TURMOIL IN THE BALKANS : Some Blast Survival Training Course’s Traumatic Realism

In a sense, Christian Polintan is the flip side of Capt. Scott F. O’Grady’s success story.

O’Grady relied on the skills he learned in a rigorous Air Force survival training program to elude capture in Bosnia-Herzegovina after his F-16 was shot down by Bosnian Serb forces. Rescued after nearly a week, he is on his way home now to what will be a hero’s welcome at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington on Sunday.

In 1993, Polintan, then a cadet at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., underwent the same “Survival Evasion Resistance Escape” course that O’Grady took. But he was later forced to leave the academy after complaining that he had been sexually abused during a part of the training designed to prepare recruits for what could happen to them if they are ever taken prisoner.

Polintan said he was subjected to simulated sodomy. Air Force officials defend the survival training, noting that to be useful in a real POW setting, it must be realistic; in this case, that means being rough.

They insist, moreover, that simulated rape scenarios are never allowed to go too far. And, although they refuse to comment on the classified resistance and escape techniques taught as part of the 17-day course, they note that more than 5,000 students take the course annually and graduate without complaint.

Defenders of the POW training--the classified resistance and escape portion of the survival program--argue that, without use of real violence, the training could not possibly prepare military personnel to endure the torment they could be expected to face in an Iraqi jail cell--or a Bosnian Serb prison camp.

But Polintan’s case is neither unique nor--judging from some of the other complaints--extreme.

In perhaps the most publicized instance of abuse associated with the training program, former cadet Elizabeth Saum is suing the Air Force for the trauma she says she suffered from the prolonged physical abuse and simulated rape she was forced to endure when she took the course at the end of her freshman year at the academy in 1993.

Beaten, abused, humiliated and grabbed so hard by the neck that she passed out, Saum was later diagnosed by a psychologist hired by her family as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her “captor-trainers’ ” treatment of her.

“If the despicable conduct which injured Elizabeth Saum had occurred while she was in the hands of the enemy, she would now be receiving the highest honors for her bravery,” Doris Besikof, the Denver lawyer who is representing her, said in a March 22 letter to the secretary of the Air Force.

As a result of complaints by Saum and other female cadets with similar stories, the Air Force Academy suspended the rape scenario portion of the survival course it introduced in 1993.

But congressional investigators complain that their efforts to find out how many women may have been abused at other survival training centers have been stonewalled by Pentagon officials.

“The Air Force Academy says it has eliminated the ‘sexual exploitation scenario’ from its [survival] program, but we don’t know if it has been eliminated elsewhere. . . . And no one on the outside has any idea how many people have been traumatized by this,” said Lisa Moreno, an aide to Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.).

Schroeder, a member of the House National Security Committee, sent three letters to Air Force officials demanding information about the Saum case, but “they were never answered,” Moreno said.

But researchers at the National Security News Service, a nonprofit, Washington-based organization that researches military subjects, said they have uncovered at least 10 instances between 1993 and 1994, the period when sexual exploitation was used as part of the survival training at the Air Force Academy, in which assaults or sexual abuse resulted in significant injuries. These included one miscarriage, a concussion and a case in which a female cadet was hospitalized due to “cartilage separation” in her chest as a result of “routine manhandling.”

“Mistreatment is widely accepted and tolerated in the SERE program. . . . The survival and evasion training which got O’Grady out of Bosnia seems to go pretty well, but it’s when they get into the POW stuff that things go out of whack,” said Roger Charles, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who works for the research service.

A senior military source observed: “The question, I guess, is where you draw the line that separates realistic training from the reality of being a prisoner itself.” The source added that “in some cases, maybe that line has come too close to being crossed.”