through the sack’s opening. My mind raced, trying to remember what I had been taught the week before. This was initial capture, the most dangerous time of all. I could expect a field interrogation, and I had to give up enough information to be kept as a prisoner instead of being killed outright. Know-nothings and hard-heads usually ended up with a bullet in the base of the skull.
I felt almost elated being slammed against a metal wall. Field interrogation; I had been right. A swarthy guy with a mustache had me by the collar, bouncing me back and forth against the wall. After two or three bounces, he would ask my name. I said, “American.” He slapped me across the face, and the bouncing continued. We went back and forth like this a couple of times before he pulled out a gun. I recognized the danger sign and told him my name. The rule of captivity is to bend, not break. Be the willow, not the oak. Getting killed means you failed the test. We went back and forth on a few more questions, and then I was hurled into the bed of a truck.
The next day and night passed in a blur of beatings and interrogations. I was stripped to my underwear and shoved alone into a cinderblock cell, shorter than I was tall and narrower than I was wide. My legs cramped, and I shifted onto my feet. Then my back cramped, and I repeated the cycle for hours on end. Isolation is brutal, even for a short time. There was nothing to look at, no one to talk to, no way to keep track of time. We were made to feel completely powerless so that we would understand that our fates were in the hands of our captors.
After dark, a scratchy recording echoed through the camp. I recognized it as Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots,” in a droning British monotone. Over and over, it played a continuous loop: “There’s no discharge in the war!”
When dealing with stress, we crave human contact, a connection with others who can empathize with our pain and provide the simple hope of shared hardship. I was cautiously excited when, hours after sunset, the guards dragged me from my cell and led me at gunpoint down a long underground corridor. Even hearing them talk and seeing them move took my focus off myself.
I entered a carpeted room, warm and bright. A man behind a desk greeted me with a gracious smile and, in accented English, asked me to sit. He pushed a candy bar and a steaming mug of coffee across his desk, inviting me to enjoy them. Mind-fucking me. I refused, but not without a long glance at the rising steam. He introduced himself as a representative of the Jamaican embassy. I nodded. He asked about my treatment. I replied that Article 25 of the Geneva Convention required that I be housed in decent accommodations, while Article 26 guaranteed me basic daily food rations. I had received neither. He smiled and said he would see what he could do to help. He put on a concerned look and asked about my physical condition. At his prompting, I moved my head up and down, and back and forth. I bent my arms and legs.
Going through the charade, I knew this was a “soft sell” interrogation. Torture is generally a weapon of the weak. Americans are social creatures and especially susceptible to those who will eviscerate us with a gentle smile and a kind word. By obeying politely but accepting no favors, I had defeated the conniving Jamaican. I was returned to my cell.
After shivering for a few hours, I was again led out, this time blindfolded and bound at the wrists. Inside another room, I was forced into a wooden box. It measured perhaps five feet by two feet and was no more than two feet deep. A lid slammed over me, and I heard a latch slide into place. It was like being buried alive. I struggled to stay calm, to breathe easily, and not to thrash around and let them know they’d gotten to me.
When I was finally let out, the guards pushed me up a flight of stairs and made me kneel on a wooden floor. They tightened the blindfold so I could see nothing. My hands remained tied behind my back. A voice began to fire questions at me — name, rank, service, reason for being in the country, number of Americans on my plane. The floorboards creaked as he walked around me. I didn’t know where the blows would come from.
I struggled to use the resistance techniques I had been taught, crafting a story that was believable, logical, flexible, and consistent. Alternately, I slipped into vagueness and ran down irrelevant tangents. I filled my speech with military acronyms and claimed a faulty memory. Whenever I sensed a fist winding up in the dark, I gave him a piece of information. I verbally bobbed and weaved until my knees were sore. Finally, a rifle barrel prodded me to my feet and planted itself in my rib cage as I limped back to my cell.
Coping strategies. I stared at the cell wall, shivering. I had no idea how many hours remained before sunrise or how many days I’d be in the camp. Then I remembered the tap code. One of the classes in Coronado had been in a Morse code-like tapping of letters to spell words through cell walls. I tapped “hi” on the wall in front of me. H-I H-I H-I.
It surprised me when someone tapped back. I missed his first few taps and scratched at the wall, the signal to start over.
S-F S-F S-F.
Semper fi. Always faithful. I smiled in the tight confines of the cell and sat back to wait for my next mind- fuck.
When SERE ended, the staff carefully debriefed each student on his performance. A Navy petty officer sat with me in an empty Coronado classroom.
“So, sir,” he said with a smile, “how long do you think you were locked in the box?”
“An hour, maybe two,” I replied.
“Eight minutes.”
The two times I was led from my cell had, as I guessed, been my soft and hard interrogations. The hard sell had been a total success — I had given up almost no information and had used the resistance techniques so effectively that the interrogator had never resorted to torture. The soft sell had been a different matter. As I sat in silence the petty officer played a videotape. There I sat in the warm room, looking pale and thin. Apparently, there had been a hidden camera I never saw. A voice-over asked questions that were never actually posed to me, and my reactions had been spliced in.
“Do you care that you bomb and kill the little children of our country?”
I shook my head no.
“Do you think America is evil for the war crimes it commits here against our peace-loving people?”
I nodded an emphatic yes.
My neck stretches in response to the Jamaican’s health questions had been used against me. Despite the best intentions, I had fallen victim to the soft sell. The petty officer was sympathetic. “Don’t worry, sir. Getting mind-fucked once is the best way to make sure it won’t happen again.”
18
THE FOLLOWING Monday morning, I put on my green dress uniform for the second time. It had been nearly two years since I’d checked into 1/1, and I wasn’t a boot anymore. I wore a few ribbons from Afghanistan on my chest and all the confidence that went with them.
Recon’s headquarters was called Camp Margarita, a collection of single-story offices near Pendleton’s airfield. A sign at the entrance bore the insignia I remembered from Colonel Leftwich’s statue at TBS: a skull and crossbones surrounded by the words “Swift, Silent, Deadly.” The battalion had been formed in 1937, and had fought with distinction in almost every Marine campaign since.
The clerk collected my orders and sent me to the battalion commander’s office, saying the commander liked to shake hands with each of his new officers when they checked in. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Ferrando, trim and
