Preparing for the Worst

Feet tied and hands clutched painfully behind their backs, the U.S. Army officers snaked and wiggled on their stomachs over the dusty, rock-strewn ground. "This way, sickie, crawl to me!" cried one captor. "You're ugly, you know that, sickie? Crawl--remember, we've got a lot worse waiting for you."

The men were not Viet Cong captives but trainees in a gruelingly realistic prisoner-of-war course at Fort Sill, Okla. Roughest of its kind in the Army, the course is designed to toughen artillery-officer candidates for the kind of torture and humiliation under which many prisoners cracked in Korea. In the year since the course began, about 6,000 officers have completed it.

Ready for the Worst. "Before Viet Nam," explained a training officer, "the artillery always had the infantry out in front. Now sometimes we have to do all our own patrolling and perimeter defenses. We want to be prepared for the worst." With as many as 200 American servicemen presently held by the Communists in Viet Nam--though no Army artillery officers have as yet been captured by the enemy--the instructors have devised a fiendishly ingenious array of tortures and tests to ensure that their men know what to expect.

The course begins at dawn. After calisthenics and classroom work, the artillerymen are trucked out to the fort's forested hills, turned loose, and told to evade mock aggressor forces patrolling the 7 1/2-sq,-mi. area. Of 133 artillerymen who took the course one day recently, fewer than 30 got away. The rest were marched, often barefoot, to a simulated P.O.W. compound.

Under constant taunts from their captors, the artillerymen were forced to crawl, wallow in mud, hang by their legs from a horizontal bar, sit for seemingly endless minutes with their legs wrapped painfully around a pole. The guards badgered them for information beyond the maximum--name, rank and serial number--sanctioned by the Geneva Treaty. A sympathetic "Red Cross" representative tried to wheedle additional intelligence out of them, but most immediately spotted him as a phony.

"Kiss the Mud." When persuasion failed, pressure replaced it. "Get up, hit it, up, down, roll over, crawl in circles, up, down, faster, talk, talk, talk." The captives were lined up in front of a row of odoriferous barrels partly filled with slime and crawling with spiders. "Get in headfirst, you dumb sickies," they were told. "Kiss the mud. Now do push-ups."

Thrust into a tiny, darkened hut, the captives found that a barrel placed in the middle of the floor had no bottom and led into a black hole. Climbing through, they descended into a sewer pipe barely wide enough for their shoulders. Slowly, the artillerymen clawed their way through the 75-ft. pipe to freedom. But their ordeal was not yet over. Though they had started the day at 5 a.m., they still had to run a mountainous ten-mile course, evading aggressors armed with blank bullets and dummy grenades. Most of them made it back to their mess hall just in time for the next day's classwork.

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