This Freaky Recording Of A Rudyard Kipling Poem Is Used To Train Elite Soldiers For Torture

Anyone who has ever attended the US Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school will never forget Rudyard Kipling's poem "Boots," according to SERE graduate and Navy veteran Ward Carroll.

SERE school is designed to train US troops on how to survive if they were to be captured and tortured. Carroll, who attended SERE in 1984, particularly remembers Kipling reciting his poem "Boots" over and over again in a very haunting voice while he was detained in a small cell.

The poem is about the endless marching the British infantry did while colonizing parts of Africa. Soldiers would march for weeks with no known destination and did nothing but "go mad" watching the boots in front of them. Since the war was still on, they couldn't take leave or as Kipling put it, "there's no discharge from the war".

Here are the beginning verses of Rudyard Kipling's "Boots" (and here is the full poem):

We're foot ... slog ... slog ... slog ... sloggin' over Africa
Foot ... foot ... foot ... foot ... sloggin' over Africa -
Boots ... boots ... boots ... boots ... movin' up and down again!
There's no discharge in the war!

Seven ... six ... eleven ... five ... nine-an'-twenty mile today
Four ... eleven ... seventeen ... thirty two the day before -
Boots ... boots ... boots ... boots ... movin' up and down again!
There's no discharge in the war!

Don't ... don't ... don't ... don't ... look at what's in front of you
Boots ... boots ... boots ... boots ... movin' up an' down again -
Men ... men ... men ... men ... men go mad with watchin' 'em
An' there's no discharge in the war!

Here is Kipling reciting his poem: