I attended SERE in (and well north of) Brunswick, Maine in January 1984. Several of my F-14 RAG (training squadron) classmates had been to the class just before mine and those of us about to go sat them down over beers and had them walk us through the entire week, blow-by-blow. They obliged but qualified their comments with “what I’m telling you won’t help make it easier.”
It didn’t.
Warner Springs (west coast SERE) used waterboarding as the torture simulation. Brunswick used smoke — gooey thick pipe tobacco smoke administered point blank to the nose and mouth via an industrial-width rubber hose. I knew it was coming because of the details my friends had offered. Although I couldn’t see him, I had heard there was a doctor observing the conduct of the interrogation through the full-length one-way mirror in the corner of the cement-walled cell. I was pretty sure all I had to do was show some measure of resistance for a few seconds and my training block would be checked.
A few seconds later — after passing out, coming to, and vomiting (certainly worthy of a “training time out” I thought) my interrogator (a
burly red-head with a full beard — DIA, if I remember my final debrief correctly) hit me with the smoke again. At that point, like the reporter
in the video describes, whatever strength and comfort I was drawing with my knowledge of the antiseptic mechanisms around me vaporized, and I was convinced this guy was willing to kill me. I waited several lifetimes for the doctor to rap on the mirror and chide the red-head with “hey, he’s throwing up already; knock it off,” but that didn’t happen. After coming to a second time, the interrogator decreed I was “insincere” (in his Peoples Republic of North America (PRONA — Cold War scenario) accent and sent me back to my cell to think about what I wanted to tell him a few hours later when the questioning started all over again. The second session was worse than the first.
I don’t know if this constituted torture a la current debate around the topic. I do know I thought I was going to die at the time — I mean really die — even though I knew it was a training environment.
The torturer in the video describes waterboarding as “feeling like you’re drowning.” Have you ever almost drowned? (I did the first time I was made to tread water in full flight gear.) There’s no time for the luxury of rational thought at those moments. Your survival instinct screams - blares! - at your body to do what it takes to live. If you’ve never felt it then it’s impossible to know what it feels like. It’s also impossible to know how you’ll react until you’re there.
SERE was easily the best training I ever got on the Navy’s dime, by the way.
Here’s Ann Coulter’s input to Politco’s Patrick Gavin when asked about who should be featured in the forthcoming “Real Housewives of Washington DC” on Bravo:
Jill Biden — these “Real Housewife” shows always have at least one woman whose husband acts like he’s 30 years younger than she is. And Michelle Obama, of course, because the shows benefit from having one “sassy” cast member…Also, they’ll need at least one trophy wife married to a big, unattractive pile of money. So the producers better line up John Kerry.
This from Ralph Peters’ essay titled “Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars” in the Spring 2009 edition of the Journal of National Security Affairs:
. . . to most media practitioners, our troops are always guilty (even if proven innocent), while our barbaric enemies are innocent (even if proven guilty). The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures. Indeed, the passionate belief of so much of the intelligentsia that our civilization is evil and only the savage is noble looks rather like an anemic version of the self-delusions of the terrorists themselves. And, of course, there is a penalty for the intellectual’s dismissal of religion: humans need to believe in something greater than themselves, even if they have a degree from Harvard. Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar.
I was on KGO in San Francisco last night, talking to Bret and Chris about General McKiernan’s firing and the impact it might have on the war in Afghanistan.
Some have suggested that the impact of milblogs was a function of the Bush Administration’s frustration with the traditional press’ demonstrated unwillingness to tell the “whole story,” particularly about the conduct of the wars. While the unorthodox direct outreach to milbloggers by the Bush White House and the Department of Defense generated mainstream outlet coverage, coverage that mostly posited milblog content as an insouciant lark with the tacit implication that milblogs wouldn’t survive the sea change that the new president has yielded.
The range of profiles and tenor of conversations at the Fourth Annual Milbloggers Conference in DC, which I’m attending right now, prove that the milbloggisphere has legs that will take it well beyond W.’s reign. The good news is the community was never about a political affiliation, in spite of the MSM’s attempts to pigeonhole it as such.
Joining Matt Burden and Uncle Jimbo on the panels is David Stanford and Lily Burana. While their profiles are wildly different, their motivation is not. And listening to all of them I’m struck that the importance of milblogs, where they fit among all forms of media, is not a function of who’s living in the White House.
Here’s what golf great Tiger Woods said recently during the Inauguration festivities:
“I grew up in a military family - and my role models in life were my Mom and Dad, Lt. Colonel Earl Woods. My dad was a Special Forces operator and many nights friends would visit our home. They represented every branch of the service, and every rank. In my Dad, and in those guests, I saw first hand the dedication and commitment of those who serve. They come from every walk of life. From every part of our country.
Time and again, across generations, they have defended our safety in the dark of night and far from home. Each day — and particularly on this historic day — we honor the men and women in uniform who serve our country and protect our freedom. They travel to the dangerous corners of the world, and we must remember that for every person who is in uniform, there are families who wait for them to come home safely. I am honored that the military is such an important part, not just of my personal life, but of my professional one as well. The golf tournament we do each year here in Washington is a testament to those unsung heroes. I am the son of a man who dedicated his life to his country, family and the military, and I am a better person for it. In the summer of 1864, Abraham Lincoln, the man at whose memorial we stand, spoke to the 164th Ohio Regiment and said: ‘I am greatly obliged to you, and to all who have come forward at the call of their country. ‘Just as they have stood tall for our country - we must always stand by and support the men and women in uniform and their families.”
Amen, Tiger. Now get well soon so people start paying attention to the PGA Tour again.
I’m playing my first solo acoustic gig in a long time this Friday night, and I’ve been working on a set list for the show for the last few days. Like we tried to do with MiLES FRoM CLEVeR I’m trying to pick songs that are at once familiar but not necessarily too much so, which is to say THERE WILL BE NO BUFFETT. I also love it when an artist surprises me with an acoustic version of an electric song (like “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters). So I’m throwing in a couple of those (Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” Pearl Jam’s “Alive,” even The Who’s “Baba O’ Riley”).
As I was in the brainstorming phase of creating the list, this song popped into my head:
More proof that you don’t need a Marshall stack to blow an audience away.
And if you’re in southern Maryland this Friday, please stop on by Fenwicks in downtown Leonardtown. My part of the show starts at 7 pm.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Michael Steele was elected Republican National Committee chairman on Friday, defeating the incumbent party chief and three other challengers over six rounds of voting to become the first black to lead the GOP.
The former Maryland lieutenant governor takes over a beleaguered GOP as Republicans seek to rebound from back-to-back defeats in national elections that gave Democrats control of Congress and the White House.
“As a little boy growing up in this town, this is awesome,” said Steele, the most moderate candidate in the field and considered an outsider because he’s not a committee member.
In a brief acceptance speech, the new GOP chairman struck a tone of inclusiveness.
“We’re going to say to friend and foe alike: We want you to be a part of us, we want you to with be with us, and for those who wish to obstruct, get ready to get knocked over,” Steele said.
He won 91 votes out of a possible 168 in the sixth round. A simple majority of 85 was needed, but it took six rounds for Steele to win.
After describing the ideas behind the new novel to Chris Michel (serial entrepreneur and founder of Military.com and Affinity Labs) his first reaction was, “It sounds like a bummer. Is there anything uplifing about it?”
To be honest, I don’t know. I hope so because elements of the story are perilously personal, and I’ve never enjoyed living a bummer for very long. Plus not many people want to spend hours reading a story that ultimately is a bummer. (And no smart publisher would buy such a story.) It can have bummer parts, of course, but the overall theme should at least strike a balance if not tip in the favor of “life is good” . . . because it is.
Here are some relevant thoughts from Eckhart Tolle’s latest book Oneness with All Life (excerpted in the latest issue of The Oprah Magazine, the font of all knowledge obtained in a variety of waiting rooms. I know this because I’ve been spending a lot of time in a variety of waiting rooms over the past months):
People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness. They don’t realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn’t have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have. And so they miss the deeper perfection that is inherent in life itself . . .
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you and allowing that goodness to emerge.
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace
I like it. Perhaps those are the themes I should attempt to ply with Autumn.
In the meantime, how about a music break? Here’s one of my faves that comes to mind about now:
I caught up with my literary agent for the first time in a while yesterday. Now that I’m 30-some pages into the first draft of Autumn of the Sea Wolves and developing some sense of the characters and (less so) storyline I wanted to get Ethan’s take.
Since the earliest days of discussing what eventually became Punk’s War (with me on one of VF-143’s squadron phones in the hangar at NAS Oceana) — way before he was actually my agent — Ethan has always asked the right questions and challenged me without disrupting my creative psyche. Yesterday after hearing me out he asked, “Is it Pat Conroy or W.E.B. Griffin?”
Um . . . yes? Seriously, if forced to choose between those two vastly different approaches to the novel I’d say it’s going to be Conroy. But while I respect Ethan’s methodology, I hesitate to attach facile labels. I’m an artist, dammit.
And as I’ve indicated here before, this one is going to have to write itself. Actually, I guess all of my novels have sort of written themselves. That’s how I write. I don’t use outlines. I really don’t have any idea what the story’s about when I start. It’s more like improv, like that show “Who’s Line is it Anyway?” where two comedians on stage have to wrestle with scenarios thrown at them by Drew Carey: “Two elephants in a phone booth with a Starbucks gift card . . . ready, go.”
Punk’s War started with the idea that a squadron CO — a position worshipped in most technothrillers — could screw it up. The scene where Soup Campbell blows the intercept of an Iranian jet, the first thing I put on paper, turned out to be Chapter One, which is to say the story unfolded from that point. Punk’s Wing came to me in a vision of Punk stumbling upon the wreckage of a Tomcat on the hangar floor, pieced together like a macabre jigsaw puzzle. That scene, again the first thing I wrote (based on a real-life mishap that killed a good friend and classmate), turned out to be Chapter Four. Why? Because once the chapter was done I realized not only were there questions the reader would need to have answered as the book went along, there were things the reader needed to know going into that chapter in order to have an emotional stake at that point. I had to establish a viseral connection around the friendship between Punk and one of the aviators who died in the crash. That fact didn’t strike me until I’d written 40 pages of the book.
So at this point with the new effort all I know is this: Autumn has a prologue; it starts with Trip Reynolds — husband, father, airline pilot, yachtsman, Navy veteran — dying in a collision with another jet during takeoff from the San Francisco Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport in foggy weather. Each subsequent chapter after the prologue introduces the reader to one of Trip’s classmates — five total – all of whom reconnect at his funeral and decide to take one last sail up the Chesapeake Bay from Solomon’s Island to Annapolis in his honor.
And Foo fans thought Taylor Hawkins was a good drummer (which he is). After fourteen years one forgets where Dave started, doesn’t one?
And one forgets that Jimmy Page was never much of a lead player (except for “Stairway,” of course). Doesn’t matter; the man still rocks. Power to the old guys.
The Bush twins wrote a letter to Sasha and Melia Obama that got to me, especially the final paragraph:
And finally, although it’s an honor and full of so many extraordinary opportunities, it isn’t always easy being a member of the club you are about to join. Our dad, like yours, is a man of great integrity and love; a man who always put us first. We still see him now as we did when we were seven: as our loving daddy. Our Dad, who read to us nightly, taught us how to score tedious baseball games. He is our father, not the sketch in a paper or part of a skit on TV. Many people will think they know him, but they have no idea how he felt the day you were born, the pride he felt on your first day of school, or how much you both love being his daughters. So here is our most important piece of advice: remember who your dad really is.
Whatever you think of the man, at the end of the day he’s doing something right.
Here’s what golf great Tiger Woods said recently during the Inauguration festivities:
WASHINGTON (AP) - 
I caught up with 
The Bush twins wrote a letter to Sasha and Melia Obama that got to me, especially the final paragraph:
This week: Closing Gitmo, stopping the war in 16 months, and Obama’s first ride on Air Force One. Check it out 