Thousands of U.S. Military trainees waterboarded during Viet Nam era.

With all the debate going on about waterboarding being torture, it brings up memories of my own experiences during advanced combat training at survival school at Widbey Island in Washington State in 1968. 

During this five day survival, escape and evade and POW internment training, we were exposed to a whole array of mental and physical exercises designed to break our committment to the Uniform Code of Military Justice which very strictly forbid us to say anything but our name, rank and serial number. Numerous attempts were made to get us to turn against our fellow comrads by signing documents or making statements against our own training group and our country. 

Because we had eaten very little during our four day survival in the forest, we came into the last day which was the concentration camp segment somewhat in a weaken state which meant the first attempts by camp guards to get us to turn coat was to bribe us with food.  Once we were interned we were also deprived of water, which after a few hours in a barb wire compound, the guards would fill their own canteens outside the fence and spill more water than they drank in front of us which in many ways may have been the worse torture than the physical attempts to break us as the the day went on. 

Among the things tried to break us physically were outright physical slapping and punching, awkward positioning of our bodies by arching our back for extended periods of time with our head against a wall.  Isolation in wooden boxes that measured about 5 feet tall and 5 feet square where you were to stay standing upright hunched over for several hours at a time, being confined in rectangle shaped wooden boxes about 5 feet long, 1 foot tall and 1 foot wide.  We were enclosed in these boxes for probably 20 minutes which was a very long time for your body to be in such a cramped position.  After just a few minutes, you couldn’t feel the bottom half of your body because of poor circulation.  Once they let you out of these boxes you were unable to stand up for several minutes.  I remember several of my fellow trainees breaking during this segment.  It was very difficult because we did not know how long we were to be left in this box.  Just a few minutes seemed like an eternity especially if you were prone to any kind of claustrophobia which in this case some of the guys started screaming to let them out.

And of course the waterboarding segment which was uncomfortable but most of us felt this segment was not the worst part of the concentration camp exercise. 

While the physical things were difficult, it was the food, water and sleep depravation that metally was harder to take and I am sure that many of the trainees, probably myself included,  would have broken if these tactics would have lasted a longer period of time in a real situation.

I bring this whole experience up wondering why these types of mental exercises are considered so terrible when thousands of our own military personel during the Viet Nam era experienced these things in training and did not have any lasting physical or mental problems from them. As long as no lasting physical or mental damage is done to the jihadist detainees we pick up on the battle field, I would think we would need to try most of these mentioned tactics to get the information we may need to save innocent lives.

We have to remember, that through out history, very few militaries the United States has had wars with other than the so called civilized Northern European and British militaries would ever treat our POW’s like human beings.  We don’t ever see our guys again if they are captured by these jihadist maniacs, they just kill our guys in the field right on the spot.  If we do see them again, it probably is a propaganda video of some masked mad man with a long knife cutting the head off the infidel. Its no different to them then cutting the head off a chicken to have for dinner for these brained washed animals taught in madrasas schools.

Do I want to see physical abuse or anything goes tactics?  No, I want to use the tactics that work short of torture and waterboarding is mild compared to what could be done.

Kind of makes you wonder what all the angst is about in this debate.  A little perspective here.