carry nuclear weapons. Everything about their mission was classified. If they were to crash in hostile territory, you can imagine how curious their captors would be about the contents of their planes. The SERE program was supposed to prepare a flight crew for what might happen.
The subjects would be cold, hungry, forced to stand—awake—inside a box for days. Then came the interrogation. “You would see if you could try and extract that information from them,” Mitchell said. He says it was “very realistic.” One particularly effective technique developed at SERE was “walling.” You wrap a towel around someone’s neck to support their head, then bang them up against a specially constructed wall.
“You do it on a fake wall,” Mitchell explained:
It’s got a clapper behind it and it makes a tremendous amount of noise and there’s a lot of give, and your ears start swirling. You don’t do it in a way to cause damage to the person. I mean, it’s like a wrestling mat, only louder. It’s not painful, it’s just confusing. It’s disruptive to your train of thought, and you’re off balance. Not only physically off balance—I mean, you’re just off balance.
Mitchell’s responsibility was to help design the SERE program, and that meant he occasionally went through the training protocol himself. Once, he says, he was part of a SERE exercise involving one of the oldest tricks in the interrogation business: the interrogator threatens not the subject, but a colleague of the subject’s. In Mitchell’s experience, men and women react very differently to this scenario. The men tend to fold. The women don’t.
“If you are a female pilot and they said they were going to do something to the other airman, the attitude of a lot of them was, ‘It sucks to be you,’” he said. “‘You do your job, I’m going to do mine. I’m going to protect the secrets. I’m sorry this has happened to you, but you knew this when you signed up.’” Mitchell first saw this when he debriefed women who had been held as POWs during Desert Storm.
They would drag those women out and threaten to beat them every time the men wouldn’t talk. And [the women] were angry at the men for not holding out, and they said, “Maybe I would have gotten a beating, maybe I would have got sexually molested, but it would have happened one time. By showing them that the way to get the keys to the kingdom was to drag me out, it happened every time. So let me do my job. You do your job.”
In the SERE exercise, Mitchell was paired with a woman, a senior-ranking Air Force officer. Her interrogators said they would torture Mitchell unless she talked. True to form, she said, “I’m not talking.” Mitchell said:
They put me in a fifty-five-gallon drum that was buried in the ground, put a lid on it, covered it up with dirt. At the top of the drum, protruding through the lid, was a hose spewing cold water.…Unbeknownst to me because of the way they positioned me, the drain holes were at the very top, at the level of my nose.
Slowly the barrel filled with water.
Mitchell: I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t kill the next psychologist to come to the school, I was pretty sure of that, but I wasn’t convinced of that. You know what I mean?
MG: How did you feel when that was happening?
Mitchell: I wasn’t happy, because your knees are up against your chest and you can’t get out. Your arms are down beside you. You can’t move. They put a strap underneath you and lower you into the thing.
MG: At what point were you removed?
Mitchell: An hour or so later.
MG: How high was the water?
Mitchell: It comes right up to your nose. It comes right up so you really don’t know. I mean, the thing’s coming up around your neck, it’s coming up around your ears.
MG: You’re in darkness?
Mitchell: Oh yeah.…Maybe it wasn’t an hour, maybe it was less than that. I’m sure it was, otherwise I’d have some hypothermia. It felt like an hour. Anyway I’m in this thing, and they lower you down, and I think, “Oh, they’re going to put me in a barrel, see if I’m claustrophobic. I’m not. No big deal to me.” Oh no. They stick the hose in, put that little metal lid on, and then cover it up with rocks.
MG: Do they tell you beforehand what they’re going to do?