Tag: Air Force

Posted on

Adapt and Overcome

After I finished Air Force Basic Training, I moved to a different part of Lackland Air Force Base (AFB) near San Antonio, TX. Here I began trying out to become a survival school instructor, officially called a SERE Specialist (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape). At the time, this two-week course was called SEREIIC – SERE Instructor Indoctrination Course. If you passed this course, you moved up to Fairchild AFB near Spokane, Washington to take part in a longer, 6-month training course.

Just because this course was only two weeks long didn’t mean we only spent two weeks there. Having just arrived from Basic Training, all new SEREIIC trainees were skinny, had no muscle, still called everyone “Sir” or “Ma’am,” and generally were not suited for the physical rigors of the upcoming training. Two weeks is simply not enough time to transform skinny “Basic” bodies into something strong enough to withstand the requirements of the course. Even though the course was only two weeks, some students spent months there developing muscle mass and required skills. A few months after I first showed up at SEREIIC, I was 30-40 pounds heavier, mostly from all the workouts we did.

The training could be incredibly stressful, both physically and mentally. It’s not on par with Navy SEAL training, by any stretch, but they use some of the same elements. Room and uniform inspections that require impeccable attention to detail; sleep deprivation; spending hours a day doing physical training; and constant harassment from your instructors and others in charge of you. The whole purpose of this introductory course is to weed out the people that want to be there from the people that are less than fully committed. The instructors are training you to adapt and overcome. In a survival situation, when you are alone, exhausted, and it seems like there’s a never-ending list of hurdles you need to overcome, your life itself can depend on your willingness to overcome doubt, get up off the ground and keep going, no matter how much you just want to lay there a little bit longer.

We didn’t always see it while it was happening, but the misery we endured built fortitude and perseverance in us. The physical training on its own was enough to make some people drop out. Add to that various types of verbal harassment and other pressures, and it became incredibly stressful. I showed up with a group of about 10 or 11 guys, and the guys who had been around for awhile thought it was really fun to haze us. Our first night we were part of the “Newbie 500,” more or less a couple of hours where the students with seniority made us work out in absurd ways until they got tired of messing with us. Pushups, flutter kicks, squats, sprints, bear crawls, crab crawls, and a number of other activities too difficult to describe here, all of them exhausting or painful.

We were only seriously hazed once, but it continued on and off until the guys with seniority either graduated or washed out of the course. The heavy duty physical training came as a part of our normal duty day, under the supervision of instructors. During our duty day (when we were actually at work), any time we entered or left the dorms, the chow hall, or the school, all of us did a synchronized set of about 25 pushups. To be honest, it looked pretty cool when there were 20 of us doing pushups in unison, but we had to do it as a team, or else we’d have to start over and probably pay some kind of physical penalty on top of it for not working together. Between the normal course of traveling between buildings, doing normal PT, missing details during our uniform or room inspections, and after-hours “smoke sessions,” there were days where we did a thousand pushups.

There was plenty of running and rucking, too. We had a couple of tracks, one of them a quarter mile and another one a full mile. To help build our bodies’ tolerance, the new trainees were issued ruck sacks that they were to fill with “only” 45 pounds’ worth of rocks or anything else that could get the scale past the minimum. Over time the load grew. Our instructor cadre would tell us to either run or ruck some seemingly impossible distance in some improbably short amount of time. We had this one guy that, once the instructors were out of earshot, would always start complaining “Dude, there’s no possible way we can make it that far that fast!” It never failed. At first we felt the same way as he did, but over time we learned not to think like him, instead saying “you might be right, but c’mon, let’s argue about it along the way.”

A funny thing happened during our stay there at SEREIIC. We got stronger, and our confidence grew. The ruck sacks got heavier, but we could handle it. We became faster, and could go farther. Pushups weren’t so scary, they just became part of the day’s routine. We were able to smash through the mental barriers we had put up for ourselves and accomplish just about every goal the cadre set before us.

I’ll have more stories to share from this chapter of my life, but for this post I want to convey this main point: if you want to do great things for Christ, you have to be able to look at seemingly insurmountable obstacles, take a deep breath, and start moving. If you are a child of God, there is unimaginable power living within you! Do not be afraid or discouraged!

Break loose from mediocrity, and start climbing the huge wall that stands between where you are and reaching your full potential as an impactful Christ-follower. Want to know a secret that’s kinda scary but also kinda exhilarating? After you make it past that wall, there’s going to be another, bigger one behind it. And there’s another one behind that one. And another one. And on, and on, and on. Each one you overcome, though, will either arm you with new knowledge, or show you that you can do things you once thought impossible. Once you’ve scaled a number of these metaphorical walls, you’ll no longer flinch at doing things you believe to be beyond your capability.

God has a way of putting big challenges in His followers’ lives. It’s important to remember that the things you faced yesterday have prepared you for the challenges you’ll face today and tomorrow. It’s scary sometimes, but if He’s placed an impossible task in front of you, He’s also made a way for you to get past it. Will you start complaining that it looks impossible, or will you pick up your ruck and start moving?

Posted on

Help’s Coming

An Air Force Pararescueman during an exercise

More than normal, I feel like this post can be helpful or encouraging to people. So please, when you finish reading it, pass it along if you think you know someone that can benefit from it. Link to it on social media, forward the email, or text the link to someone that comes to mind.

In order for the Air Force to cultivate an aggressive attitude among its frontline warriors, those Airmen need to be confident that if something goes wrong during a mission (their aircraft gets shot down, they get separated while behind enemy lines, etc.), somebody from our side is tenaciously coming to find them, and is going to fight viciously to bring them back. Just in case our forces can’t get there right away, those people need to be trained how to survive, how to try to avoid capture, and what to do in case they do get caught.

The Air Force has two main answers to this. It has two entire career fields dedicated to this function. One group is a set of special forces medics sent into combat to locate, stabilize, and bring out our people that are in trouble (all while under fire, if need be). They can parachute or swim in, rappel down a cliff to retrieve someone dangling by a parachute, get them medically patched up well enough to move them, and link up with a way to get to safety. This group is called the PJs (short for Pararesecue Jumper), and during a real mission, they rarely travel without some heavily armed friends.

The second career field is the one I tried out for: the SERE Specialists. The acronym “SERE” (pronounced “seer”) stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. Full-fledged SERE Specialists are responsible for conducting training for anyone that, due to their official duties, experiences a higher-than-normal risk of being isolated and/or captured by the enemy. This includes pretty much anyone that works onboard an Air Force aircraft, Air Force special forces, some specialized combat roles, and a mishmash of other personnel. This is the only career in the Air Force where brand new enlisted Airmen are trained as instructors teaching both officers and enlisted Air Force members right off the bat.

Fire building is a critical skill taught in SERE training

The SERE acronym itself covers the full range of living through a combat mishap and getting returned to friendly forces. “Survival” is the easiest one. If, for example, your aircraft crashes in the ocean and you drift to a deserted island, you need to figure out how to survive until you get rescued. “Evasion” gets trickier; now you need to survive and signal friendly forces while trying not to get caught by the enemy forces looking for you. “Resistance” refers to your actions after you’ve been caught by the enemy; you’re going to be interrogated and dispirited. This phase focuses on doing your best to avoid giving the enemy useful information while clinging to hope. Finally, “Escape” is the goal of most prisoners. During WWII, the more prisoners that escaped from their POW camps, the more enemy personnel had to go out looking for escapees or guard those camps, which meant those enemy troops left combat roles on the front lines.

It’s expensive for the Air Force to move people around to different assignments and locations. Someone in the Air Force noticed “Hey, there are a handful of jobs whose training courses have high failure rates. Instead of sending people directly from Basic to those schools, why don’t we have sort of a “try out” school at the same location as Basic Training, and if they pass that, then we send them to their school?”
That’s why, after Basic Training, I moved from the main part of Lackland Air Force Base (AFB) near San Antonio, Texas to a base annex nearby. The unit I joined was made up of five groups:

  • SERE trainees (this is the group I was a part of), 
  • Pararescue, or PJs, 
  • Combat Controllers (another type of special forces that can improvise a runway or landing zone where no official one exists; they’re air-traffic controllers with guns and face paint), 
  • Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or EOD (the bomb squad),
  • SOTs – Students Out of Training (someone that, for whatever reason, will not be continuing to the main training school of one of the previous four groups. The collective washout rate for the other four groups was so high that this group warranted its own organization while they awaited reclassification to a new job.)

For the SERE trainees, every aspect of being stationed here revolved around one of two purposes: developing the mental and physical toughness to endure hardship and seemingly overwhelming odds, and demonstrating proficiency in learning the skills taught to you. If SERE trainees passed this class, they move up to Fairchild AFB in Washington State, where they continued their training. Anyone who ultimately graduates as a SERE Specialist will have personally endured situations where they refused to give up, where they endured miserable conditions, and where at times all they could think about was finding shelter, firewood, food, or water. On top of that, they learned to be teachers responsible for the health and well-being of a group of students that were cold, wet, miserable, and hungry, trying to trek around in the Washington wilderness without being caught by a mock enemy.

It’s also very expensive for the Air Force to train aircrew and special operators. Once those individuals are trained and begin getting some combat experience under their belt, they become even more valuable. The point behind the Air Force sending so many of its aviators and special forces personnel through survival school is so that, if something goes wrong on a mission, they can keep going long enough for us to get them back and return them to performing well in their combat role. The training does not guarantee that they’ll live comfortably while isolated; it doesn’t even guarantee that they’ll be able to perform the same job once we get them back. It’s just meant to help them live through it, because Air Force leaders know that even if they recover people that can no longer perform their primary function, the training and experience wrapped up in them still makes them high-performing contributors in a different capacity.

You might be in that situation right now. Figuratively, or maybe even literally, you might be cold, dirty, wet, wounded, hungry, exhausted, and scared. All you’re trying to do is survive; to hang on long enough for things to get better. You can’t possibly think about embarking on some grand adventure for Christ right now. My answer to that is this: you may have already begun one.

Once you get back to being able to take a deep breath, the experience you’ve survived will become a part of who you are. The immediate danger and stress may be over at that point, but it will permanently impact how you go through life, affecting how you make decisions in the future. Better yet, God can use the current craziness to steer you into a new role that reaches others in ways that you didn’t see coming. That could be the part God’s after, even though things are rough right now. What you’re going through now is part of the training you have to endure, but you don’t yet know what your future role is going to be. Even though it’s difficult, and at times unbearable, but it’s something that you’ll lean on in the future.

In the meantime, I know it’s hard, but keep holding on. Someone’s coming for you. I don’t know what form it will take, but help is tenaciously coming for you, and will fight viciously to bring you back.

Posted on

Leap of Faith

USMC Confidence Course

When I was in Air Force Basic Training, we spent about a week at a mock deployment location. Up until that point Basic had focused on learning rank, Air Force customs and courtesies, how to conduct yourselves as Airmen, how to wear the uniform, etc. The goal of this “Warrior Week” was to introduce trainees to some of the things they would be likely to encounter in a deployed environment. This is where trainees first use a gas mask, where they eat their first MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat), where they first fire an M-16, and the week generally serves as an introduction to a variety of other things that they might need to understand when deployed.

This week is also when trainees go through the Confidence Course. The Air Force cannot control the background, knowledge, or skills of its enlistees, but it can provide the same training and experiences to everyone that joins its ranks. The Confidence Course is intended to present trainees with obstacles that they have to somehow overcome. In the process it builds in each trainee a sense of confidence in having been able to accomplish each task, so each person feels able to take on more difficult tasks, which is good because the most difficult challenges are toward the end of the course. None of the individual obstacles are particularly difficult, but the odds are that every trainee is likely going to have to face something they’ve never done before.

One of the more memorable obstacles for me was one where you had to swing on a rope to get across a pool of water. This is no big deal and it’s actually kind of a fun thing to do, except for the fact that the rope is too short for you to grab while standing on the edge. The person that went before you stands on the far edge of the pool and swings the rope to you, but since it’s not going to make it all the way to you, there comes a point at which you have to jump to meet the rope. Also, if you don’t jump, the rope will swing back and forth, with a little less momentum each time. Your best opportunity is the first one.

Rope swing element at the US Air Force Academy’s Confidence Course

As you grow and mature in your relationship with Jesus, you find that this obstacle may be an example for you. It’s a wonderful and beautiful thing when someone accepts Jesus as their Savior, and that relationship needs to deepen and grow. There comes a point, however, where believers must use their talents, abilities, and resources for the glory of God’s kingdom, and to help others learn about how He offers them an eternal gift. Sometimes the tasks set before believers will seem impossible to accomplish on their own, but they need to remember that they are NOT doing it on their own.

It is possible for believers to kill their own opportunities by waiting. There’s often something that’s in short supply, usually money or time. “I’ll start my new ministry when the money’s in place.” “This is a very busy time in my life, I can’t start something new right now.” What a lot of people don’t realize is that God may be deliberately withholding the resources you need until you demonstrate to Him your commitment. Sure, He knows your heart, but knowing your heart is a lot different from witnessing your resolve. Like the rope swing, you need to trust that if God has challenged you to do something, the things you need are going to be there at the time you need them, but you’re not going to reach them if your feet don’t leave the ground.

Sometimes you have to jump before you can get a grip on the rope.