Fairchild training gave 3-week taste of torture methods

It was an experience Tom said he can’t forget.

There were times he thought he might die.

He was sexually humiliated.

Other times, he was exhausted, cold, hungry, thirsty, sweaty and filthy.

He completely lost track of time, even the day of the week.

He was so sleep-deprived that his judgment faltered.

He was blindfolded, imprisoned and treated like a prisoner of war – 12 miles from downtown Spokane on the sprawling grounds of Fairchild Air Force Base Survival School.

Despite the emotional, mental and physical ordeal, the experience gave him a higher level of confidence. “I knew I could survive almost anything after walking out of there,” he said.

Now out of the military, Tom agreed to describe his three weeks of top-secret training at the U.S. Air Force Survival School if his real name wasn’t used.

He did what 10,000 military personnel a year are now doing at Fairchild: preparing for a global battle with terrorists.

As a member of a KC-135 flight crew, Tom was required to undergo three weeks of survival training in the mid-1990s, shortly after the first Gulf War.

It began, he said, with a week of classroom lectures where he and two dozen other flight crew members, all strangers from various military branches, were taught the basics of SERE – survival, evasion, resistance and escape.

There were plenty of poignant moments.

One occurred as Tom and the other students sat in numbered seats in the classroom. The instructor called out No. 32 and asked that person to stand. The projection screen then showed a picture of a previous student who sat in seat 32 – before his plane was shot down and he was held as a POW.

“It was a way of driving home the point that the people undergoing this training could one day put it to very important use,” Tom explained.

In learning outdoor survival skills, air crews were taught how to blend in with the environment and live off the land.

An instructor showed them how to capture a rabbit, Tom said. Holding a real bunny by its hind feet, the instructor struck its head against his knee, killing it. “He gutted and skinned it with his fingers and had it ready to be cooked over a small fire he started – all in 15 seconds,” Tom said.

Tom and the other students then were required to kill and skin a rabbit, whether they wanted to or not. Students who volunteered for advanced winter survival training in Alaska might see an instructor club a seal to death and light its oily body afire to stay warm in the arctic cold. “They told us it burns like a tire,” Tom said.

After a week in the Fairchild classroom, the students were taken by bus to a wooded, remote area of the Kaniksu National Forest northwest of Cusick.

“Up there, we were told our plane had been shot down and we had to live on the land and avoid capture – use the evasion techniques we were taught in the classroom,” he said.

As the students split up and tried to find camouflage cover in the woods, Survival School instructors posing as enemy troops went looking for them.

The outdoor exercise lasted a week, and C-rations quickly disappeared, forcing the students to forage. The nights were cold and the students sometimes slept next to each other to share body heat.

Eventually, the instructors – using helicopters – captured all the students.

“They then tied our hands behind our backs and put hoods over our heads,” Tom said. They rode in darkness for the 80-mile bus trip back to the Survival School.

In a remote corner of the base, called the “back 40,” the two-dozen hooded students were taken to a mock prisoner-of-war camp. In the mid-1990s, shortly after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the survival camp still emulated a Soviet Bloc environment. The instructors wore Soviet military uniforms, and even barked orders with Russian accents, Tom said.

Today, he has been told, the camp uses a terrorist scenario. “The enemy has changed, and so has the resistance training,” he said.

Inside the camp, Tom and the others were placed in individual, tiny cells. “There’s a small slit in the door, but you can’t sit down,” Tom said, explaining what the instructors call “stress positions.”

Exhausted, Tom said he dozed fitfully, his back resting against the back of the tiny cell, his shins pressing against the door.

“The guards would come by and pound on the doors and make sure we weren’t sleeping,” he said.

At some point, one-on-one interrogations began.

“They took the hood off, began berating me and told me to sign this paper,” Tom said. He later was humiliated by his interrogators when they told him he’d signed a confession that he was a U.S. war criminal.

Another time, one of the interrogators made homosexual advances to see how Tom would respond.

“They slapped me around a little bit, nothing too bad,” Tom said. Military medics and psychologists monitored the interrogations using hidden cameras and microphones, but the students weren’t aware of that.

“During one of the interviews, the interrogator mentions some personal details about your wife, girlfriend or some other family member – just to see how you react,” Tom said.

Ultimately, the prisoners were put together in concrete cellblocks.

“They would hose us down with fire hoses,” Tom said.

The prisoners were forced to urinate through a hole in the concrete walls of the cell, and they had a bucket for bowel movements. “There wasn’t a lot of that,” Tom recalled, “because nobody had eaten.”

A few days into the imprisonment, a large pot of partially cooked lentils and one ladle – no plates or eating utensils – was brought into the cell to the surprise of the dozen hungry prisoners.

“We were given five minutes to eat, and then they took it away,” Tom said.

The prisoners also were ordered into small boxes – forced to crouch down in another stress position before the lid was secured. “Then they turned on a large speaker right above the box, with a voice shouting ‘boot, boot,’ over and over.” Tom said that apparently was intended to conjure up mental images for the detainees.

On another speaker, a little girl’s voice screamed, “Daddy, daddy, the bad guys are coming to get me.”

His legs were so cramped when he came out of the “stress position” box, Tom said, “they rolled us around on the floor for a while just to get the blood flowing.”

Then the guards crammed some of the inmates into 50-gallon drums, secured the lids and began filling them with cool water. “You think you’re going to drown,” Tom recalled of the torture technique. “But they stop the water just before it gets to the top of the 50-gallon drum, leaving just barely enough room for you to breathe.”

One of the guards who used a Russian name wrapped a towel around Tom’s neck and choked him into brief unconsciousness – one of the techniques apparently intended to focus on the inmates’ fears.

Back in the cell blocks, the prisoners practiced tapping on their prison bars as a crude way of communicating with each other in code – a technique that was highly successful for Vietnam POWs held at the infamous Hanoi Hilton.

“You never know when it’s going to end,” Tom said.

The treatment he and the others received in resistance training was far harsher, Tom said, “than the stuff that was going on over there in Abu Ghraib” in Iraq.

One day, they marched him and the others out of their cells for a formation. They were ordered to stand at attention as the “Russian commandant” running the prison berated them, “calling us the worst scum he’d ever seen.”

Then the commandant suddenly ordered the prisoners to do an about-face.

A huge U.S. flag unfurled and the “Star Spangled Banner” blared out of the speakers.

The prisoners were caught off-guard.

They hugged each other, and some collapsed. Tears flowed.

The moment, Tom said, made him proud to be an American.