Chapter 14: Diminishing Returns

SERE school ran three weeks in February at an undisclosed location in the mountains of North Carolina, in weather that February in North Carolina considered seasonal and that I considered a personal challenge from the landscape. The school was divided into three phases — classroom instruction in survival and evasion theory, practical field application, and the resistance training that occupied the final days and constituted the part that most people who had been through it declined to describe in detail afterward.

I will not describe it in detail here either, not because it was the worst thing I’d experienced — it wasn’t, by a margin that said more about my prior history than about SERE’s instructors — but because the resistance training’s value is specific to the person going through it, and description flattens it into something that sounds either worse or better than it is. What I will say is that the instructors were professionals doing a necessary job, that the techniques they used to produce the psychological conditions of captivity were effective, and that I emerged from the final phase with a specific piece of information about myself that I hadn’t previously had in confirmed form.

I had always known, in the abstract, that I had a high threshold for isolation and institutional pressure and physical discomfort. SERE confirmed this in conditions designed to find the threshold’s actual location. The instructors found it. It was further out than they typically encountered, which produced, at the debrief, the specific look I had seen on Galloway’s face at BRC and the MEPS physician’s face in Los Angeles — the look of someone filing information that doesn’t fit the standard distribution.

The debrief officer, a major with the careful neutrality of someone trained to not react visibly to what candidates disclosed about their inner experience during the resistance phase, asked me at the end of the session what I had used to maintain orientation during the extended isolation component.

I thought about how to answer that honestly.

“I’ve been maintaining orientation during extended isolation since I was five years old,” I said. “The conditions here were more controlled than some of what I’ve previously encountered.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he wrote something in the debrief folder and closed it.

“Cleared,” he said. “You’re done.”

I flew back to Pendleton in late February with the SERE qualification in my record and a particular kind of tiredness that was not physical — the tiredness of having been examined in a specific way and having passed the examination at a cost that was real even if it was lower than it might have been.

The trading account had grown another seven percent in my absence. The positions had executed as modeled. I noted this with the same detachment I applied to everything and went to bed.

Scout Sniper school was ten weeks at Stone Bay, on the northeastern edge of Pendleton, beginning in April when the California hills were briefly green before the summer burned them back to brown. The school had the reputation of being among the most demanding in the Marine Corps pipeline, which was accurate in the specific sense that the demand was less physical than cognitive and the cognitive demand was sustained in a way that physical demand was not.

The marksmanship component I had been building toward since BRC. The foundation was there — the precision hand work, the breath control, the patient stillness — and the school gave it a framework that converted instinct into documented capability. I shot well. Not the best in the cohort, which position belonged to a staff sergeant from 2nd Marines named Crawford who had been hunting since he was old enough to hold a rifle and had a relationship with long-range ballistics that approached the philosophical. But well within the upper range, and improving through the course in the consistent way that suggested the ceiling was higher than the current scores indicated.

The stalking was where everything came together in a way that produced, in me, something I didn’t immediately recognize as pleasure because I so rarely encountered the experience. The stalk — moving undetected through terrain to a firing position within a specified distance of an observer who was actively looking for you — required exactly the combination of skills I had been building since I was nine years old in the Arizona desert, watching coyotes from six feet away without being noticed. Terrain reading. Movement discipline. The specific patience of someone who understood that stillness was not the absence of movement but the presence of control.

My stalk times were the best in the cohort. Crawford, who was gracious about competition in the way of someone secure enough in their own specialty to recognize excellence in a different one, said after the third evaluation: “You move like you grew up in the woods.”

“Parts of several different ones,” I said.

He nodded as if this were a complete explanation, which from his perspective it probably was.

The final qualification exercise ran four days and integrated everything: observation post establishment, target detection and ranging, communication of firing solutions, and the stalks. I passed with scores that Okonkwo received by message and acknowledged with a single word reply — the battalion’s standard for significant information — which from him I understood as the equivalent of a standing ovation.

I drove back to the main camp in the late afternoon light with the Scout Sniper qualification confirmed and the specific quiet of someone who has finished a long piece of work and hasn’t yet started the next one.