After I passed the SERE Indoctrination course in Texas, the Air Force moved my fellow course graduates and I up to Fairchild Air Force Base in eastern Washington state. Fairchild AFB is the site of the Air Force’s main survival school.
In some ways the environment was more relaxed. The screening course was about two weeks long, but the upcoming course was six months long. With such a lengthy course that starts only twice a year, if you missed the start of one class, you could be waiting around for awhile before the next class began.
While waiting we had various tasks and activities to perform. We’d work out together in the mornings five days a week, with every Monday being a PT test that the rest of the Air Force only did once or twice a year. On Monday afternoons we’d do a 7-mile timed ruck march. The other afternoons during the week usually involved some sort of training in a section of the base where we could practice using an ax to fell trees or split wood, perform other firecraft training, or practice building shelters. Another afternoon was usually spent cleaning a particular building, repairing equipment, or prepping and resupplying stuff we’d used previously. Every now and then we’d spend a few overnights out in the forest somewhere, learning to use the skills and tricks we’d picked up.
One of the cool things we regularly got to do was grab our loaded rucks and pile into a bus and we’d get driven to state parks or national forests or some kind of wilderness that was open to public use, and we’d go on 10+ mile hikes to help prepare our bodies for the upcoming training. The only real rules given to us were that we had to carry a decent weight in our packs, we had to bring water, and we had to wear the boots we’d use in training, but aside from the boots we could wear whatever we wanted. It was a relaxed version of intense training and we’d get to apply more things we’d learned along the way.
About this time of year, April or May, we went for one of these hikes up in the mountains somewhere. There was still a lot of snow on the ground, but it was warm enough that the snowpack was melting.
We came to one spot where some small evergreens were sticking out of the snow. As we walked through the patch of trees, a few guys started sinking waist-deep into the snow. It was a total surprise to me. I had no clue what was going on…it almost seemed like some kind of snow shark was swimming around underneath us or something, picking us off one by one.
It turns out that during the winter, as the snow fell, the evergreens acted like umbrellas. The snow piled up around the outside of the trees, but near the trunk a snowless void remained. Weeks or months later when some unsuspecting Air Force students came walking along and got too close to the trees, the snow shifted underneath them and started to swallow them up. Though the trees looked small, their full height was hidden from view. In this picture, Carl walked right between two trees growing close together, and after sinking into the snow he had to get a hand up. The surface he had been walking on, despite its appearance, was not as solid as what he had imagined it to be.
We live in strange times. Up is down, black is white, right is wrong, and wrong is right. The snow that humanity stands on is shifting around us, leaving us in a state of confusion with unsteady footing. As the world goes off in search of today’s version of a moral compass (and gets ready to change it tomorrow), build your life not on the shifting footing of the world’s ideology, but on the firm foundation of Jesus Christ, which does not change.
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”-Matthew 7:24-27
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