Special Forces vet, wife team up for ‘Man, Woman, Wild’ - Entertainment, TV, Television - Army Times

Special Forces vet, wife team up for ‘Man, Woman, Wild’

Mykel Hawke, a recently retired Army Special Forces captain, and Ruth, his TV journalist wife, head to the back country in Discovery Channel’s latest reality survival series, “Man, Woman, Wild.”

Dropped into some of the most remote spots on the planet with only a knife and the clothes on their backs, the couple put their survival skills — and their marriage — to the test.

Think: “King of Queens” meets “Man vs. Wild.” Or, better yet: Going to SERE school — with your spouse.

“That’s a good way of putting it, because in some ways it is like good going through SERE school with someone you know,” says Hawke, a veteran of Afghanistan and a litany of other combat zones. “You have someone to lean on when times get tough, but on the other hand you hate to have your weaknesses exposed to someone you care about, and you hate to see someone you care about suffer.”

And suffer they do. From the Bayou to Botswana, the couple must make it through four nights in the wild, finding food, water and shelter.

“All that stuff is easily two or three times what people normally do in a day, but you’re doing it with less food, less water and less sleep. So yeah, we get stressed out in every single episode. And every single episode we have a fight,” he says from his home in London, just after returning from filming the last episode of the first season on the Caribbean island of Dominica.

And what didn’t kill them, or their marriage, has made them stronger.

“You know what each other’s strengths and weaknesses are, and you see both of those in a greater depth, so you love what you love, and those things you don’t love as much — you accept that as part of the package. As a whole, we’re stronger from this whole thing,” he says.

New episodes air Fridays at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, and 8 p.m. Central and Mountain.