http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58

Want to help Navy SEALs stay mentally fit enough to survive capture by the enemy? Good. Just let me put this cloth over your face while I fill my water bucket.

The military trains its troops to deal with the contingencies of getting stranded behind enemy lines. That involves passing a rigorous course called Survival Evasion Resistance Escape, or SERE – which, for elite commandos, simulates capture and torture. If SERE sounds familiar, that's probably because former Air Force psychologists involved in the program brought its harshest methods, like waterboarding, to the CIA shortly after 9/11 for use against captured terrorists. The rest is infamy.

But that was an aberration. SERE psychologists are actually supposed to stop torture if they observe it. And they're supposed to provide guidance during the extreme training "if students show signs of becoming mentally unstable," according to a recent solicitation for SERE shrinks from U.S. Special Operations Command. One of the ways they'll know is that they'll have had to experience all the pain of the SERE course themselves.

SOCOM clarified that before psychologists can ship out to San Diego to assist Navy SEALs pass the SERE course, they must "be a graduate of a SERE level C training curriculum." Level C is the highest level of SERE training, the ones that commandos with a "high risk of capture" endure.

The importance of the training is underscored in a 2010 Army aviation document. "Soldiers without fundamental SERE-C competencies are not able to mitigate certain risks inherent in military operations," the document reads, "and become factors in the isolating incident and increased risks to others during personnel recovery rescue operations."

The solicitation specifies that it won't specifically provide SERE Level C training for interested shrinks. That gives quite the advantage to commandos-turned-psychologists.

The military is cagey as to whether waterboarding – simulated drowning – remains a part of SERE instruction after the post-9/11 torture controversy. Nor does it discuss what other tactics SERE Level C involves. But a former Navy SERE instructor, Danger Room friend Malcolm Nance, once explained what psychologists working on SERE may still have to endure, as he went through it himself.

"It's a very rapid process where a person is put onto a table and, of course, water is introduced until it overcomes their ability to swallow or spit it away. And then of course it goes down into the esophagus and onto the trachea and starts filling the lungs," Nance told ABC's Brian Ross in 2007.

It's a far cry from a tweedy headshrinking practice. During "days 7, 8 and part of 9" during the 10-day SERE course, "the psychologist must be physically on site 24 hours during the SERE exercise in case of emergency." And it promises to push even psychologists' endurance to the absolute physical limit.

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