Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

SERE had been created by the United States Air Force during the Korean War to help airmen who might get shot down over enemy territory. The Air Force suspected that Koreans, like Japanese, would use hideous tortures to get what they could out of the captured U.S. airmen, and reasoned that the airmen’s best chance was to be prepared. Later, the program was adopted by the Navy, Army, DoD civilians, and private military contractors with a “high risk of capture.”

SERE was mostly what you might figure: wilderness survival in various climates, emergency first aid, land navigation, camouflage methods, communication, and how to improvise tools. Former prisoners of war taught the resistance and escape classes, based on their own hard-earned wisdom. Just as Chuck Graff had said, it was headquartered at Fairchild AFB.

Early rumors held that resistance to “Chinese brainwashing” was the main focus of SERE’s “psychology of captivity” training, though Air Force spokesmen denied this. Details of the training were, of course, classified. SERE’s broadly stated purpose was to “provide students with the skills needed to live up to the U.S. Military Code of Conduct when in uncertain or hostile environments.”

I hadn’t thought about the Military Code of Conduct since I studied it as a boot camp wannabe grunt in 2001. Some parts of that document never leave my mind. I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense. I will never surrender of my own free will... If I am captured... I will make every effort to escape... I am required to give name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability... I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions... I will trust in my God...

I was twenty-two years old when I studied that code. We memorized and were tested on it. I had nothing but eighteen years of innocence and four years of college to bring to the altar. A history major! But still I committed myself to the code with all of my heart, truly and without reservation. The reservations started coming soon thereafter, when I saw that a code required action. Kind of like stepping up to the edge of the Grand Canyon and looking down. It was that way for a lot of us. We didn’t talk about it until later, when we were on our way out of the war. Maybe twenty-two is the oldest you can be and still believe absolutely what a government tells you to believe. I have regrets in my life, and some of them are substantial, but none of them came from my allegiance to that code of conduct.

Clay Hickman was even younger — eighteen — when he joined the Air Force and memorized the Code of Conduct. In Dr. Paige Hulet’s file, Clay’s military ID picture had him looking more like sixteen, with different colored eyes, an oily complexion, and a buzz cut that had a small white tuft up front. He stood five foot nine and weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. In spite of his prosperous and influential family, Clay had enlisted.

I wondered what Chuck Graff had found so ominous about the more modern-day SERE. It seemed to me a good idea to prepare airmen for survival and captivity, especially American airmen flying over murderers, torturers, beheaders. Reading further into the articles, I found two interesting entries under “Controversies.” The first was a 1993 incident at the Air Force Academy, where USAF cadets in the program claimed that they were sexually assaulted during their SERE “Resistance to Sexual Assault” classes. According to the cadets, the “playacting” instructors had gotten out of hand. Air Force spokesmen denied the allegations but modified the program. A three-million-dollar settlement to one cadet was reported but not corroborated.

The second controversy was murkier and darker. In 2006 the ACLU obtained a sworn statement in which the former chief of Interrogation Control Element at Guantánamo Bay said that SERE instructors taught “interrogation techniques” to Guantánamo military personnel, and that these physical and mental techniques were “mirror images of SERE resistance training.”

The upshot, in the words of more than one journalist, was that SERE instructors had “reverse engineered” their resistance methods into interrogation methods — training military interrogators to use the same dark arts of persuasion that they had been teaching Americans to resist if captured. They had turned from defenders to attackers. Their methods were said to include waterboarding, beatings, mock executions, and sleep deprivation, among other “enhanced techniques” recommended on a SERE-approved twenty-item “menu.”

SERE came up again in the big ugly blast that hit the news late in 2014. In December the Senate Intelligence Committee published its report after nearly five years of investigating the CIA-run detention and interrogation programs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reading those “torture report” headlines again was its own kind of torture:

SENATE FAULTS CIA FOR LIES AND TORTURE — “A scathing Senate report says the brutal methods yielded no useful intelligence and were badly managed.”

FACE-OFFS WITH CIA INTERROGATORS — “Key Sept. 11 figure seemed to take pride in his ability to endure waterboarding, Senate panel’s report says.”

INTELLIGENCE GAINED FROM TORTURE FOCUS OF DEBATE...

AIR FORCE SERE PROGRAM DIRECTORS QUESTIONED...

PANEL FAULTS CIA OVER BRUTALITY AND DECEIT...

THE HORRORS IN AMERICA’S “DUNGEON”...

AL-QAEDA MASTERMIND WATERBOARDED 183 TIMES...

DETAINEE LEFT TO FREEZE TO DEATH...

DETAINEE KEPT AWAKE FOR SEVEN STRAIGHT DAYS...

STRESS POSITIONS...

MEDICALLY UNNECESSARY RECTAL FEEDING...

RECTAL HYDRATION...

TOTAL CONTROL OVER DETAINEE...

THE SALT PIT...

It took a few more days for the SERE connection to the CIA interrogation program to bubble back up into the headlines. But there it was again, right in front of me, glowing from my computer monitor in the evening gloom of my crumbling home.

THE ARCHITECTS OF TORTURE...

EX — AIR FORCE DOCTORS RAN PROGRAM FOR CIA...

EXPERIMENTS IN TORTURE HAVE ROOTS IN U.S. MILITARY...

DOCTOR’S ROLE IN TORTURE DETAILED...

I scanned through these articles, too, feeling those dark pages of history flapping around inside of me. As a combat Marine, I’d had a pretty good idea what was going on in the so-called black sites. Wasn’t proud of it, just aware. War is hell — no excuse, but a fact. Later, I had actually tried to forget it. Yes, Roland Ford, private investigator — with a history degree and a concealed-carry permit — was more interested in forgetting than remembering his own country’s recent past.

And then I found exactly what I thought I’d find, something half forgotten, which is also something half remembered.

Fourteen years ago psychologists Briggs Spencer and Timothy Tritt were buddies at Fairchild AFB in Washington State, “master trainers” in a program to help captured U.S. servicemen survive captivity and torture. Now the just-released Senate report on CIA Detention and Interrogation programs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is naming them as co-authors of one of the darkest chapters in American history — the torture of hundreds of detainees in “secret” CIA “black sites” scattered throughout the mid-East, Europe and Asia...

I remembered Paige Hulet’s description of Arcadia’s founder: a bit of a renegade. Which made Paige Hulet as understated as she was neat and pretty. My search engines fired on all eight cylinders with “Briggs Spencer” and “SERE” as fuel. He was a doctor of psychology but not a medical doctor, born and raised in ritzy Newport Beach, California. He was fifty-eight years old, twenty years my senior, had attended Cal State Fullerton on a baseball scholarship, helping the team to its first College World Series championship in 1979. He played first, threw and hit left, had a.314 lifetime Titan batting average. He was dark-haired and big-jawed, with merry eyes and a cheerful, harmless smile. He looked like he would be popular.