America must stop torturing our troops

This Independence Day, as we gather to celebrate our freedom and honor the brave men and women who’ve dedicated their lives to defending it, I hope you’ll join me in demanding that we stop imprisoning and torturing our own troops.

I realize this demand may sound strange to you. You’ve probably been unaware that deep in the woods of western Maine there is a secret military facility where, over the past five decades, tens of thousands of American servicemen and women have been brutalized, humiliated and tortured by their own government, ostensibly for their own good.

I didn’t know this facility existed until my pal Hutch Brown, whose family has a camp in the area, pointed it out to me a few months ago. There it is, on Map 29 of DeLorme’s Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, about 10 miles east of Rangeley: the U.S. Naval Training Facility in Redington Township.

Hutch was concerned because this is also the place where Geraldine Largay, a retired nurse from Tennessee, mysteriously disappeared two years ago while hiking the Appalachian Trail, which runs within a few hundred yards of the unfenced military facility. None of the many dozens of news accounts about Largay’s vanishing mentioned the fact the Navy’s so-called “torture school” is a stone’s throw from where Largay was last seen. And no one — even, apparently, the wardens and state police in charge of the investigation — thought it would be worthwhile to ask whether anyone associated with the facility could have been involved in Largay’s disappearance.

So Hutch conducted his own investigation and interviews and wrote about his findings in the cover story of this month’s issue of The Bollard. I helped him research the story, and the more I learned about this classified military program, the more convinced I became that it is doing far more harm than good.

The Redington facility is the site of one of the Navy’s two SERE Schools (the other is in California). SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. The program began in the early days of the Cold War, and was intended to help troops stranded behind enemy lines evade capture and resist interrogation by Communist forces.

After a few days of classroom instruction, cadets are bussed to the facility in the woods and taught how to start a campfire, catch game and build a shelter for the night. Those sorts of Scouting skills are undoubtedly valuable, and there’s no reason to discontinue that part of the training. But after a day or two of these war games in the forest, the students are rounded up or hunted down and brought to a fake P.O.W. camp where all manner of mistreatment and misery is inflicted upon them.

Because the program is classified, it’s hard to know exactly what takes place there these days, but in the past SERE trainees have been subjected to waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual abuse, confinement in tiny “tiger cages” and the forced endurance of so-called “stress positions.” Our sailors, soldiers and pilots have been forced to spit, urinate, defecate and dance upon the American flag by sadistic “guards,” an increasing number of whom are not fellow enlisted personnel, but private contractors (soldiers of fortune, or mercenaries) paid handsomely with your tax dollars.

The program’s supporters, like Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, claim SERE training “saves lives.” But I challenge Pingree or anyone else to produce a verifiable account of an American serviceperson, captured sometime this century, who would not have survived their ordeal (or who would have divulged information that could have led to the death of other troops) had they not first been tortured by their own military.

In a piece published in 2009 by Slate, David J. Morris, a Marine who underwent SERE training in 1995, points out that the insurgent groups our military confronts these days do not engage in the types of Cold War-era torture techniques SERE was still training troops to endure as late as last decade. Morris notes that based on the experience of personnel captured in more recent conflicts, an entirely different set of skills would be more likely to save lives, including the ability to “befriend” or otherwise psychologically manipulate one’s captors to one’s advantage.

Psychologists who’ve studied SERE’s effects on trainees caution that it’s very difficult to inflict the exact amount of suffering necessary to make the program effective: too little, and the experience is just a bad joke; too much, and the trainee is conditioned to avoid torture at any cost, not to mention the lifelong psychological scars.

The SERE School in Maine has put over 56,000 people through its wretched wringer since it opened in 1961. Let 2015 be the year this sadistic stain on our nation comes to an end.

Chris Busby

About Chris Busby

Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard, a monthly magazine about Portland. He writes a weekly column for the BDN.