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BY WESLEY BOURKE PHOTOS BY ARMN NEVILLE COUGHLAN
n a Connemara valley in the middle of a win- ter's day, gale force winds drove heavy black clouds overhead and turned hail and rain into
skin-piercing needles as we waited for the arrival of the students of the Military Survival Instructors Course. Out there, somewhere, were the fatigued, ravenous students struggling through the last stage of their final exercise, a 96-hour marathon designed to test everything they had learned on the four-week course conducted by the Air Corps Military Training and Survival School (MTSS). A month earlier and things had begun a lot
more sedately back in MTSS. Survival courses are based on different levels of SERE (standing for 'survival, evasion, resistance to interrogation, and extraction') training. SERE training is becoming a prerequisite for deployment overseas and now forms part of recruit, NCO, and cadet training.
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