Survival of the Fittest: A Look Back at How Survival Training Prepared Aviators for Tough Times Editor’s Note: The following article comes from the November 1958 issue of Approach. It takes a look at what aviator survival training was like in the 50s and the benefits and consequences of being placed in a stressful situation. While stress is often looked at negatively, there is a positive side to knowing how to survive under great stress and pressure.
he fine, cool rain, almost a mist that seemed to drift down between the gray windowed walls of San Francisco’s buildings, settled on the gaily colored neon signs and the dull black lamp posts, giving them all a glossy, varnished appearance. The quick-stepped noonday crown filtered past LT Smith as he leisurely made his way toward a federal building to pick up his transportation orders at 1:30 p.m. 24
He stopped occasionally here and there to look at the displays and articles that filled the shop windows. Suddenly the sounds of the cop’s shrill whistle, the buzzing street traffic and the staccato footsteps on the pavement were obliterated by the raucous music coming from a loudspeaker horn clamped to the striped awning of a music store. It was a song by the Chordette’s singing “Lollipop Lollipop Oh Lolli Lolli Lollipop.” As he stood there on the Market Street sidewalk and listened ot the repetitious beat and sound of the record, LT Smith realized that it still has been only weeks since he had been released from the tortures of just such sounds. There had been not one loud speaker but two — on opposite corners of the 12 inch barbed wire fence which enclosed the compound and separated his crew and him from freedom. All day long, at 90 decibels, their captors had played the Chordette’s singing “Lollipop Lollipop Oh Lolli Lolli Lollipop,” over and over again, stopping only for “their” national anthem and gibberish of orders and commands which they read from their military manuals Approach
