SERE

So here I am, five weeks from my last post, and I completed SERE. Was it all I had hoped for and more? Of course. I'm glad I went in the middle of July. It was as you would expect in Southeast Alabama in the middle of summer HOT! It rained every day and when it wasn't raining the temperature was around 90+ degrees with humidity over 85%. If you're going to go, go all out.

Now the question is, what did we learn? All I can really talk about is the survival portion of the course. For me, having grown up in the suburbs without a lot of survival experience, the course taught me a lot about which plants to eat, which bugs are ok to dine on, procuring and purifying water, building shelters and fires, and of course trapping and eating animals. If you were any kind of boy/girl scout growing up you undoubtedly learned these same skills, however, I hated scouting and never got to that point so this was all new to me. The difference is how we apply the knowledge. This definitely wasn't just some boy scout weekend adventure in the woods. I will leave it at that and let your imaginations run with how the rest of the course went. 

The weight loss everyone is curious about. I lost quite a bit of muscle, and you can really see it in my face. The thing is, I ate so much at the chow hall that I gained a good amount of fat and my actual weight loss was only a couple of pounds, but the average weight loss is about ten pounds.

All right, real lessons learned here:
1. Knowing you're going to be hungry for days seems to alleviate the actual feeling of hunger.
2. When motivated by the mind to do so, the body can accomplish much bigger things than we imagine.
3. The owls in Alabama sound like giant dying monkeys at night... Creepy...
4. Banana spiders are nasty. (See picture below)
5. You get a lot of time to think, make sure you discipline your mind to think of things that will motivate you.

That is a full grown banana spider. They are not harmful, but they freak you out when you walk through their webs which are kind of like walking through a web of bungee cords.












I had one goal while in SERE and that was to eat a snake. Because it rained so incredibly much I only saw one snake, and we were not able to get it. It crawled up into a log and we couldn't pull it out. Ah well, maybe I'll scour the back yard for some.

This course reminded me of the Bible verse Matthew 4:2 - "After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry." This is in reference to Jesus. Wow! I hardly made it a few days, and here this guy went forty.

So what are my final thoughts on SERE? Canned answer: "It was the best training I've ever received, but I would never want to do it again." This statement is actually true. I learned a lot of cool things, but it was not the most pleasant course I've been through.

I've been trying to ease back into working out and it's not going well. You lose a lot of strength from not eating for so many days.

What am I up to now? Studying for Aeromed which starts for me in about a week which is immediately followed by flight line, which is the reason I came to flight school in the first place. FINALLY! My buddy, before I started this process, told me that all the bs I had to deal with prior to flying was totally worth it once you get into the cockpit. I'm excited to see if that's true or not, though I know it will be.

I'll update the blog soon with my trip to Minnesota that I took while waiting to start Aeromed, as well as what flight line is like.