Fight to Survive

Grouped into teams of six, students are pursued by hostile forces, played by SERE instructors, other soldiers, and local law-enforcement officers with dogs. For the first two days, the teams don't sleep. They trudge through thick underbrush all night. When the teams finally set up camp, they construct a shelter that blends into the scenery and build handmade weapons and tools. In winter, the trees are bare and animals are hibernating, so food is scarce. They make do with pine-needle tea, roots, bugs burrowed under bark, and if they're lucky, roadkill. "If it's a rabbit, we eat it," says Smith, aka "Smitty." "But if it's a possum with maggots all over it, it goes right to them. They love it."

By this point, the soldiers' comfort zone is a distant memory. They're sleep deprived, dehydrated, exhausted, and famished. This is where sound thinking and teamwork break down, and instructors want students to recognize the signs of deterioration. "Some of these guys think, 'It won't happen to me,' " John says. "Then they find themselves sitting next to a friend during the field exercise, thinking, 'If I hear him breathe one more time, I'm going to slap his head off.' That's what this stress does to you."

At some point, each team gets captured and sent to a POW-style camp known as "the lab." Having been taught the Army's code of conduct, which states that a soldier must resist saying much beyond name, rank, serial number, and date of birth, students are put to the test by interrogators such as Mike, who has the build of a wrestler and whose nickname in the lab is "the Hammer." "When you're deprived of all the things you're accustomed to -- your ability to satisfy your hunger, sleep, control over your psychological environment -- when all that control is taken away, you learn that what you are on the inside pulls you through," the Hammer says. "That's the quantum leap in this course."

Between the field exercises and the lab, students lose an average of 15 pounds. And the stress that they experience is extra-ordinarily high. According to researchers who have studied SERE, changes in the stress hormone cortisol in some students are among the highest ever recorded. Higher than sky divers on their first jump. Higher than pilots landing on an aircraft carrier for the first time. Higher than patients just prior to heart surgery. The result of that stress, instructors say, is that soldiers become conditioned -- or "inoculated," as they put it -- for the real thing.

Rule 3: Keep Your Priorities Straight (and Simple)

In a survival situation, your major needs are food, water, and shelter, unless you're seriously injured, in which case medical care comes first. While the priorities vary -- depending on whether you're in the jungle, at sea, in the arctic, or in the desert -- water often comes first for the simple reason that you can live without food far longer than you can live without water. You have three days, max. As you lose fluids, you must replace them, or your body breaks down. Fast. After depleting just 2% of your body fluids, you experience extreme thirst. By a 5% loss, you become weak and nauseous. By 10%, you've got a massive headache and tingling in your limbs. You're too dizzy to stand. Your blood, starved for water, can't deliver the oxygen and nutrients that your body requires to function properly. You're disoriented. By the time you've lost 15%, you're on death's doorstep. Partially blind. Numb. Deaf.

Ideally, you should drink a small amount of water every hour to replenish your fluids. A minimum of two liters a day should suffice. Finding that water, of course, is another matter. SERE soldiers learn to tap alternative sources: cacti or bamboo plants, rock fissures, a tarp or poncho positioned to catch rain.

"If you don't stay healthy, surviving becomes that much harder," says John. "There's a huge difference between what affects someone in a healthy state and what affects someone in a compromised state. What normally might be a little cut or scrape could turn into a potentially life-threatening situation in a short period of time."

In a survival situation, decisions are rarely straightforward, because the options are between something bad and something worse. For example, you're becoming increasingly dehydrated, but your only source of water will make you ill because it isn't sterile. What do you do? If you don't drink the water, you'll die shortly. If you do drink it, you'll get sick first, then you'll die. But, as John points out, at least you'll stay alive a little longer.