A Marine And The T-Word

Here's a Marine sniper who could not be a tougher camper using the English language to describe training to resist the torture inflicted by foreign regimes who don't follow the Geneva Conventions or the UN Convention on Torture:

SERE training consists of torturing you… they torture you through different methods, they starve you, and they lock you in a little cement box. You actually have to sign a waiver at the beginning of the course saying that you won’t hold them responsible for any physical damage done to yourself. Like my partner got his nose broken ...they lock you in a footlocker for four hours, and then they pull you out and you can’t stand up because your legs are numb. You want to kill yourself by the time you get out of that fucking thing.

They come by and beat on the locker with a bat every couple minutes to make sure that you’re not falling asleep, and just to stress you out ...

The worst thing that I ever experienced in SERE school was the waterboard. Only 5-10% of SERE school students did it … they called it the water torture device. That’s where they strap you down on a declined board and they pour water in your mouth.

To simulate that you’re drowning?

Yeah. They drown you. They DO drown you. I thought, “they’re not going to kill me…this is training, right?”

I was fighting and choking and swallowing water for a minute or two, and then I acted like I passed out to get them to stop pouring water. In the meantime they’re asking me questions like “Where did you helicopter land?” “How many are in your group?” “Where were you going?” “What are you doing in our country?”..its all simulated like you’re in another country. I’m thinking that they’re going to stop doing this, but they don’t.They just keep pouring the water. I couldn’t hold my breath any longer and I started inhaling water. I freaked out….I’ve never freaked out worse in my life. I ripped a leather strap off the board, and then pulled the cloth off my face, turned my head to grasp some air, and then five guys jumped on me. They kept holding me down pouring water in my mouth. I was choking, and I thought I was dying….I FELT like I was dying.

But this, by the preposterous logic of Dick and Liz Cheney, when done to prisoners utterly outside any training process, is not, somehow "torture." Tell that to this Marine.