Never say die

Bodybuilders and SupeRmen need not apply. To become a commando, you need to have other talents, none of which typify the unfeeling Rambo-type guy who grunts and shoots, says Benedict Carey


During a routine military training exercise some years ago, two skydivers collided about 1,000 feet above the desert floor east of San Diego. One of the parachutes shuddered, and held. The other one collapsed, sending a U.S. Navy commando named Mark Divine into
free fall.

In the next few moments, which promised to be his last, Divine's training took over. He worked his parachute lines up and down, to try to catch air. About 50 feet from the ground, the chute swept open, pitching its cargo hard into the dust and scrub, unharmed. "I don't remember ever thinking about dying," Divine recalls. "Even afterwards."

At a time when there are many people engaged in counter-terrorist operations around the world, psychiatrists and military professionals are determined to learn how some people can handle heart-stopping danger and walk away without any apparent psychological harm.

The answers are crucial not only for recruiting elite fighters but for preventing the kind of mental breakdowns that can follow intense combat.

Academic psychiatrists have been doing sophisticated blood analysis and mental testing on groups of U.S. special forces, including Navy SEAL (Sea, Air Land) teams and Army Green Berets, as they participate in classified training courses. The research reveals how training and upbringing - including our response to trauma and abuse - can produce enormous mental resilience.

It also affirms that most commandos are neither unfeeling warriors nor the Rambo-type loners many people imagine. "We think of these guys as people who just don't feel stress at the same level as everyone else," says Dr. Andy Morgan of Yale University, who is directing the research. "But that is not the case. In some ways they are even more sensitive than the rest of us."

The U.S. military has been profiling its most elite soldiers since at least World War II, to better predict who has the right stuff. After all, about 60 per cent to 80 per cent of special forces candidates drop out. On standard tests, there are few surprises.

Commandos tend to score above average on general intelligence, high on measures of determination and earnestness, lower on neuroticism and anxiety, studies show. They also score high on tests of sociability, the ability to work well in teams.

"That's fairly crucial: They have to play well with others," says Lt. Col. Morgan Banks, command psychologist for U.S. Army special forces at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.

Bodybuilders and self-styled supermen tend not to make the cut.

In several experiments over the last two years, Morgan and colleagues at Yale and in the Army have analysed blood and saliva samples from about 250 special forces and regular infantrymen as they participated in survival training courses.

The training, required of all U.S. combat troops, is meant to evoke fear of capture, interrogation and torture.

In exercises based on prisoner-of-war experiences, the young men are "captured", bound and hooded, deprived of sleep, then 'bullied' to give up precious information. The men are not physically harmed. But they don't know how or when the test will end, and one slip-up can derail a career.

In the special operations personnel, the exercise causes the stress hormone cortisol to spike about as much as in a patient undergoing heart surgery - about 20 times the normal rate. Contrary to expectation, their stress response is actually higher than in the regular infantry.

But at the same time, these elite fighters have highly elevated levels of another hormone, called neuropeptide-Y, or NPY, which is thought to be a natural relaxant. Produced in the brain and intestine, this substance plays a role in appetite control, heart function and sleep quality, among other things.

The physical demands of commando training are notoriously difficult. There are hours of jogging in boots, with a full pack. Naked swims in winter waves. No sleep for days on end. Among many other challenges, for example, Green Beret candidates are dropped into a rugged wilderness in the dead of night, alone, with little more than the clothes on their backs. They must find their way to fixed points miles away, under time pressure.

In his book Inside Delta Force (Delacorte, 2002), about the Army's secret counter-terrorism unit, founding member Eric Haney describes how the training measures soldiers' minds at precisely that point when their bodies are shutting down. "The whole programme is geared to find people who think, and think well, in a firefight," Haney says.

"Bullets are flying, maybe you're wounded, and you have to have people in your unit thinking straight. You depend on them."

In animal studies, injections of the hormone significantly reduce anxious behaviour, according to Bob Kesterson, a hormone researcher at Vanderbilt University.

Although similar experiments have not yet been done on humans, the Yale group believes this internal relaxant helps keep commandos' minds alert and supple when stress levels are going off the chart. "In most people, the system may simply shut down after cortisol levels get to a certain point, and they kind of lose it," Morgan says.

A day after interrogation, infantrymen still aren't entirely themselves. Their stress hormones are slightly elevated, their NPY readings low. The special forces fighters, by contrast, are rested and ready.

"Bottom line, these are guys whose bodies remain challenged and engaged when the stress is there, but when it's gone they bounce right back," Morgan says. "They move on." In part, this difference reflects how the special ops forces are trained.

All SEALs go through some variation of a scuba-diving test, in which trainees are attacked, their air hoses yanked out and tied in knots, their masks ripped off. The men must recover their equipment, untangle their hoses and restore airflow, all without surfacing for a breath.

Those who succeed are attacked again. "You don't really know when it's going to end," says Chris Berman, 46, a former SEAL and reservist who now runs fitness camps and team-building seminars for corporate clients.

By exploiting these unknowns, military instructors add a strong, if not explicit, psychological component to the selection process. One of the most common ruses is to inform a man who has nearly collapsed across a finish line that he's not done yet, or he has failed.

Berman remembers an officer telling him and the handful of other desperately exhausted men who'd survived SEAL "hell week" that they'd flunked out - but would have the chance to go through it all again, if they chose.

"I looked down at my hands, which were swollen and covered in sores, literally covered, and I thought: electrical tape," Berman says. "That would substitute for the skin I no longer had." Almost all of the men wept openly. None quit. That's when the officer broke into a smile and told them they'd passed.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post