The Spartan Way: Difference between revisions

m (clean up)
Line 166:
* The US Navy SEALs have a period of intense, brutal training called "Hell Week" that trainees must endure before <s>becoming full fledged SEALs</s> they are allowed to begin the second third of SEAL training.
** SERE School, for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape, is given to military members who might be taken prisoner by enemy forces. Most people who go through it regard it as the worst part of training they experience. There are three levels of SERE training conducted depending on an individual's military occupation, rank, and probability of capture. Most of the training that takes place in at the highest levels of training is classified, and those who go through it aren't always fond of discussing it. It is commonly told that graduates are given a rabbit to kill and eat during exercises. Other exotic foods are on the menu as well. If you can catch 'em.
** Some of the exercises done to trainees during SERE school would be considered violations of the Geneva Conventions if done to enemy prisoners. Specifically, the torture resistance exercises. They operate on the basis that its not really practical to simulate torture without diluting the training value... so they use non-simulated, genuine torture. While they obviously avoid methods that cause permanent physical or mental damage (after all, you need the student still in fighting shape and reasonable sane at the end), or the ones involving sexual assault (because there's just no way anyone will ever sign a permission slip for that one), that still leaves a tremendous amount of wiggle room in which to be ''really really horrible''.
** Some of the exercises done to trainees during SERE school would be considered violations of the Geneva Conventions if done to enemy prisoners.
*** Which is somewhat understandable, since not everyone who might take them prisoner is going to respect the Geneva Convention.
*** Especially since many of the missions rely on the ability to plausibly claim that the people involved are not combatants from your country.