Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [110]
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous Requires Drones
Starting in 1963, preparing for Oxcart missions involved punishing survival-training operations for the pilots, many of which occurred in the barren outer reaches of Area 51. For Ken Collins, a mock nighttime escape from an aircraft downed over the desert was meant to simulate hell. Collins knew the kind of challenge he would be up against as he stood on the tarmac at Groom Lake watching the sun disappear behind the mountains to the west. Soon, it would be dark and very cold. Collins climbed into a C-47 aircraft and noticed that the windows were blacked out. Neither he nor any of the other Oxcart pilots he was with had any idea where they were headed. “We got inside and flew for a little while,” Collins recalls, “until we landed in another desert airfield, somewhere remote.” The men were unloaded from the aircraft and put into a van, also with the windows blacked out. They were driven for miles, Collins thought going in circles, until the doors of the van opened into what appeared to be thick, rough, high-desert terrain. “We were told that we were in Chinese enemy territory. To escape and survive the best that you can. There were electronic alarms, trip wires, and explosive charges on the ground.”
Collins ran and took cover under a bush. In the darkness, he lay on his belly and gathered his thoughts. He had been through a series of survival trials during Oxcart training already. Once, he and another pilot were taken to the Superstition Mountains in Arizona for a mountain-survival trial. “On that exercise we had minimal food, sleeping bags, and a very small tent. We walked and camped in the mountains for five days. The first three days were comfortable; the third night a weather front moved in with cold rain,” making things a little more challenging. A second exercise took place in Kings Canyon, in the Sierra Mountains. During that trip, Collins and another pilot had to live in snow for three days. They dug a snow cave and made beds of pine boughs. A third trip, to Florida, simulated jungle survival. “I was taken out to a swamp, given a knife, and told to survive on my own for four days.” What Collins remembers vividly was the food. “I caught some turtles to eat, but found them difficult to open, so my staple became the heart of palm. I’d cut the new palm buds out from the center. It was thin fare, but sustainable,” Collins says. But the high-desert survival training at Area 51 felt different. Unlike the other sessions, this one would involve psychological warfare by the mock enemy Chinese.
Collins crawled along the desert floor through the darkness, feeling for the trip wires and considering his next move. He pulled his small compass from his survival pack so he could chart a path. “I crawled slowly through the brambles, bugs, and mud for about thirty minutes when, suddenly, I hit a trip wire and alarms went off. A glaring spotlight came on and ten Chinese men in uniform grabbed me and dragged me to one of their jeeps.” Collins was handcuffed, driven for a while, put into a second vehicle, and taken to so-called Chinese interrogation headquarters. There, he was stripped naked and searched. “A doctor proceeded to examine every orifice the human body has, from top to bottom—literally,” which, Collins believes, “was more to humiliate and break down my moral defenses than anything else.” Naked, he was led down a dimly lit hallway and pushed into a concrete cell furnished with a short, thin bed made of wood planks. “I had no blanket, I was naked, and it was very cold. They gave me a bucket to be used only when I was told.”
For days, Collins went through simulated torture that included sleep deprivation, humiliation, extreme temperature fluctuation, and hunger, all the while naked, cold, and under surveillance by his captors. “The cell had one thick wooded door