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File: 120596_aaczf_18.txt18 of gives you an example of people who had been through the same thing...it made it a little less scary. And two, I think having a history degree helped because, like I said, I'd read a lot about it. Maybe in some respects that didn't help because I knew too much; but, overall it did help because I knew people, not just prisoners, but a lot of other people had been through a lot of things that were pretty awful and survived. Q: Based on your own experiences, are there any suggested changes you'd like to see in the survival program as far as the Academy is concerned? A: I don't know what changes they've made since I was there, so some of what I say is probably based on old informa- tion. When I went through, it was directed toward the Southeast Asia experience. So, they might consider going to a more Middle Eastern type of scenario. I don't know. They may be doing it that way now. They ought to talk about how to deal with getting videotaped (under duress), because anyone can go out and buy a VCR player now. You don't have to be rich, you can just be a terrorist and take movies of anything...and you need to know how to handle that. But other than those things I thought the training was pretty good. Q: I have no more questions, does anyone else have any questions? (Dave) What kind of information were you asked to provide during the interrogations and how were you able to answer? A: Initially, they asked a lot of questions about what our target was and how we were shot down. We basically told them it was a SCUD missile site and we didn't know where. We were just told these are the coordinates. And when they asked about how we were shot down, we said we had an engine fire and had to eject. After that, they kind of went into wanting to know a little bit more about the airplane. I was able to evade a lot of those questions. Saying you don't know will only work so long because, after awhile, they don't like that answer anymore. (laughter) But you can use it a little bit. Then later on, they started asking a lot of questions about laser guided bombs; obviously they were quite interested. I could truthfully say, I'd never dropped a laser guided bomb in my life and as far as I knew our airplane wasn't capable of dropping them. This was true at the beginning of the war, and that's all I cared about. I also found that it was nice not to know things, for instance, the Stealth. I knew nothing about it, and truthfully I could say, when they asked me, that it was highly classified and if they had released any information, I didn't know.
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