21.9.09

Camp Awesome

I've been meaning to update this thing for a while, but Twitter has been fulfilling most of my "hey look at this" quota lately. I'm preparing a bunch of old photos to share though, hopefully I'll be able to get those done and post them Soon (tm).

I did want to share my love for the TV series Survival School (or as I liked to called it: Camp Awesome). Freely available on Hulu, it follows a platoon of US Air Force airmen through the environmental survival sections of SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) School for air jockies. Typically there is around a 40 percent graduation rate, though in this show it's around 80 percent (it's hard to tell if that is due to the effect of the cameras putting a damper on the harshness of the training or to the prowess of the students.)

It's a three-month course that takes the students through hell and back in some of the toughest areas of Washington, Alaska and Florida. Think Survivorman meets Full Metal Jacket and daily ruck marches. While at first I was a little skeptical of a bunch of flyboys fucking around in the woods, they end up facing off with some pretty serious hypothermia, bloody wounds and gnarly ass jungle bugs. Nearly all the students end up on the medic's stretcher at one point or another, and several are medevaced for life-threatening conditions.

These guys basically live in the wild off of what they can build out of an ejection seat and trees for months, and in the last episode they accidentally face a textbook example of those rain-induced hypothermic conditions that we're concerned about. Definitely worth checking out if you're into this sort of thing, if only to see a guy rip a cow's eye out of its skull with his teeth and eat it raw.