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File: 120596_aaczf_18.txt
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		18
 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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