Service members who have gone through Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training, or SERE may get flashbacks from the trailer for the upcoming zombie horror film by Danny Boyle, “28 Years Later,” which features a 1915 reading of the Rudyard Kipling poem “Boots.”
In the past, troops who went through SERE were forced to repeatedly listen to a reading of the 1903 poem, which is written to mimic the cadence of British troops marching: “Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up and down again!”
SERE trains service members on how to avoid capture and what to do in the event they are taken prisoner. Much of the course focuses on how to resist interrogation and keep a level head during capture. There are some physical elements, but the school emphasizes psychological misery. Playing “Boots” ad nauseam is meant to test a service member’s fortitude.
“My initial reaction was that it was some weird silly little song that was played on repeat,” a Special Forces soldier told Task & Purpose. “Midway through the course while we were in the camp it quite literally became this soundtrack to our suffering. I would argue that most guys who have attended the course when hearing this song are able to recall those incidents with a sense of dread.”
“You just don’t want to hear it anymore”
In 1984 now-retired Navy Cmdr. Ward Carroll was an F-14 radar intercept officer when he went through Navy SERE training in Maine near the Canadian border. He and his fellow sailors were “captured” by forces of the fictional “People’s Republic of North America”
While Carroll was in an isolation cell, he said his captors piped in a variety of sounds including an unnerving reading of “Boots” that went from being quiet to loud.
“By the time you’ve heard it a dozen times, you’re like: ‘This is really starting to be an unpleasant earworm,’” Caroll told Task & Purpose. “It really starts to screw with your head.”
His captors would then make him listen to propaganda, followed by a wailing saxophone without any sort of meter, and then they would repeat the “Boots” poem, said Carroll, who estimated that the entire experience lasted about 12 hours.
Combined with the other aspects of SERE, being forced to listen to “Boots” over and over again made Caroll feel that he was actually in captivity, he said.
“You just don’t want to hear it anymore,” Carroll said. “You’re like: ‘I’m begging for some other thing.’ And so, they’re just trying to wear you down. It’s sort of a form of torture. It was effective in that you totally lost any sort of training scenario perspective. You really felt like you were a prisoner of war.”
A Navy spokesperson declined to say whether the service’s SERE school still uses “Boots” as part of the course.
“Due to the sensitive nature of SERE training, we do not discuss tactics, techniques, or procedures,” the spokesperson told Task & Purpose.
The history of “Boots”
Kipling was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, said Andrew Scragg, chairman of The Kipling Society. In early 1900, a force of 60,000 British troops carried out a series of physically and mentally punishing forced marches in South Africa.
“Kipling’s writings, generally, strongly identify with and celebrate the common soldier, demonstrating a possibly unique civilian understanding and sympathy for their situation both at peace and in war,” Scragg told Task & Purpose. “As a writer who drove himself to the point of breakdown, Kipling identified closely with men under strain, and it is this constant pressure on the soldier to march, fight and march again, in adverse weather conditions and with little rest, that Kipling identifies with and encapsulates in this poem.”
Kipling deeply sympathized with British foot soldiers, and “Boots” is meant to capture the mental strain of military duty, said John McBratney, professor emeritus of English at John Carroll University in Ohio.
“The poem does culminate in a declaration that: ‘I’ve been through hell; and it’s not the fire; it’s not the devil; it’s not the dark or anything — it’s the boots,’” McBratney said. “And the fact that those marching boots signify for him that this type of experience is going to go on for forever: There’s no discharge of the war.”
The rhythmic pattern of “Boots” and descriptions make it unnerving on its own. But the poem gained a new life and some of its legacy 12 years later in 1915 thanks to American stage and film actor Taylor Homes. Holmes is the voice behind the anguished, scared pleas of madness heard in the trailer for “28 Years Later.”
“Those of us who have never been engaged in actual warfare, have very little idea of some of its worst horrors,” the introduction to the recording says. “One of the most terrible being the agonized impression made on the minds of infantry soldiers during the long forced marches. Soldiers have been known to go absolutely insane with the everlasting sight of marching feet all around.”
In the trailer, Holmes’ rising cries of “Four—eleven—seventeen—thirty—two the day before” quickly establish a haunting tone. It turns out Kipling’s words work just as well for testing the willpower of troops as they do for scaring moviegoers.
As the title implies, “28 Years Later” takes place nearly three decades after the initial outbreak of the “rage virus,” which introduced the “fast zombie” to horror movie-goers in 2002’s “28 Days Later.” That first film was followed by “28 Weeks Later” in 2007, which answered the question: How well would the military fare against a zombie apocalypse? The answer, by the way, is not well.
“28 Years Later” hits theaters on June 20.
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