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Training airmen to survive behind enemy lines

COLVILLE NATIONAL FOREST, Wash. — The motto of the Air Force Survival School is “return with honor,” but the students here seem more concerned about returning with all their fingers and toes.

It’s cold out. Real cold.

Video

Training to survive

The mercury reads 2 degrees above zero at 8 a.m., and the students in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape course huddle around an instructor giving a lesson in map-and-compass navigation. The students’ breath billows from their mouths in thick white plumes, and the powdery snow squeaks like Styrofoam as they stamp their feet for warmth.

Of the 49 classes that come to the mountains north of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Wash., for SERE training each year, these prospective pilots, navigators and aircrew had the bad luck of drawing the coldest week of the year. There is more than 4 feet of snow on the ground, and temperatures drop well below zero at night.

But conditions aside, the students try to remain focused on the task at hand: learning how to survive if they get shot down or crash and are stranded in the wilderness or behind enemy lines.

“It’s good [stuff] to know,” said 2nd Lt. Robert Aton, an electronic warfare officer with the 563rd Flight Training Squadron at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. “But it wasn’t too fun last night when I thought my nose was going to freeze off.”

About 4,500 airmen complete the 17-day SERE course every year. It’s required for aircrew who could deploy. Much of the training is conducted in sight of the flight line at Fairchild, but each class of 100 or so students spends five days learning survival techniques in the mountains about 70 miles north of base.

The SERE school’s half-million-acre training area in the Colville and Kaniksu national forests is remote and beautiful, an outdoorsman’s paradise with few people or paved roads. More than one SERE instructor has a hair-raising story about getting stalked by a mountain lion. Bear, moose and elk sightings are common. The streams are teeming with trout, and the mountainsides are carpeted with towering spruce, fir and cedar trees, the boughs of which sag with the weight of fresh snow.

It’s a lovely place, but unforgiving and unrelenting.

The students spend every minute of their five days of field training outdoors; their lessons take them trekking on snowshoes through the mountains or trying to build a fire in the wind and snow, and they sleep in crude shelters they build themselves from logs, tree boughs and parachute nylon.

Their instructors, all SERE specialists, are part mentor and part tormentor.

“We don’t necessarily try to make it hard on them or make them suffer, but we want them to respect what they’re going through,” said Airman Patrick Harrington, a field instructor with the 22nd Training Squadron, which runs the aircrew SERE course. “Being super-cold out here, sleeping in shelters [makes them] know the difference between not being in a shelter and being in an improvised shelter. ... [They realize] that the things they are learning actually work.”

Desert heat, mountain cold

Harrington, 23, has only six months’ experience as a SERE specialist, but you wouldn’t know it by the deference his eight students give him. SERE is one of the few career fields where rank doesn’t seem to matter much. Harrington’s students are nearly all commissioned or noncommissioned officers, but he is the unquestioned leader in the woods.

The SERE specialist assigned to work under him as an apprentice is a staff sergeant 11 years his senior.

The morning lesson is navigation and overland travel, and Harrington is teaching the students how to pinpoint their location using a map, compass and sticks. He demonstrates how to use one’s own position in relation to prominent landmarks to triangulate a location on the map. It looks crude, but the students are able to determine — often on the first try — their location within 100 meters of what a Global Positioning System unit shows to be correct.

“Realistically, they’re going to have a GPS, but as long as they have a background knowledge and confidence in their map and compass skills, their survivability is going to be a lot higher,” Harrington said.

Building the students’ confidence in their ability to survive is one of the main purposes of the course, Harrington said. Instructors can’t possibly teach them all the survival skills that might be useful, and they can’t expose them to the numerous natural environments they might encounter, such as the deserts of Iraq or the jungles of Asia.

Instead, the instructors teach basic skills — building fires and shelters, navigation, and food and water procurement, among others — and encourage students to think about how those skills might be applied in various environments.

“Out here we teach them global principles with everything,” Harrington said. “Throughout the day I’ll ask them, ‘Hey, what’s going to be different about traveling up ... this slope in the tropics?’ Or ‘Where might we want to walk in the desert?’”

The heat of the desert is nearly inconceivable to these airmen, who are bundled in camouflage parkas, black wool ski masks and thick insulated boots to protect them from the biting cold. After Harrington’s navigation lesson, they take a quick break to scarf down packages of snack food from the rations they brought from base.

Getting enough food and sleep is a constant challenge. The students’ bodies burn far more calories than usual, trying to generate warmth, and the cold and physical exertion sap their strength.

On this week in January, the instructors provide more food than usual because of the extreme cold, but their supply is still limited to a few small packages of snack food — and several live rabbits.

The students kill and butcher the rabbits for meat — a practice that has drawn the attention of animal rights groups — and they learn to scrounge edible vegetation from the forest.

“We had rabbits last night, and it was pretty good,” said 1st Lt. Ryan Busbey, an F-16 student pilot with the 87th Flight Training Squadron at Laughlin Air Force Base, Texas. “It’s not the cleanest conditions, but you’re going to survive with a little food and protein.”

Sleep is an even bigger issue. The students spend the night in frigid parachute shelters, and they haven’t been able to manage more than four or five hours of fitful rest per night.

‘The most extreme thing’

Three days into the course, exhaustion is starting to show on their faces. Still, the students face a long day of rucking through the mountains to practice overland navigation. Carrying heavy packs and wearing snowshoes to keep them from sinking in the waist-deep powder, they slowly wind their way up a hillside to rendezvous with a rescue helicopter.

“I have never seen this much snow in my entire life,” said Busbey, a native Texan. “Hiking through these woods, the environment [is] probably the most extreme thing I’ve ever been through.”

The line of students resembles a train of pack animals, trudging forward dutifully until the person in front of him stops — which happens often as someone inevitably loses a snowshoe or gets tangled with a downed tree branch. The pace is slow, except for Harrington, who bounds back and forth like a jackrabbit.

Harrington repeatedly sprints up the trail to some feature of the landscape or vegetation he wants to point out to the group. He is clearly in his element, unlike most of the students.

The navigation is in the hands of Airman 1st Class Andre Montgomery, who Harrington appointed squad leader for this leg of the trek. Montgomery’s task is to keep the group moving in the direction Harrington assigned him, despite the zigzagging necessary to climb the steep terrain.

The trek proceeds in increments of 50 or 100 meters, as Montgomery peers through his compass sight to find a landmark — usually an easily identifiable tree — that lies in the right direction. He leads the group to that point and then repeats the process, finding another landmark in the right direction to which he can lead them. It’s a simple and seemingly foolproof method.

It works this time, anyway, and students seem in better spirits when they find out they’ve made it to the right spot — their bodies warmed and minds perked by the physical exertion. Standing around and getting cold during lessons is much harder than the rigors of being on the trail, they say, and the best way to stay warm and awake is to keep moving.

In the summer, the small glade the group has landed in would be choked with blueberry and huckleberry bushes. Harrington sets up a spot on the edge of the clearing from which to vector in the helicopter, and he instructs the students to wait beneath the cover of a towering fir 10 meters away. He pulls a bright orange piece of plastic and several smoke flares from his rucksack.

The distant whap-whap of helicopter rotors echoes through the surrounding peaks and valleys as other groups of students — there are several like this one operating in the vicinity — conduct their vectoring exercises.

As the helicopter comes into sight, one student pops a flare, spewing bright pink smoke into the clearing.

Vectoring — guiding the helicopter onto one’s position with directional headings — is harder than it looks. The echoing sounds make it difficult to get a bead on the chopper’s location, and students must read their compasses backwards, providing bearings from the aircraft to them rather than from them to the aircraft. It’s counterintuitive, and more than one student sends the helicopter a full 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

It’s not such a big deal in an exercise, but it could be disastrous during a real rescue. This is their only chance for a mulligan; the next time they vector in a chopper, it could be from behind enemy lines.

“They’re the weakest link in the recovery,” Harrington said. “They need to realize how important it is to follow the different things we teach them. ... That way everything works out smoothly for them in the end.”

Unfortunately for the students, the helicopter isn’t picking them up this time. They’re stuck in the woods for a few more days, and Harrington tells them to saddle up and get ready to move. It will be a short trek, Harrington promises, after whichthey can build a fire to heat up water and make hot Gatorade, the drink of choice at SERE.

Then it’s back to the trail, and several more hours of trudging through waist-deep snow.

Modern-day mountain men

SERE specialists are a different breed.

Airmen taking SERE training have to gut it out in austere conditions for a few days, but the specialists live like this for up to half of the year. They’re modern-day mountain men, experts in how to survive in any environment with just your wits and a few basic tools.

“This is a skill set ... that every child back in the 1800s knew, just as they would know how to catch the bus or turn on a computer nowadays,” said Tech. Sgt. Todd Foster, an 18-year veteran who oversees the course that trains new SERE specialists. “It’s a skill set that has been lost and one that we continue to keep these guys going with.”

The specialists don’t look like other airmen. In the field, they wear a distinctive uniform of battle dress pants, green woolen jackets, black skullcaps and black gaiters to keep the snow out of their boots. They look underdressed for the weather, but they seem comfortable in the single-digit temperatures. Most of the field instructors are young — in their early 20s — but their faces are weathered by long months spent in the elements.

And they’re almost all men.

There are only five female SERE specialists, according to Air Force statistics. Foster says women are every bit as capable as men of passing the 5½ month training course required to become a specialist, but not many seem interested in the austere lifestyle.

The qualification course is rigorous, to say the least. About 40 percent of those who start the course wash out. Sprained ankles and trench foot take a toll, and some students decide the lifestyle is not for them. Others don’t perform to par and are asked to leave the course.

Airman 1st Class Josh Schmitz, a gangly 22-year-old from a small town in Minnesota, and his classmates are five days into their first stint in the woods. Their bodies already show the effects of the constant cold and exhaustion, but it’s their minds they struggle with the most.

“The hardest part so far is probably just ... keeping the morale up,” he said. “I mean, yeah, it sucks. Yeah, you’re tired. But the job needs to be done, and the quicker you get it done the quicker you get to go to sleep.”

The job this morning is to construct the shelters they will sleep in tonight. Each student must first clear a 15-by-12-foot area of snow to serve as a platform for the shelter. The student then gathers or cuts down three large logs — one 14 feet long and two 12 feet long — to build a sturdy A-frame.

Next, he drapes a large piece of parachute nylon over the “A” and secures it to the frame. Finally, the student piles freshly cut evergreen branches — a “bough bed” — into the shelter to give him insulation from the cold ground. It’s hard work, and most of the students strip off their winter gear to keep from sweating.

The students are given about an hour and 15 minutes to construct their shelters, and several struggle to keep up.

The group’s three instructors — Staff Sgt. Cassidy Helregel, Senior Airman Mike Hume and Senior Airman Ryan Magee — circulate among the students to give them pointers and critique their work. The instructors can always find something wrong with a shelter, Foster says.

As the students finish their shelters, they trickle back into the large, pyramidal log-and-nylon structure that serves as the camp’s main gathering place. They huddle around a fire the instructors keep burning and stretch their hands out for warmth. Some open their jackets to expose their chests to the heat — the best way to warm your body core, the instructors tell them.

At chow time, the ravenous students each scoop a small amount of goat-and-potato stew into small tin cups. The goat meat comes from a store of several live animals — including chickens, ducks and rabbits — the students brought with them for food. They learned to kill and butcher the goat for meat and make leather from its hide.

“That goat ended up as supper and lunch, and many more meals to come,” Schmitz says. “He was sitting here in camp one day, and the next day he was hanging over the fire.”

The meal lifts the students’ spirits, but some of them clearly are not faring well. One shivers uncontrollably, despite the heat of the fire, and another seems disoriented and stumbles clumsily when he tries to walk.

A hand-and-foot check — which the instructors conduct three times daily to guard against frostbite and trench foot — reveals a few whose feet are dangerously shriveled and cold and others whose hands have small cuts and nicks that could become infected. A few of the students are looking like long shots to make it through this first grueling trip to the woods.

“This job is not for everybody,” Foster said. “It takes a strong-willed individual ... to make it through this training.”

The students are enjoying what will be their last day in camp, because tomorrow they will hit the trail for five days of orienteering and trekking through the snow with 60-pound rucks on their backs. For some of them it will be torture, and it will likely drive a couple to quit.

For others, it is why they are here in the first place.

“I’ve always been outdoors, always been [doing] manual labor,” Schmitz says. “A desk job is just not for me. ... I’d rather be outside more than anything, and this is the career field that had the most [outdoors] in it.”