visit. It was the Army’s version of the Air Force school in Spokane where Jessen and Mitchell worked. “It was kind of surreal,” Morgan says. The Army had built a replica of a prisoner-of-war camp—the kind you might find in North Korea or some distant corner of the old Soviet Union. “I had a tour of the whole compound when nothing was running, so it was this really foggy, gray morning. It reminded me of some war movie you’ve seen, showing up in this concentration camp, but no one’s there.”
Morgan went on:
Each cycle of training always ended with a former POW talking to the class and saying, “This happened to me. You spent three hours in a little tiny cage. I lived in one for four years. Here’s how they tried to play tricks on me.”
Morgan was fascinated, but skeptical. He was interested in traumatic stress. SERE school was a realistic simulation of what it meant to be captured and interrogated by the enemy, but it was still just a simulation. At the end of the day, all the participants were still in North Carolina, and they could still go and get a beer and watch a movie with their friends when they were done: “They know they’re in a course and they know they’re in training. How could this possibly be stressful?” he asked. The SERE instructors just smiled at that. “Then they invited me to come and said I could monitor it for about a six-month period. So every month, for two weeks, I’d go, and I was like a little anthropologist taking notes.”
He started with the interrogation phase of the training, taking blood and saliva samples from the soldiers after they had been questioned. Here is how Morgan describes the results, in the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry:
The realistic stress of the training laboratory produced rapid and profound changes in cortisol, testosterone, and thyroid hormones. These alterations were of a magnitude that…[is] comparable to those documented in individuals undergoing physical stressors such as major surgery or actual combat.
This was a pretend interrogation. The sessions lasted half an hour. A number of the subjects were Green Berets and Special Forces—the cream of the crop. And they were reacting as if they were in actual combat. Morgan watched in shock as one soldier after another broke down in tears. “I was amazed at that,” Morgan said. “It was hard for me to figure out.”
Well, I [had] thought, these are all really tough people—that it’ll be kind of like a game. And I hadn’t anticipated seeing people that distressed or crying. And it wasn’t because of a physical pressure. It’s not because somebody’s manhandling you.
These were soldiers—organized, disciplined, motivated—and Morgan realized that it was the uncertainty of their situation that was unsettling to them.
Many [of them had] always operated by, “I should know the rules of the book so I know what to do.” And I think much of the stress, as I got to know it over time, was largely driven by an internal sense of real alarm, like, “I don’t know what the right answer is.”
Then he decided to have the SERE students do what is called the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure drawing test. You’re given this:
First you have to copy it. Then the original is taken away and you have to draw it from memory. Most adults are pretty good at this task, and they use the same strategy: they start by drawing the outlines of the figure, then fill in the details. Children, on the other hand, use a piecemeal approach: they randomly do one chunk of the drawing, then move on to another bit. Before interrogations, the SERE students sailed through the test with flying colors. Being able to quickly memorize and reproduce a complex visual display, after all, is the kind of thing Green Beret and Special Operations soldiers are trained to do. Here’s a typical example of a Rey-Osterrieth figure drawn from memory by one of the soldiers before interrogation. These guys are good.
But just look at what the soldier drew fifteen minutes after interrogation:
In one version of the experiment, Morgan says, after stressful questioning, 80 percent of the sample would draw the figure piecemeal, “like a prepubescent kid, which means your prefrontal cortex has just shut down for the while.”
For anyone in the interrogation business, Morgan’s work was deeply troubling. The point of the interrogation was to get the subject to talk—to crack open the subject’s memory and access whatever was inside. But what