Sere

Caning and Spanking Stories copyright 1994-2001 by OldTom, all rights reserved.

I promised, more or less, to explain a little more about my college class that involved eating rabbits and wandering through the woods avoiding bad guys.

SERE was a three-week required class offered between freshman and sophomore years at the United States Air Force Academy. So far as I know, the class is still part of the standard curriculum. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape.

The Resistance and Escape portions refer to wartime prisoner-of-war conditions where the Geneva Conventions apply. The precise content is classified. But, surprise, surprise, a major portion was the theory and practice of "mind games" aimed at subverting/brainwashing someone. I was surprised to discover that the bruises obtained in the R & E training persisted quite a while - it was days before it dawned on me what the source was of a certain area of soreness.

The Survival portion was pretty standard stuff. How to bail out of a not-so- good airplane, how to hit the water in a parachute, how to prepare for a survival trek using native materials and what's left of the parachute, snakes, heat and cold and storms, that kind of stuff. All useful stuff, but I was quite familiar with most of it; I'd had a fair exposure to survival considerations as part of my mountain-climbing experience.

In preparing for the survival trek, we were divided into units of six guys (students), the group of six divided into two teams of three. By a nice serpendipity, a second one of the six was quite at home outdoors, and even more fortunately had Applachian experience. My experience was limited to the Pacific Northwest - different trees, plants, shrubs, animals, etc. So between us we had quite a body of experience. We had already been hiking buddies and knew something of each others' backgrounds.

This was going to be totally cool. Understand, it was well known that the survival trek was pretty tough. In preparing for the trek, we needed to construct a backpack (knapsack) for carrying stuff, a tent, and I forget what else. All was to be constructed from pieces of parachute and native materials using our training and a small survival knife (*not* one of those Rambo blades).

He and I decided to construct real backpacks, frame and everything. We did, and they worked very well. We had plenty of parachute cord available to "Indian lace" everything tight and serve as a nice pad for resting the weight against our backs. Especially compared to everyone else's over-the-shoulder nylon sack, it was totally cool. And unprecedented - lots of people watched our progress in construction and usage. We got lots of comments during the trek to the effect of "Oh, *you're* the guys..."

So, the "Survival" phase ("S" of S.E.R.E.), then, was on campus. Part classroom, part practical exercise (such as landing in the -cold- water in parachute harness), part working on our "projects" such as stitching together a rucksack. As you might infer from any other intense training experience, we didn't exactly head for bed by 9 pm. In fact, it was after 9 that Smitty and I headed out with our flashlights and pocket knives to gather suitable branches for our backpack frames. This phase included map and compass training - again something I was pretty good at from lots of no-trail-in-sight travel with map and compass.

For the "Evasion" phase, primarily consisting of the survival trek, we were trucked to some other area of the Colorado Rockies. The weeklong (so far as I remember) trip was in the 8000-11000 foot altitude range. The scenery was absolutely wonderful, though most of our group was in no shape to appreciate that.

The first Evasion day was in camp. Among other things the groups shared a cow (I think). We made blood sausage and smoked beef. That meant somebody had to stay up all night to make sure the stuff continued to get "smoked". For that day's meal we were given a (coffee?) can, a potato and a couple of carrots, and a live Bunny Rabbit. That was lunch and dinner for six. We were taught how to kill a rabbit: You hold it by its hind legs so it's head downward. Stroke its back in a certain way and it will arch its neck so that the head stretches back. Then you karate-chop old Bunn's neck in a certain way, breaking the neck and killing Bunny Rabbit. We were then taught how to skin and "clean" it.

Several of us were squeamish about such things as skinning and gutting cute Bunny Rabbits. (They have such cute little tails, you know.) As it happened, I was the only one of the six to not be involved in any part of Rabbit preparation - I was obviously so comfortable with the various survival skills that I was easily able to defer the "experience" to others. Heheheh.

But that day in camp, we had a feast. That was because both he and I knew what kind of edible leaves and stuff to look for. We gathered all sorts of greens, flowers, roots, and I forget what else for adding to the stew. All six of us carried our BFC's with us. (When telling the story years ago, we'd always talk about carrying our BFC's, inviting the obvious question - What's a BFC? We'd answer Big F---ing Club and move on with the story.)

In the process of searching for edibles we found a Jackrabbit and ran it down, stopping it with our BFC's. Between the wild edibles and the second Rabbit for six, we now had a tremendous feast as compared to the other groups. This was survival training; we had no intention of sharing. What we found, we gathered for ourselves. Later on, though, while one of our six was relieving himself in the vicinity of a tree, he saw another Jackrabbit! We were hungry and definitely wanted that Rabbit. The chase was a bit hilarious, I'm afraid. Eventually we cornered Jackrabbit in its hole and waited at both exits (there were six of us, and we were hungry). We got the third Rabbit with our BFC's and had an again unprecedented feast.

We were hungry.

As you might guess, the other group's eatings were not too wonderful. But we found we had too much to eat - and it actually tasted quite good, survival or no. We *had* done well in our edibles-gathering, you see. Another group of six, fairly nearby, stopped by and discovered we couldn't finish our meal by reason of being full. We were lamenting the need to clean up after the meal. We were, after all, just 18- and 19-year old boys! The other group, ah, expressed a willingness to finish up the stew for us and return things clean.

We received positive feedback as to the quality of our meal. It was only then that we realized how bad the other groups' meals had been. Properly accompanied with wild greens, that Jackrabbit was mighty fine eating! We felt sorry for the groups that had to settle for one single Bunny Rabbit.

For the survival trek to commence the next day, we had each had one C ration (that's like one freeze-dried dinner for one) and the small amount of sausage and smoked beef we'd made. No breakfast, of course. That amount had to last for I forget how long, I think it was either 5 or 6 days.

Anyway, the survival trek was an Evasion game. We were given a map coordinate and told to go find the Partisans at that point, and they would give us the next coordinate. Each checkpoint, miles away, was only open for an hour or two so it didn't pay to get lost in those mountains. We had to be properly camouflaged when we contacted the Partisans.

Meanwhile, there were lots of Bad Guys travelling with guns (loaded with blanks, of course) and jeeps, and on foot. We had to Evade them, and they tended to have an idea of where we'd show up. We each individually carried a score card with us. Each time we got caught by a bad guy, we'd get a mark on our score card. At the end of SERE, the ones with the most marks got to stay over to wash down the trucks while everyone else went on leave. Since we only got three weeks off all summer, that was pretty significant.

Naturally, the Bad Guys tended to keep an eye on the roads, trails, ridges, and valleys, especially including water sources. So travel was difficult and careful (that, of course, was the whole point).

Only once did I or my group get caught by the Bad Guys. Once only were we stupid enough to drop down to a trail for a short ways. We came around a corner and Surprise! we had to stand in line to get our scorecards marked off. Ouch.

As you might guess we stayed pretty hungry. With bad guys around we had a hard time obtaining water too. I remember being pretty severely dehydrated. We had iodine pills for water purification. There was a packet of instant coffee powder in the C ration. I used that to give the water an alternate flavor - that was also my second-ever taste of coffee.

The first day of the trek included a severe lightning storm. Believe me, I *know* the mountains are the wrong place to be in a lightning storm. Quite an evening.

By the last couple of days of the trek, I had found a pattern. The bad guys tended to block the direct path to the Partisans, and thus capture people. They tended to show up only just before the Partisans did, I forget, maybe half an hour before and raise hell with the student Evasionists.

So. Our wilderness travelling skills being pretty good, we usually arrived long before the checkpoint opened (as did some others). The navigation required to get safely from one checkpoint to the next, at the right time, really was quite challenging. But anyway, we continued on *past* the area and waited on the *far* side of the checkpoint. From there, we were never troubled. We watched the Partisans set up their check point, not realizing our camouflaged selves were a few feet away.

The final checkpoint was to be the next morning. We would then be done and trucked back to campus for dinner. We found the checkpoint that night and traveled on past. We crossed the main dirt road and set up camp *just* out of sight of the road, in a nice meadow. Right out in the open! To date, our camps had been carefully hidden.

We heard jeeps on the road all night, flushing out campers and catching them. Likewise in the morning. We were never bothered, just a few feet on the *other* side of the road. We slept in. Several groups of Partisans passed through the middle of our camp, travelling to the various final checkpoints nearby (different groups had different checkpoints). Finally one loudly observed that we really should probably be getting up now as he walked on through! We had found the pattern and were flaunting that knowledge! It was totally cool! (Except for not having eaten in a few days, that is.)

We filled our plates to overflowing that night, but thanks to the long time since our last meal, we felt stuffed with only a few bites.

So there you have it... one of my summer school classes back decades ago.

All stories contained herein are property and copyright 1994-2001 OldTom@rocketmail.com, all rights reserved. Please don't repost them or make them publicly accessible via FTP, mail server, or archive site without explicit permission. Permission is granted for one hard copy for personal use.