Page 111 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Mitchell and Jessen gave KSM the full treatment for three weeks. Finally, he stopped resisting.
But KSM’s hard-won compliance didn’t mean his case was now open-and-shut. In fact, the
difficulties were just beginning.

4.

A few years before 9/11, a psychiatrist named Charles Morgan was at a military neuroscience
conference. He was researching post-traumatic stress syndrome, trying to understand why some
veterans suffer from PTSD and why others, who go through exactly the same experiences, emerge
unscathed. Morgan was talking to his colleagues about how hard it was to study the question,
because what you really wanted to do was to identify a group of people before they had a traumatic
experience and track their reactions in real time. But how could you do that? There was no war
going on at the time, and it wasn’t as though he could arrange for all his research subjects to
simultaneously get robbed at gunpoint, or suffer some devastating loss. Morgan jokes that the best
idea he could come up with was to study couples on the eve of their wedding day.
But afterward, an Army colonel came to Morgan and said, “I think I can solve your problem.”
The colonel worked at a SERE school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He invited Morgan to come
and visit. It was the Army’s version of the Air Force school in Spokane where Jessen and Mitchell
worked. “It was kind of surreal,” Morgan says. The Army had built a replica of a prisoner-of-war
camp—the kind you might find in North Korea or some distant corner of the old Soviet Union. “I
had a tour of the whole compound when nothing was running, so it was this really foggy, gray
morning. It reminded me of some war movie you’ve seen, showing up in this concentration camp,
but no one’s there.”
Morgan went on:

Each cycle of training always ended with a former POW talking to the class and saying, “This
happened to me. You spent three hours in a little tiny cage. I lived in one for four years. Here’s
how they tried to play tricks on me.”

Morgan was fascinated, but skeptical. He was interested in traumatic stress. SERE school was a
realistic simulation of what it meant to be captured and interrogated by the enemy, but it was still
just a simulation. At the end of the day, all the participants were still in North Carolina, and they
could still go and get a beer and watch a movie with their friends when they were done: “They know
they’re in a course and they know they’re in training. How could this possibly be stressful?” he
asked. The SERE instructors just smiled at that. “Then they invited me to come and said I could
monitor it for about a six-month period. So every month, for two weeks, I’d go, and I was like a
little anthropologist taking notes.”
He started with the interrogation phase of the training, taking blood and saliva samples from the
soldiers after they had been questioned. Here is how Morgan describes the results, in the scientific
journal Biological Psychiatry:
The realistic stress of the training laboratory produced rapid and profound changes in cortisol,
testosterone, and thyroid hormones. These alterations were of a magnitude that…[is] comparable
to those documented in individuals undergoing physical stressors such as major surgery or actual
combat.
This was a pretend interrogation. The sessions lasted half an hour. A number of the subjects were
Green Berets and Special Forces—the cream of the crop. And they were reacting as if they were in
actual combat. Morgan watched in shock as one soldier after another broke down in tears. “I was
amazed at that,” Morgan said. “It was hard for me to figure out.”
Well, I [had] thought, these are all really tough people—that it’ll be kind of like a game. And I
hadn’t anticipated seeing people that distressed or crying. And it wasn’t because of a physical
pressure. It’s not because somebody’s manhandling you.
These were soldiers—organized, disciplined, motivated—and Morgan realized that it was the
uncertainty of their situation that was unsettling to them.
Many [of them had] always operated by, “I should know the rules of the book so I know what to