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Reality show displays grit, gore of SERE school

The survival docudrama genre has become a crowded field in recent years, with popular TV shows such as Discovery Channel’s “Survivorman” and “Man vs. Wild” imparting basic survival tips while entertaining and sometimes nauseating audiences with feats of endurance and extreme culinary daring.

Notably absent from the genre has been a military-themed survival show — curious since no one knows survival better than the military.

That gap finally is being filled by the new series “Survival School,” premiering at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time Sept. 9 on MOJO HD, a men’s channel that is part of the high definition package offered by most of the big cable providers.

The 10-part series, produced by Sirens Media, follows 47 students and their instructors at the U.S. Air Force Survival School at Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash., the military’s premier survival training program. The students undergo a brutal five-month course to become specialists in survival, evasion, resistance and escape, or SERE.

The cameras follow the airmen through all the stages of the program, from a 10-day initiation phase to scorching desert training to vomit-inducing water survival. At various times in the series, students get hypothermia, vomit until they have to go to the hospital, risk anaphylactic shock because of bee stings and become delirious with dehydration.

Much of the training appears to suck badly, and, in fact, that seems to be a broad theme of the series.

“When you’re in a survival-type situation, you’re going to have to do things that suck,” said Staff Sgt. Brice Portwood, a SERE instructor featured in the show.

The series is shot in crystal-clear high definition, and the camera is often hand-held, allowing viewers to see the suckiness — or the “suck factor,” as the students call it — up close and personal.

And unlike many docudramas, there is no host/star and no contrived situations meant to heighten the drama.

“The other ones are really manufactured drama, … whereas this is really fly-on-the-wall filmmaking,” said executive producer Valerie Haselton of Sirens Media. “We just followed it as it happened. … This has the reality aspect, … which I think makes it a little more interesting.”

The film crew for the series was small — just cameraman Jimmy Felter and sound technician Yana Benyumov — allowing the filmmakers to shadow the airmen without disrupting the natural flow of the training.

But that doesn’t mean the typically low-key and unassuming SERE guys were immediately thrilled about having a camera in their faces.

“It was a little odd at first,” said Staff Sgt. Robert Martin, a SERE instructor. “But they did their best to be basically noninvasive in training. When there was counseling going on [with a student], they stepped aside and filmed other aspects of training. And when they needed to get in there and get close shots, they did. It wasn’t too terribly bad from the instructors’ standpoint.”

Haselton said it took the students a while to warm up to the camera crew and begin to loosen up.

“At first everybody’s on their best behavior on camera and sort of awkward, and then after a couple days they just forget you’re there,” she said. “After a few days, I think all the men really let down their guard and let us see what it was really like instead of just putting on a polite façade.”

Within an episode or two, the students give viewers an unvarnished look at what a group of military men stuck in the woods for weeks on end can really be like. We see a few of the students unabashedly nude and dropping a blitzkrieg of F-bombs.

The producers are unflinching in their depiction of SERE, and parts of the series are sure to make some viewers uncomfortable.

The students slaughter rabbits, poultry and a calf for food, and while the producers edited out footage of the animals being killed, some scenes still will upset the squeamish.

Particularly memorable are scenes in which the students learn to suck the eyeballs out of the rabbit’s and calf’s heads and eat them as a source of sodium. They also gnaw on a raw calf testicle. Pretty gruesome stuff.

“Hilariously, our cameraman’s a vegetarian,” Haselton said. “So, poor guy had to watch a sweet little calf butchered and nice little bunnies killed and all this sort of stuff.”

Though Haselton admitted the filmmakers found it difficult to capture how difficult the training really is on the student’s bodies — the heat, the dehydration, the frigid water and the hunger — the series gives a representative glance at the strange world of SERE.

This is a world where young men — and a very few women — choose the life of a woodsman, spending long weeks in the wilderness with few modern amenities. And the ones who make the cut seem to love it.

“I never knew until I found SERE that there was a job where I could get paid to be a crazy redneck,” a grinning student, Airman 1st Class Ryan Hyslop, told the cameras.

Watch

An Air Force Times reporter and photographer attended part of SERE school last winter. See the video.