Learning to Survive : Training: The mood of pilots at an Air Force school grew more intense when U.S. fliers started appearing on Iraqi TV.

In the chill air of the nearby Colville National Forest five men and a woman in battle fatigues stand knee-deep in snow and strain their ears for the sound of a rescue chopper whirring in the distance.

“Rescue! Rescue! Rescue!” Air Force Lt. Brent Haserkamp barks into a battered yellow hand-held radio. “We’re in a medium-sized clear-cut, a few hundred meters to the west of some beaver ponds, over.”

“Are there survivors?” the crew of an approaching UH-1N Huey helicopter radios back.

“We have six survivors--all in good health,” Haserkamp said, using a compass to direct the helicopter toward the clearing.

This rescue exercise, conducted this week in the snow-covered Colville National Forest, is part of a grueling 17-day combat survival course designed to simulate conditions Air Force pilots and crews face if their plane is shot down. At the Air Force Survival School, based at nearby Fairchild Air Force Base here, 3,800 men and women each year receive training on everything from which insects can be eaten in the wild to the instruments of torture that might await a downed pilot in a prisoner of war camp.

The survival school generally is regarded with the same blend of contempt and affection reserved for Army boot camp. That traditional outlook, of course, changed when the sorties over Iraq began and, more to the point, when captured pilots started appearing on Iraqi television.

“Before things started happening over there a lot of students had a hard time taking this school seriously,” said Senior Airman Virgil Litterell, a survival instructor at the school. “Now, they are listening a lot more intently.”

The rescue this week of a Navy pilot who bailed out over the Iraqi desert and then used a small radio to communicate with his rescuers was inserted quickly into the curriculum--a case study of how courses taught here can save a life.

Those being trained were not certain if they would be sent to active duty--or when.

The six students who were practicing how to direct a rescue chopper with a radio and a pocket compass belong to the first class assigned to the school since war broke out in the gulf.

Following standard practice, their training has come in phases. First, there was classroom instruction, teaching them the sobering lesson that they could expect loneliness, malnutrition, starvation and possibly torture--if they managed to live through the rigors of parachuting over foreign soil.

In lectures and in instruction manuals, they were taught how to travel when it is cooler at night, to find and conserve water and to improvise loose clothing in desert terrain so that air can circulate around the body.

Then they were dumped in the wilderness to forage for raw materials. They were drilled on how to build shelters with rocks or with tree branches and parachute lining, how to start fires with a piece of flint and a knife, how to signal for help with small mirrors--all the while escaping enemy detection.

Beyond shelter, there is the problem of finding food and water. In these mountains, students are challenged to find extraordinary sources of nourishment. As gruesome as it may sound, they were taught to consume protein-rich ants and lizards. With dehydration a constant risk, they were instructed to replenish their bodies with salt by eating squirrel and rabbit eyes.

“You’d be amazed at what you can procure with a stout stick,” said Sgt. Robert Shearer, an instructor at the school. “Woe it be to the snake that wanders into our camp.”

“The little ants taste like pepper,” said Airman 1st Class Rena Dejong, “but the huge black ones that drill holes through wood taste like almonds.”

Last Wednesday--after a full day of building makeshift shelters in three feet of snow and directing helicopters with pocket compasses, radios and mirrors--the students turned their attention toward a furry brown rabbit tied to a tree near a campfire.

The rabbit, they said, was nicknamed “Stew.”

That the heavily wooded training site 70 miles north of Spokane stands in stark contrast to the bleak Arabian desert is a cause for concern among students and instructors alike.

“The desert takes some getting used to,” said Sgt. Mark Gouge, 22, a student from Hurlburt Air Force Base in Florida. “It is kind of hard to do that in this weather and snow.”

“I’m paying special attention to any information they give us about surviving in the desert,” added Airman 1st Class Thomas Javis, 24, of Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.

Although many of the survival lessons taught here can be applied to Arctic, tropical or desert wilderness terrains, Col. David R. Lloyd, commander of the 3636th Combat Crew Training Wing at Fairchild, acknowledged that the school lacks a “preponderance of dry arid areas available to us year-round.

“If in fact the arena in the Mideast would continue for some length of time,” Lloyd said, “and it was deemed that the training people receive here is not sufficient, then I’m sure they would take a look at the possibility of providing more training in an environment more closely aligned” to the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, the school has dispatched teams of survival instructors to the front to learn what they can about terrain, weather, enemy camps and interrogation techniques. Such information already is being incorporated into the school’s survival lessons, Lloyd said.

Lloyd declined to discuss specifics about the information these teams are bringing back. But others at the base noted recent changes were made at the school’s “resistance laboratory,” which is believed to include an exact replica of an Iraqi prisoner of war camp.

During the Vietnam War, the resistance laboratory included a Viet Cong camp complete with “foreign looking people who yelled at you all day long,” according to one graduate.

The final week of class is reserved for so-called resistance and captivity survival training, details of which remain classified.

The Pentagon has redesigned its Code of Military Conduct to allow war prisoners more leeway in dealing with their captors. The code, which once demanded a prisoner give only name, rank, serial number and date of birth, was relaxed after the Vietnam War with an addendum that stated POWS should resist cooperation with the enemy “to the best of their ability.”