ARMED FORCES: Training by Torture

ARMED FORCES Training by Torture

Korea showed that captured U.S. servicemen could be forced by torture, by the threat of torture, and sometimes by the mere promise of creature comforts, to hurt their fellow prisoners and their country. This came as a shock to the U.S. public; it came as even more of a shock to the nation’s military leaders, and it was inevitable that they should determine to do something about it.

Foremost in the attempt to train men to resist torture is the U.S. Air Force. At the Stead Air Force Base near Reno, nearly 30,000 airmen have gone through a course in which some of the ugliest Communist methods of handling prisoners are followed. Herded behind barbed wire for a 36-hour interrogation period, the “prisoners” are subjected to electrical shocks, crammed into an upright box where they can neither sit nor stand, forced to stand shoulder deep in water for hours of darkness, fed a mixture of raw spinach and uncooked spaghetti, made to stand naked before their captors, and to listen to slanderous talk about their wives.

Last week, in reply to published charges that the Stead school is one of epic brutality, its top officers were summoned to Washington, where they met with Lieut. General Emmett (“Rosie”) O’Donnell Jr., the Air Force deputy chief of personnel. The Steadmen, Colonel Burton E. McKenzie, school commander, and Major John Oliphant, training director, later reported that O’Donnell had commended them and that they contemplated no change in the school’s program.

“We never take a man and see how much he can stand,” said McKenzie, a German P.O.W. for 14 months in World War II. “We do not degrade students. We try to teach them by demonstration what to expect if captured, and how to conduct themselves to evade punishment.

“We feel our greatest accomplishment is to remove the pattern of fear of the unknown . . .”

Sometimes the unknown is less feared than the known, and there is grave doubt that the Air Force has found the answer to its problem. Men can be given spiritual stamina through spiritual training; they can achieve physical stamina through physical training. There is no evidence that they can become immune to torture by small doses of torture.