Kevin McCullough writes about two of his military friends and their connections to the S.E.R.E. school at Camp Mackall, which is right here in my home county, Richmond, in North Carolina.
It stands for Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape.
Few in civilian life know much about it because of the intense nature of what it is. Stories have surfaced as to what others experienced in undergoing it, but even these are few as those who do persevere it are expected to not release the details of what happens.
The description as best I could decipher is akin to being caught behind enemy lines. Your objective is to survive for periods without the basics. You are to do so for as long as possible by not being captured (hence the "evade" phase.) When captured you are to react as though those who hold you are in fact the enemy, and as they do things like waterboard you, break fingers, etc., you are to rely upon all your ability as an honorable member of the defense forces of the United States to resist, not give up your information, nor of your mission. The more you resist the more those who run the program are encouraged to hurt you to tempt you to break. The only major caveat they are asked to observe is not to break any major bones.
Comforting.
The S.E.R.E. school was developed and founded by one of the heroes of my war, the Vietnam War, but few outside of the Special Forces (Green Berets) community ever heard of him.
James "Nick" Rowe was a young lieutenant serving as an advisor with South Vietnamese troops early in that war when he was captured and became a Prisoner of War. I met Nick Rowe much later and did a feature story for a local newspaper about his war experiences leading to S.E.R.E.
I also wrote about Nick Rowe in a semi-autobiographical novel I self-published, "
The Crossland Shootout." The part about Col. Rowe is not fictional. Here's an excerpt, if I may quote myself.
Nick Rowe learned how to survive, evade, resist and escape the hard way, by surviving five years of captivity in Vietnam, becoming the first American prisoner of war to successfully escape in that long war. He later wrote a book about it, "Five Years to Freedom."
I met the colonel when I did that SERE feature story, and in the interview I did with him he recalled the crucial moment when he was at the end of his rope, beaten and bloody from repeated torture and starvation, about to give in to whatever his captors demanded just to get a little relief, or maybe just to give up and die.
In that moment, the young Green Beret said he recalled just the first five words of the 23rd Psalm, which he had learned as a boy in Sunday School back in Texas. "The Lord is my shepherd."
That was all he could recall in his search for spiritual strength at that defining moment of his life, but he said he held onto that, repeating it over and over until one word stood out.
My. When I saw that word in my mind's eye, I grabbed on to it. I made the Lord my personal shepherd right then and there, and from that point on, I found the strength to keep on resisting."
And he resisted finally to the point of his successful escape.
His resistance had finally marked him for death, when the Viet Cong who had been holding him prisoner for five years finally decided they couldn't break Nick Rowe and were transporting him under guard to a North Vietnamese prison for his execution.
Then the Good Shepherd who gave Nick Rowe strength to survive intervened. The Viet Cong patrol stumbled into a helicopter sweep by U.S. forces and Nick Rowe evaded his captors and escaped.
And for that escape, Nick Rowe knew he was a marked man. The death sentence passed on him by the North Vietnamese kept him from going back to Vietnam, so he spent the rest of that war in the U.S.
I saw the colonel again just before he took an overseas assignment to the Philippines, back when we still had a big military base there. It was closed in recent cutback times.
He had advanced to one rank shy of a general's star and told me he knew he had to take another overseas assignment if he ever expected to make general.
In what I later realized was a prophetic moment, he told me one of his buddies asked him if he was going back over there where the communist guerrillas were still fighting to do some research for another book. He said he replied, "I hope not."
But that's the way it turned out, except Nick Rowe didn't get to write about this research. The communist guerrillas in the Philippines carried out the death contract the North Vietnamese put on Nick Rowe's head for escaping. He was assassinated with his driver one morning on his way to work in Manila in an ambush by the guerrillas.
As the Bible says in
Hebrews about the heroes of the faith, "of whom the world was not worthy."
Like the Marine and the Navy pilot McCullough writes about, the world is not worthy of such men and women who have fought and died for our freedom. We owe them everything. And they ask of us nothing. At the bare minimum, we owe them our respect, loyalty and support.
Here's a news item from Pennsylvania that frankly makes me madder than hell.
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