can't speak specifically for army, or navy/marine corps SERE, but in AF survival school, first thing is you get is emergency self-administered medical training. a lot of physical injuries can happen to an airman if his plane crashes, whether he gets to eject, whether it's a 'relativly' safe ejection, yada yada... setting bones, relocating your shoulder, what to do if you land in the trees and you impale yourself on a limb/stick, etc...
then, you learn about land navagation [one universal truth in the AF, never NEVER take directions on the ground from an airdale navigator - flying maps are "different" and nothing looks the same down here on the ground compared to from up there in the air!], how to find and/or make shelter in a range of environments from benign to utterly hostile behind enemy lines, and in various climates and geographic regions.
at the same time, you're learning how to eat off the land, including the infamous making you eat bugs. for flyers/aviators this was a HUGE thing in vietnam. we lost MORE american lives to *food aversion* than to all the maltreatment, beatings, torture, etc... endured by POWs!! that was also one of the primary reasons for creating these schools.
american's simply cannot "stomach," both figuratively and literally, much of the kinds of foods eaten around the rest of the world. if you can force yourself to eat something [and here peer pressure plays a big part in the training environment] unpalpable to you in an "academic envoronment" then you can pretty much know you will be able to do it if you are forced to choose between turning your nose up at, or outright 'gagging' at what they give you, versus starving [yourself] to death. [and that's what happened in vietnam, more guys starved because they could not/would not eat what the vietnamese gave them to eat!]
and that's pretty much the logic behind the whole effort. that and it being a 'safe' environment to TRY things, to see how much you can do, to see if you can determine what your limits are.
and most people walk away from this experience realizing that their bodies and minds can withstand *significantly MORE* than they -think- they can going in!
then there's also the "resistence training" part, where you emulate being captured and held prisoner and treated to conditions *about what* you might expect were you to be shot down and captured.
here, as with the rest too, it's all about being free to test yourself, and see what your limits are. although you are physically being put in difficult conditions, -mentally- it's a "non-threatening environment" where you can test yourself and see if you learned what you're supposed to know.
and, a real biggie, if you can think after they've deprived you of food, worn you down physically during the 'evasion' phase, and then subjucted you to humiliations and deprivations you wouldn't otherwise experience.
then there are what i called the 'fun parts' learning how to do parachute landing falls, figuring out how to undo a parachute harness when you're being dragged by your chute and the wind pulling you across the field, or through the underbrush, etc... getting extracted by those neat devices everyone saw the coast guard, navy, Marines, army and af helos using across the louisiana and mississippi gulf coast after hurrican katrina last month.
and a basic introduction to water survival - how to climb in and out of a survival raft, how to ditch your chute once you get in the water, etc...
and that's just the beginning. that's what we consider initial qualification, if you will. all throughout their careers, aircrew have to continually take classroom training in this stuff, and there are special exercises run giving aircrew continuing experience in these skills, as well as exposing them to changes, and upgrades in capabilities.
as an intel officer in a squadron, i taught this stuff to aircrews. intel can also participate in larger scale survival/SERE exercises, and occasionally ran a few of them.
then there's more advanced SERE/Survival courses - and these are separate from the original basic course. they are sepcific to particular climates and geographic regions. and a full blown water survival course, etc... and for the AF anyway, a much more "robust" resistence training program for folks who fly special mission aircraft.
from what i've heard from all my navy and Marine aviator and army SF friends, their SERE training experiences sounds similar if not quite identical to AF survival school.
one anecdotal comment. legand has it that, if told they'd have to come back to fairchild to go through at least one half of the course again either the "in the field" portion, or the "resistence training" portion - the guys all answered they'd do the field part, and the women all said they'd do RT!! ;-D
michelle g