When I went through Air Force pilot training back in the 1980s, survival school was scheduled between the completion of pilot training and the beginning of your first “real” assignment.
Survival school took place at Fairchild AFB, near Spokane. I don’t think the Air Force Academy graduates had to attend, since they did all this at when they were at the Academy.
As I recall, the first week at Fairchild was mostly spent in the classroom. Then it was off to the woods for six days. They put us all on a bus and drove us about three hours up into the mountains.
I was pretty lucky. This was sometime around September or October and the previous group had been rained on the entire time they were out there. I had relatively cool but dry weather for my time in the field.
The first few days were essentially a camping trip. We were taught basic skills like how to make a tents and clothing out of your parachute. They showed us how to use the radios and signal flares in our survival kits. We got to vector in a helicopter and practice getting hauled up into it. Fun stuff.
The helicopter didn’t even fall on me. Those things scare me.
The first few days simulated a peacetime situation, so we could have campfires. We were hungry most of the time but they gave us just enough food to keep us going. Part of the survival rations were these really hard granola bars that constipated me to no end. That at least saved me the trouble of figuring out how to poop in the woods. We got one of those a day as I recall.
Sadly our survival kits did not contain nylon stockings, gold coins or any of the other stuff Slim Pickens had in the movie.
On the first day of training they gave each group of students a cute, fluffy, rabbit. We had to feed and care for the rabbit. Sometime around day 3 we were instructed to “thump the bunny”. It ended up as rabbit stew. We also got to try our hand at eating bugs. They weren’t too bad but wouldn’t be my first choice. Of course, if you’ve ever eaten a hot dog you’ve probably eaten a few bugs whether you knew it or not at the time.
Around the 4th day the scenario changed and we started getting into escape and evasion training.
We were given a scenario that we were in bad-guy territory and had to make our way to the “resistance” who would shelter us for the night. The Survival School instructors played the part of the resistance fighters as well as the bad-guys who were looking for us. Getting caught got you verbal abuse plus a bad mark. Enough bad marks and you would flunk the course.
We were paired up in groups of two. My partner was an enlisted guy who had grown up in the country and spent a lot of time hunting. The bad part was he was badly addicted to nicotine and had to stop and smoke every so often. On the balance I’d say it was a wash.
I figure the instructors knew where we were most of the time and only decided to “spot” us if they saw us do something stupid. The ground was covered with dried leaves and we were only going to be so quiet no matter what we did.
One time my partner and I were so well camouflaged that two aggressors literally stepped on us. I could tell they didn’t know we were there because they were just shooting the breeze and weren’t “in role” at the time. We got the verbal abuse but plus marks for camouflage.
I recall one night having to sleep in an “evasion shelter”, which was basically dig a hole and bury yourself. I remember waking up in the middle of the night having to decide whether my need to pee outweighed my need for warmth. I did not want to crawl out of there. Sooooo cold!
Now I'm sure this was pretty tame compared to what the Army and Marines do, but that’s why I didn’t join the Army or Marines. My father is an Army veteran and he told me: “Son, don’t join the f*cking Army!”
After our six day excursion in the mountains of Eastern Washington, it was back to the classroom for another day or two. Then we got to do POW training.
This was the mid 1980s and at the time POW training was based on lessons learned in Korea, Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis. I’m sure it’s different today. Since the Communists were the presumed bad-guys at the time we were to be POWs of some fictional Eastern European country.
I can’t go into much detail, because a lot of this stuff is probably still classified. They weren’t allowed to beat us up, but they could make you very uncomfortable. For the most part it wasn’t physical. A lot of it involved messing with your head: trying to get you to sign confessions or pose in propaganda photos.
In case you’re wondering, I was not waterboarded.
The U-2/SR-71/RC-135 crews went through an “advanced” resistance training course that may have incorporated stuff like waterboarding. I don’t know because they were always pretty hush-hush about it. I don’t remember anyone ever saying “That was fun! I wish I could do it again!”
The evil Commies were played by survival instructors and they played their parts well. Even though I knew they couldn’t hit me, they were still sufficiently intimidating. I’m told they had to periodically get a psychiatric evaluation to make sure they weren’t getting too much into the part.
While unpleasant, I could still find some humor in the situation. At one point I was getting the “bad cop/worse cop” treatment from two interrogators and not doing particularly well. “Rambo” I am definitely not. I think I’d already confessed to bombing the orphanage, being on the grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963 and kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.
Right about then the Camp Commander’s voice angrily comes over the intercom in the interrogation room and yells at the guards: “Why are you letting that prisoner walk all over you in there!”
Oh yeah, I’ve got ‘em right where I want ‘em! I had to suppress the urge to laugh out loud, which probably wouldn’t have gone well for me.
Back then POW training only lasted a couple days even though it seemed like an eternity at the time. I was certainly happy to get out of there. Even though it was a walk in the park compared to the real deal it wasn’t much fun. I did find the next day’s debrief interesting, where they explained all the ways they f*cked with our heads in there.
If anyone tried to use sleep deprivation on me today they would be wasting their time. I live in a constant state of sleep deprivation when I’m at work. “What’s the matter comrade? You’re looking kind of sleepy over there! I do this for a living!”
After that it was off to water survival. A week of fun in the sun at Homestead AFB in Miami. I think today they do it at Pensacola with the Navy. Makes sense to me. The Navy spends a lot more of their time over water than we do.
I’m sure most of you remember the scene in Officer and a Gentleman where they had to ride in this contraption that hit the water and flipped over. I never had to do that. My training was all based around the fact that my assigned aircraft (T-38) had an ejection seat. If I was going in the drink it was presumably by parachute.
I do know somebody who put a SH-60 into the Pacific Ocean one night when the tail rotor failed (bad). The first thing a helicopter does when it hits the water is flip over, because all the weight is up top. He told me he was the last person out of the helo, and by that time it was so far under water that his life preserver wouldn’t even inflate because of the pressure. He barely made it the surface.
I don’t like helicopters. There are too many thing that can go very wrong very quickly. Every person I know who’s flown them has at least one horror story. If you fly them you’re much braver than I.
You may find it odd that we never actually parachuted in the Air Force. We were taught how to do it, but parasailing was as close as we got. They figured the odds of one of us breaking our leg (or worse) outweighed any benefits of actually having us jump out of an airplane. A lot of Air Force Academy grads had jump wings, but most of us did not.
Basically, if you parachute into the water, the thing that just saved your life is now your worst enemy. You need to get out of the parachute before you get dragged through the waves by it or tangled up in it and sink.
What you don’t want to do is cut away from the parachute before you hit the water. People have tried this, and you really can’t judge how high up you are. Most attempts have ended badly.
We learned how to do this by getting dragged through the water by a boat. Imagine you’re in a parachute harness and you’re hanging off the back of a large boat by a winch. They drop you into the water and drag you along until you manage to hit the releases and unhook. We did this both on our backs and on our faces “glub!”
After that we got to practice actual parachute landings by parasailing behind a speed boat. People pay big bucks to do that sort of thing but we got it for free! Lots of fun.
The final exercise involved “parachuting” (parasailing actually) into Biscayne Bay and getting into our life rafts.
We had these things called LPUs (Life Preserver Units) but we all called them “Water Wings” because that’s what they looked like. You wore one under each arm and by pulling a lanyard it would inflate by a CO2 cartridge.
At least in theory they would. Now mind you, this stuff was probably all left over from the Vietnam era. The gear they use in training is usually long past its shelf life. One of my LPUs didn’t inflate when I pulled the lanyard. As I came down in my ‘chute I had to “orally” inflate it by blowing into a tube. Most undignified.
As you come down in the parachute, your one-man life raft hangs about ten feet below you by a lanyard. Once you hit the water you cut away from your parachute, try not to get tangled up in it, and then pull the raft to you. Then you have to get yourself into the raft, which is easier said than done. I did my best impression of a beached whale and somehow flopped into the thing.
After that it was three hours of bobbing around in the bay waiting for the helicopter to come get me. It didn’t. Because it broke. At least I didn’t have to actually get in one.
Finally they came out with a boat and got me before I drifted down to Key West. None of my signal flares worked of course. They had probably been sitting on a shelf since the Nixon administration. At least the old fashioned signal mirror worked. That’s one of your most effective pieces of survival gear, by the way.
My water survival training at the airlines involved watching a video on how to ditch the aircraft and playing around with the life rafts in a classroom. But I’ve seen Cast Away so I’m good to go.