Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

The Army is a tremendous place for an oddball like me, if you can stay alive and keep from being relieved of your commission while you're trying to get along. In the Army there's a place for every kind of intellect. There's an unlimited field for exercising ingenuity and imagination. Yet the Army, being an institution on which the welfare of the nation rests, is not going to jump lightly from one side to another because some guy comes along with a new idea. It really has to be pushed to accept the new — and sometimes by two or three generations of people.

★ LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM P. YARBOROUGH (RET.)

That defining moment took place on October 12, 1961, at the Rod and Gun Club near McKellar's Pond at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Present that day were the new Special Forces commander, the recently promoted Brigadier General Bill Yarborough; President John F. Kennedy's military aide, Major General Chester V. (Ted) Clifton; President Kennedy himself; and assorted other dignitaries.

Kennedy had ostensibly come down to Bragg for two purposes. One was to observe an Army division, the 82nd Airborne, drawn up on Simmons Airfield with guidons flying and all of its supporting weapons and equipment — Clifton had felt the young President would benefit from watching an entire Army division spread out before him. The other reason, however, was the real purpose of the trip, as Clifton, the President, and Bill Yarborough were well aware: It was to let Kennedy experience what Special Forces could do.

Kennedy was already favorably inclined toward special operations. In his eyes, they were glamorous, and Kennedy was always favorably inclined toward glamour. But far more important to him, Special Forces had the potcntial to do things that he very badly wanted done.

Back then, Kennedy had a vision that few of the nation's leaders shared. He saw the likelihood that the United States would soon find itself entangled in a new kind of conflict that would pose a new kind of threat. In his words, we faced "another type of war" than we were used to, one that challenged our normal ways of waging war, "new in its intensity, ancient in its origins — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of by aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It requires, in those situations where we must encounter it, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force."

A vivid, exciting, and properly staged Special Forces show, Clifton and Yarborough agreed, would surely demonstrate for their commander-in-chief that the Army already possessed the kind of soldier and force needed to prevail in this new arena. It was far from fully formed and developed, no one would deny that, but Yarborough thought he could demonstrate that he had the core needed to build it.

As an added boon that day, for the first time at an official function, the Special Forces troops wore their far-from-official but much-cherished headgear — the green beret. At that time, wearing green berets as an item of uniform was strictly forbidden. The Army of the 1960s did not allow a distinetive uniform for "elite" troops like Special Forces or paratroopers. The name of the game was uniformity and homogenization. Even so, all Special Forces troops kept a green beret somewhere, and wore it on field mancuvers in remote areas, or when no one who could do anything about it was looking.

Bill Yarborough and Ted Clifton had been classmates and close friends at West Point, and remained lifetime friends. Before Kennedy's trip to Fort Bragg, Clifton and Yarborough had debated the wearing of the beret for the President. On the downside, they were putting their military careers at risk. On the upside, they felt that the Special Forces needed to be recognized as extraordinary by their military colleagues and the public. To Yarborough, a man profoundly sensitive to symbols, the beret was not simply a distinctive piece of clothing, but an emblem.

"I think the President would like to see your guys in their green berets," said Clifton.

"So do I," Yarborough replied. "But, of course, they're not authorized."

"Well," Clifton said, "you tell them to come out wearing it."

"What happens after that?"

"Whatever it is, we'll fix it."

And so on the twelfth of October, green berets of a grand variety of shades and textures, some of them veterans of dozens of field exercises, emerged from every kind of hiding place. The men wearing them that day stood proud in a way they had never been allowed to before. And the smiling young president was delighted.

Later, even as the Uniform Board of the Army tried to grapple with this outrage, a telegram from the White House came to Brigadier General Yarborough, indicating that the President had given his approval to the beret as a symbol of excellence. From that moment on, the green beret was officially sanctioned.

Since then, berets of many varieties have become official headgear for U.S. Army units — first for recognized elites such as Rangers (black berets) and paratroopers (red-maroon). More recently — amid considerable controversy — the entire Army has been given the privilege of wearing black berets (the Rangers will now wear tan).

Be that as it may, the wearing of the berets was not the main event back on that warm autumn day forty years ago. The main event was the "Gabriel Demonstration," named after a Special Forces soldier named Gabriel — though the name's associations with the announcing angel Gabriel were not forgotten. The idea was to display the variety, flexibility, and resourcefulness of the A-Detachments as played off against some of the more significant challenges they might be expected to face. Normally, they would have taken the President around to various locations where the teams were in action, but that would not work here, partly because of the nature of special forces, which operate in widely separated areas and in clandestine and covert situations, making observation difficult — but mostly, Ted Clifton informed Yarborough beforehand, because Kennedy's bad back didn't allow him much movement.

Instead of bringing the President to the show, they would have to bring the show to the President.

To that end, Clifton and Yarborough worked out a system in which Special Forces skill groups would pass a reviewing stand on floats (or using floats as props) mounted on flatbed trucks. Each one would stop in front of the President, and that element's activity would be revealed. There was little emphasis on equipment, gear, and weapons. The emphasis was on people.

One float, for example, showed an enemy guerrilla base like those in Laos, South Vietnam, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Such bases were hard to find, fix, or destroy, since they moved in fluid fashion and were concealed in swamps, jungles, or mountain hideaways. Finding and destroying such bases, the President was told, required highly trained, specially equipped, light mobile combat units. Special Forces A-Detachments could perform in these roles, but more appropriately, they could train others to do so.

Another float showed how the language and cultural training possessed by A-Detachment troops allowed them to train and assist native forces. Another showed how Special Forces civic actions (such as medical help) supplemented their combat functions, benefited ordinary folks who might otherwise help the bad guys, and helped drain away the seas where enemy guerrillas swam.

Others showed Special Forces psychological and communications skills — by broadcast, loudspeakers in villages, or leaflets. Thousands of leaflets fell out of the sky that day to reinforce the point. Others showed more traditional special operations — such as training friendly guerrillas to operate against enemy convoys and supply dumps deep within enemy territory.

The show worked.

Shortly thereafter, presidential approval came for a much larger Special Forces — more groups, more men, and much more money.

This growth came at a price. The "big" Army was not comfortable with Special Forces, and the presidential blessing did not increase their comfort. Before Bill Yarborough had taken over as commander, Special Forces had been minor and marginalized, though perhaps useful in a protracted conflict. Members of Special Forces could not expect long army careers or fast promotions. It was a dead-end unit.

Much of the army leadership in the Pentagon would have been happy if Special Forces stayed that way.

Before Kennedy's visit, Bill Yarborough got this message loud and clear from more than one friendly and well-meaning superior. For example, the commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, a three-star general, told him: "You just got your star, Bill, but I'm going to tell you straight. You're trying to pull off something that nobody much likes and that nobody's going to accept unless the President is dead sold on it. I mean, he has to be dead sold on it, because those guys there at the Pentagon are going to go after your ass if he's not."

On the other hand, it would be wrong to paint the "big" Army as totally obstructionist.

When Bill Yarborough took over the Special Warfare Center[3] in 1961, one of his first directives to his staff was to work out the philosophy that would shape the center according to President Kennedy's aims — a difficult job made more difficult by the "big" Army's failure to understand the problems Kennedy was trying to address. However, important elements in the Army did in fact try very hard to carry out the President's desires in the counterinsurgency arena.

For instance, a Special Warfare Directorate was created within the office of the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations. In January 1961, this directorate initiated the first courses of instruction in counterinsurgency at the Special Warfare School.

Then, early in 1962, a board of thirteen general officers chaired by General Hamilton Howze gathered at the Special Warfare Center. The Howze Board recommended that all Army officers from colonel through four-star general, as well as all the Army divisions in the United States, should be educated and trained in counterinsurgency. The Board also recommended doubling Special Forces from the then-2,300 to 4,600. By mid- 1968, this level had been raised to eight Special Forces groups totalling more than 9,000 men.

Meanwhile, the show Yarborough and Clifton put on for the President that October day was really the culmination of three entwined, but not (at that time) totally recognized or understood, forces.

First — and he did not know this — Bill Yarborough had been handpicked by Kennedy for the command of Special Forces, with help and advice from Ted Clifton. The President had told the Army Chief of Staff that he wanted Yarborough, so Yarborough he got. This token of executive preference was inevitably resented by "those guys there at the Pentagon," who liked to be in charge of picking who went where. They didn't like it when the President took that power away from them, and this meant that Yarborough started with strikes against him.

Second, Bill Yarborough knew that Special Forces was the only U.S. military concept oriented toward the "new form of warfare" that so worried the President, but he also knew that this would be a very tough sell to the Army without Kennedy's help. The Army had continued to fight World War II — a firepower and massed-forces war — for decades after that war was won. It meant that Yarborough would have to sail close to the wind in order to promote and sell Special Forces. He would have to convince the president and the American public. As Ted Clifton had known well when he passed Yarborough's name to Kennedy, Yarborough was a master promoter—"Showbiz" to his friends. He was the man for the job.

Third — and this is the primary reason why that October day was Special Forces' defining moment — now that he had been empowered by his commander-in-chief, Bill Yarborough began to transform Special Forces, making it over in his own image. Yarborough was a creature of many dimensions. And that was what Special Forces became.

In leaving that legacy, he proved through his genius, his vision, and his actions that the Clifton-Kennedy laying-on-of-hands that had brought him to Fort Bragg was the correct choice. Before Yarborough, U.S. Special Forces had been a career backwater. The Special Forces that exist today, with the help of hundreds of other great men, are largely his creation.

In the beginning, Yarborough had been far from pleased to take on the Special Forces job. When he was told to report to Fort Bragg, he was a high-level counterintelligence operative in Europe — commander of the 66th Counterintelligence Corps Group, headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, where he was charged with providing security for all of the U.S. Army in Europe. His counterintelligence teams worked through field stations throughout Germany, as well as in Italy, Switzerland, and Paris, and they also worked closely with German, British, and French security agencies. It was a job that he adored and hated to leave. He loved its international character, its record of successes — they identified, captured, or "neutralized" an amazing number of enemy agents — and its dynamic of intrigue and labyrinthine complexity. It was a terrific job for a highly intelligent man.

Trading all that in for command of what seemed to be a static operation didn't look like fun, nor did it seem to offer much scope or excitement for a man like Yarborough.

"I couldn't have been more wrong," he says now.

Where he was wrong, in fact, was not in his early characterization of his new command, but in not yet seeing what John Kennedy already knew, that a new kind of force was needed to fight a new kind of war. Aaron Bank's Special Forces had preserved in amber his vision of the OSS and Jedburgh World War II glory days. What was needed now was to transform the soldiers that Bank and Volckmann had trained to rampage behind the lines into fighting men who were far more highly skilled, imaginative, flexible, culturally sensitive, and resourceful.Yarborough produced men capable of handling missions that were far more complex than those he had encountered as an intelligence officer in Europe — and did so with style, finesse, and precisely focused force (when necessary).

It wasn't what Special Forces had been that was important; it was what they would become — that was the creation of Bill Yarborough.

SHOWBIZ

An army career is not exactly the expected choice of profession for a self-described oddball with an affinity for new ideas. Even stranger, Bill Yarborough was an army brat; his father, a decorated veteran of World War I combat in Siberia and a Russian linguist, retired as a colonel. He had no illusions about army life. Worse, he was a sensitive and highly intelligent young man with artistic tendencies. He loved to draw and paint. Such people tend to have trouble with the Army's sometimes numbing regulations, thickheaded bureaucracy, and paucity of vision.

On the other hand, young Bill Yarborough recognized that, despite the occasional institutional silliness, his father's calling was a noble one, that the life could be both fulfilling and fun, and that, most important, he himself was a warrior.

Yarborough joined the Army as an enlisted man in 1931, an experience that gave him invaluable insight into the folks on the ground. He later put that to good use when he commanded Special Forces.

He won an appointment to West Point a year later. At the Academy, he and his classmate Ted Clifton came to run a school publication, the West Point Pointer. Clifton was editor and Yarborough managing editor; he wrote feature articles and drew cartoons — a practice that has stayed with him all his life.

Yarborough graduated in 1936, received his commission as a second lieutenant from the hands of General John J. Pershing, and was assigned to the 57th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, stationed at Fort McKinley on Luzon. In the period before he left for the Philippines, he wooed and married another army brat — though that was not all that Norma and Bill Yarborough had in common: They both shared a lifetime love of the Far East and of the art of Asia (their home in North Carolina is filled with it).

After a three-year tour in the Philippines, Yarborough characteristically found his way to the cutting edge of the new Army, which in the early 1940s meant jumping out of airplanes with a parachute (a not-very-well-developed device). He was among the first to volunteer for and test this new and very dangerous form of warfare.

Paratroopers gave armies greatly increased mobility, but at a cost. The air transports that flew them were vulnerable, and paratroopers couldn't carry much in the way of support or firepower with them. In their early days, in other words, airborne units operated more like Special Forces teams than regular infantry.

Meanwhile, as he learned the jump trade, his Airborne superiors offered him a chance to exercise his love of symbols.

It's easy for outsiders to miss the point of the Army's wealth of institutional symbols. Qualification badges, ribbons, decorations, unit patches — even special hats or boots or songs — have a big place in a soldier's sense of identity and pride. They're certainly not essential, but they are more than gaudy decoration. Strong men will choke up now and again when they are put in the presence of some particularly meaningful piece of colored cloth.

This is not to say that there is no place for flamboyance and swagger in a soldier's outfit. You want dignity but you don't want a soldier to look timid. A modicum of flair doesn't hurt here. Yarborough has always been conscious of these truths. "A distinctive uniform," he writes, "enhances an individual's pride, makes him a man apart, makes him special."

Not surprisingly, his paratroop superiors were aware of his knack for drawing and design, and so he was asked to create the first airborne qualification badge, and then to have a silversmith produce enough of them to award the first group of qualifying paratroopers. Airborne forces still wear the wings Bill Yarborough designed.

His talents were not limited to airborne wings. He had a further knack for designing specialized clothing: the first airborne jump boots, for instance — jump boots have had the same kind of meaning for paratroopers that green berets have for Special Forces — and he would later create other pieces of military clothing, some of which found their way into the catalogs of outdoor-clothing specialists such as L.L. Bean.

Early on in his command of the Green Berets, he argued for the use of the Bowie knife, both as a weapon useful in hand-to-hand combat and as a symbol of accomplishment. At one time sabers had satisfied that kind of need, but the Army had taken away sabers. They were no more practical in the twentieth century than horse-mounted cavalry. To Yarborough, the Bowie knife seemed like a splendid replacement, rich in frontier tradition and heroic resonance.

Yarborough's dream was to present a Bowie knife to each new member of his Special Forces, together with the green beret. The knife would have an inscription on each side: on one the soldier's name, and on the other the Special Forces motto, de oppresso liber ("to free the oppressed").

The Army never approved the idea — but Bill Yarborough kept coming up with others.

Like the movies, for instance.

Back in 1941, Bill Yarborough had become a leader of the new breed of airborne warrior, and he had learned an important lesson about selling a cutting-edge-but-maybe-somewhat-suspect military unit to both the Army and the American public.

Hollywood helps.

In 1941, RKO made a movie called Parachute Battalion about three young men, played by Robert Preston, Edmund O'Brien, and Harry Carey, who go through parachute training. Since it would not do to have big stars risk their lives jumping out of airplanes, Bill Yarborough and his paratroop companions stood in as stunt doubles. It was not a memorable movie, but it did glamorize airborne forces, and made both the "big" Army and the public take more notice of them.

Later, Yarborough grabbed a similar opportunity when the writer Robin Moore presented himself at his doorstep with an idea for a novel about Special Forces. Yarborough liked the idea so much that he became a kind of muse in the writing of The Green Berets, which later became the hit John Wayne movie.

The Green Berets turned out to be the Special Forces "Gabriel Demonstration" for the American public.

But Yarborough didn't stop there.

As far back as his service as an enlisted man, he'd loved military bands. He loved the way the old marches and military hymns stirred the heart. Later, as Special Forces commander, he felt strongly that the Green Berets deserved a heart-stirring military hymn of their own. First, he got the bandmaster at West Point to write a Green Beret march. Then one day, totally out of the blue, a young SF sergeant named Barry Sadler came into Yarborough's office and started playing a song he'd written called "The Ballad of the Green Beret."

Fighting soldiers from the sky, Fearless men who jump and die….

One thing led to another, and before long, Sergeant Sadler, still on active duty, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show to sing his ballad. The public was knocked out; the song was a hit; it was translated into many languages; affection and respect for U.S. Special Forces mushroomed — and Bill Yarborough not only had a hymn, he had another huge public relations success for his Green Berets.[4]

Now he had his Special Forces novel, his Special Forces movie, and his Special Forces hymn. He needed only one more further component: a Special Forces prayer — some nondenominational words that would express and define the way Special Forces soldiers might relate to their God (there being no atheists in foxholes). It had to be something that would relate to all of his men, whatever the race or creed. And this is what he wrote:

Almighty God, who art the author of liberty and the champion of the oppressed, hear our prayer.We, the men of Special Forces, acknowledge our dependence upon thee in the preservation of human freedom.Go with us as we seek to defend the defenseless and to free the enslaved.May we ever remember that our nation, whose motto is "In God We Trust," expects that we shall acquit ourselves with honor, that we may never bring shame upon our faith, our families, or our fellow men.Grant us wisdom from thy mind, courage from thine heart, strength from thine arm, and protection by thine hand.It is for thee that we do battle, and to thee belongs the victor's crown.For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

Meanwhile, back in World War II, Yarborough continued to jump out of airplanes, but now in combat — in the invasion of North Africa in November of 1942 (the first use of American parachute troops in combat) and in later operations in Tunisia. The parachute battalion he commanded for the invasion of Sicily lost twenty-three airplanes to "friendly" antiaircraft fire. His paratroop battalion later fought at Anzio, and one of his troops, Sergeant Paul B. Huff, was the first parachute soldier to win the Medal of Honor. Later, his battalion dropped into southern France and fought along the French Riviera to the Maritime Alps. As the war was ending, he received a battlefield promotion to full colonel and was given command of an infantry regimental combat team that fought along the rugged Italian coast to Genoa. During the process, he won a Silver Star.

Previously, however, he had come close to shooting his military career in the foot.

Always outspoken, Yarborough had openly questioned his division commander's handling of the massive airborne assault into Sicily that had resulted in many transports getting shot down, with great loss of life. His commander, then — Major General Matthew Ridgeway, was not pleased with his subordinate's outburst and relieved him of his command. Fortunately, Ridgeway's superior, then-Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the 5th Army commander, liked Yarborough and saw promise in the rash young man. Clark gave him a temporary staff job, and later another fighting command.

In time, Yarborough and Ridgeway became good friends, and in fact, Yarborough came to realize that Ridgeway had done what was necessary when he'd ordered the assault. It was like with Eisenhower and D Day. The attack had to be so overwhelming that it would prevail despite the staggering losses. It is every commander's nightmare — but it was a powerful lesson for young Yarborough.

After the war, he was sent to Vienna as the provost marshal of U.S. forces in Austria and provost marshal in Vienna. The job resembled a police chief's, but also involved cooperation with the equivalent officers of the three other occupying powers: England, France, and the USSR. It proved to be Yarborough's first introduction to what was later called "civil affairs."

Since the official mission of the four occupying powers was to restore civil order and the rule of law, Yarborough grew interested in how the occupying troops might be disrupting that process — by, for example, criminal activities. To that end, he initiated a statistical study showing the nationalities responsible for the greatest number of crimes and the nature of those crimes. He then published regularly a booklet showing the curves of murder, rape, theft, arson, black market, and so on.

The results were fascinating. The Russians committed by far the most crimes, followed by the French, the Americans, and then the British.

There were a lot of factors. For one, the nationalities that had suffered most under the Germans and Austrians were hardly eager to protect German or Austrian legal rights. But it was equally true that the kinds of soldiers in occupation had a lot to do with how well they conducted themselves. The American troops that had been in combat were fairly well-behaved and responsive to discipline, but when their replacements began to arrive to take over the occupation, discipline began to collapse and crime rates began to rise.

The Russians, it seems, screened their soldiers not at all. In fact, as Yarborough learned from his Russian counterpart, who became a good friend, it was doubtful if many of the Russian commanders even knew where their people were. Their comings and goings made a mockery of regulations.

Yarborough tried to fix the American part of this situation several times. In his view, Vienna was not just an occupied capital; it was a major, politically charged test case, the success or failure of which could determine the future political direction taken by a great part of Europe. It seemed to him the United States should send representatives who would present the country in a good light, people who would create positive psychological leverage.

However, when he went to his superiors with this suggestion, he was told in no uncertain terms to forget it. He'd have to take his share of people with everybody else — the Army way — and leave the rest to leadership. This was, as he put it, "the old answer."

A new answer was needed: Only picked men should be allowed in that kind of arena. In years to come, he took this insight to other politically charged environments such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.

In Vienna (and later in Southeast Asia), civilians had high expectations for the Americans who had appeared among them. They had status and stature. They represented a vast, powerful country; they were there to help. If these expectations were going to be realized, then the old Army way wasn't going to work.

"Ordinary" soldiers were not up to the job at hand. "Special" soldiers were needed.

Bill Yarborough lost that battle. But the point lodged in his mind.

His next years followed the normal, and not very exciting, path expected of midlevel Army officers. He graduated from the British Staff College in Camberley, England, in 1951, then spent the next two years as a staff officer in London representing the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff on the project to construct the framework for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There he met and befriended a man who would come to have a large influence on Special Forces, Roger Hilsman. Another West Point graduate, and a World War II guerrilla fighter with Merrill's Marauders in Burma, Hilsman later became the State Department's head of intelligence, then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs during the Kennedy years, and one of Kennedy's chief foreign policy advisers. More than anyone else, Hilsman was the Kennedy adviser responsible for his interest in irregular warfare.

After leaving England, Yarborough attended the Army War College and remained there on the faculty for two years after graduation. During that time, he made a study of the various forms future wars might take, including guerrilla war. In connection with that study, he visited the Special Forces at Fort Bragg, then under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Edson D. Raff, another pioneer paratrooper and veteran of the 1942 North African invasion. At Special Forces Headquarters, Yarborough got a VIP briefing on their mission and capabilities, but despite Raff's enthusiasm, he was not much impressed with what he saw: During a big war, he concluded, Special Forces might have some influence on guerrillas and orient them to our cause, but it would be a mere sideshow.

In 1956, he was sent to Cambodia, as Deputy Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, where he spent a great deal of time in the field with Cambodian troops — another enlightening experience (he loved Cambodia). He was impressed, first of all, with the physical difficulties of waging conventional war in that environment, and then with the Cambodian soldiers' ability to exist and thrive in that environment nevertheless.He tells about it:

In 1956, General Ciccolella and I, serving on the MAG there, made several trips to the eastern provinces. At one time we went all the way from Phnom Penh over to Ban Me Thuot, and through a road the French had carved out, now overgrown. The rusting machinery was still there, and along the border areas the forces on both sides [Communist and anti-Communist] had met and recoiled, I guess, because there was no evidence of military activity along the border between Cambodia and Vietnam; hut when one got inside the boundaries of Vietnam, fortifications looked over most logical approaches.The going in those two provinces was very difficult, especially in the rainy season. On one of our trips, we got caught in torrential rains.We had with us a small contingent of Cambodians, a three-quarter-ton truck, two jeeps, and a trailer. Darkness fell, quickly, as it does in the tropics; and the road we were on began to disappear under water. On each side of us was nothing but flat land, and 1 began to feel desperate. Not only was it possible for us to down, but we could also flounder around in this flooded and featureless landscape and get completely lost, which was not acceptable either.So what to do?Well, just before the last vestiges of light were gone, we found a little mound — a small hill — and we pulled our equipment up onto it as the rains continued to pelt down on us. Then we deployed our sleeping bags under what cover we could find and tried to get a little rest. Next morning we'd see what else we could do.About three in the morning, we heard sounds from the direction we'd just come from. Soon we could make out blinking through the rain — a flashlight here and there — and the sounds a mule train might make, coming up the road.About half an hour later a young Cambodian lieutenant came up, wet to the skin; he saluted and then asked: "Est-ce que je peux vous aider?" — Can I help you out?And we said: "Well, who are you? Where are you going? How did you get here?""We're going to the border post along the frontier," he said, "and we're just moving through the mud.""How are you doing it?" He showed us: What they were doing was using a winch on the front of a three-quarter-ton truck. They'd attach a line onto a tree and winch forward about twenty-five or thirty feet. And then they'd repeat the process. They'd moved all the way along the road this way."Are you going to stop here for the night?" we asked. "Or wait until the rain stops?""Oh no, there's a much better place on up ahead. We'll go on up there." And then he said, "Can we pull you along?""No, we'll wait for dawn, " I said.So when dawn came, we moved out. The waters had receded a little bit, and you could see where you were going.About ten miles ahead, we came to the encampment where the Cambodian lieutenant had by now laid out his command post gear. By that time, the Cambodian officers had taken off their uniforms and changed into their "sampots" — a wrap-around garment — and the soldier orderlies were serving them. They were completely at home in that environment… really good jungle and frontier soldiers.Some time later, we finally got to the frontier post that was our destination. It was like a fort in our Old West. It had sharpened stakes around it to keep out the primitive hill tribes they called the "Mnongs" and the Vietnamese called the "Montagnards." In the morning, the bugle would sound, the flag would go up, and the Khmer soldiers would go out on the town (which was nearby), trading with zircons, just like our frontier soldiers trading with the Indians. At night they came back inside the fort.well, my feeling was that Cambodians would make superb irregular warfare soldiers, the guerrilla warfare type.

The seed of another Special Forces mission was planted.

In 1957, Yarborough took command of the 7th Infantry Regiment and moved it to Germany from Fort Benning, Georgia. From there he was sent to Counterintelligence in Europe… and then to Fort Bragg, to command Special Forces.

NEW FORM OF WAR

John Kennedy's thoughts on unconventional warfare were a response to very real worries back in the 1950s and 60s — the seemingly relentless and insidious spread of the "Communist Empire" and the sudden collapse of colonialism.

Colonialism — the rule by Western powers over Third World peoples for the sake of their economic exploitation — had lasted several centuries. Its death (except in the Soviet version) took approximately two decades, the years following the end of the Second World War.

Sadly, the departure of the old colonial masters brought few blessings to the newly independent Third World nations; the old masters left behind very few capable indigenous leaders and very little for them to work with. The "white man's burden" was a never-delivered promise. In most newly decolonized Third World nations, the infrastructures necessary to maintain a society as a going concern were lacking — transportation, education, health care, banks and investment, and most of all, enforceable laws and an effective justice system to protect them. More often than not, the emerging Third World leaders were primarily interested in personal aggrandizement and wealth rather than in the long, hard toil needed to build a viable nation.

The citizens of those nations, meanwhile, wanted what everybody else wants — better lives for themselves and their children. "We've thrown the old masters out," they argued, sensibly (and often after long, hard struggles, pain, and sacrifice). "Now we deserve to see the fruits of our victory."

When the fruits didn't immediately appear — and in fact seemed to recede ever further into a future ever more squalid and rotten with corruption — its not hard to imagine their dismay, nor to see how quickly their mood turned nasty.

Naturally, this potentially explosive situation became a major arena in the battle between the Communist powers and the West. At stake were power and influence over a great part of the world's population, as well as control over a vast wealth of natural resources.

The more ideologically driven Communists started out with a number of advantages in this contest: They had no link with the old, discredited colonial powers, and they promised heaven on earth… and soon. The Chinese, in particular, had also developed effective techniques for transforming the dismay, discontent, and rage against the failed or failing Third World governments into mechanisms that seriously threatened those systems.

The Western powers (the United States in particular, as their leader) started fighting with serious disadvantages. Communism represented the bright and shiny future. The democracies, and capitalism, represented the discredited past. Nor were the democracies especially skillful in the PSYOPs part of the struggle. Democratic capitalism and the rule of law, adapted to the cultural requirements and traditions of each society, remains the best hope for most of the world's people. The West did not do a very good job selling that truth.

Meanwhile, Mao Tse-tung's victory in China showed the way for others: Dismay and discontent can be transformed into dissent and dissidence. Dissidence can be transformed into subversion and terrorism. Subversion and terrorism can be transformed into active insurrection. Insurrection can be transformed into guerrilla war. And in time, guerrilla war can be transformed into conventional military action — but only when the guerrillas feel totally confident that the outcome favors them.

Each stage in the process supports actions aimed at exploiting the ruling system's weaknesses. The aim is not direct confrontation, but to cause a rotting from within. Agents corrupt or "turn" politicians. Other agents take over labor unions, student groups, farmers' collectives; they infiltrate the media, the military, and the police — all as vehicles for propaganda and subversion.

The revolutionaries do not expect to destroy the system in a single blow or series of blows. Any weakness will do — economic, political, psychological, physical. In fact, the greatest vulnerability of any system is often psychological — will. As a result, eroding the will of the enemy to continue the struggle is always a chief aim of the underground opposition. This can take a very long time — years, even decades. The subversive leadership, as Mao has taught, must always remain patient.

It follows that each stage is supported by the ones before it, and each stage remains active even as new ones arise. At the same time, the various elements and stages of the subversive underground are protected from detection by means of a complex cell structure. Chop off a finger, but the body remains, and a new finger grows.

It follows as well that all of these elements depend on near-flawless intelligence, and on the whole they get it. Their eyes are everywhere; they know whatever the people know.

It follows, finally, that the more active stages depend almost totally on the support of the people — for supplies, intelligence, money, and recruits. Very often this support comes at great risk and considerable cost. The governing bodies — like the Germans in occupied France — look for payback opportunities, or else simply for ways to send a strong message. The more threatened they become, the more likely they are to flail about violently — to the psychological advantage of the revolution.

Of course, standing up under such assaults requires strong, highly motivated people.

From this comes Mao's famous sea and fish image. The people are the sea; the revolutionaries arc the fish. The sea supports the fish. It also hides them from predators. The revolutionaries only want to show themselves when they are not themselves vulnerable. Then they fade back into the sea, or the mountains or the jungle.

Of course, the revolutionaries almost always received support from one or another Communist power. It was a war by proxy.

Meanwhile, all too often, Third World leaders sold their services to the highest bidder, or to whichever bidder was handy at the moment.

This was President Kennedy's new kind of war. It went under many names — revolution, peoples' war, subterranean war, multidimensional war, slow-burn war, war in the shadows. All of these names were useful, and described a significant aspect of the struggle.

The focus on concealment and complexity, however, points to a hard but basic truth: The old way of fighting wars simply did not work. You couldn't just send in the cavalry, or an armored corps. You could bomb a people back into the Stone Age, and their children would come out of their holes, throw stones, and vanish back into the holes.

Where's the enemy? Who are we actually fighting? When we take a piece of territory, do we hold anything worth holding?

The President had it right: A new kind of fighting force was required. This force had to know guerrillas inside and out — how they lived, how they fought, how they swam in the sea of the people. The Bank-Volckmann-McClure Special Forces had no problems there, but skill at behind-the-lines sabotage and running around with guerrillas was far from enough. For the early Special Forces, guerrillas and partisans were expected to be our friends. A reorientation was needed when guerrillas became our enemies. It wasn't a gigantic reorientation, but attitudes had to change and new skills had to be learned.

For one thing, you couldn't begin to uproot guerrillas without at the same time understanding and attacking the shadowy mechanisms that spawned and sustained them — the vast network of subversion, terror, support, and intelligence. But doing so without utterly wiping out the very freedoms that the United States was trying to preserve and promote was a daunting task.

Nor was it easy to go into somebody else's home and set their house in order. Sovereign states consider internal subversion a very touchy matter. They are not eager to give foreigners access to the mechanisms that support it. In fact, the governments of these states are often themselves diseased. The cure proposed by the revolutionaries may well be the wrong cure, yet their cause may be just.

This meant that if American Special Forces were going to do any good at all in a counterinsurgency situation, they would have to be able to walk a very thin and risky line. They would have to act toward the local government with great care and finesse, based on the direction they'd been given by their own commanders and government, while developing more than a skin-deep rapport with the native peoples.

In view of this very sensitive psychological and political environment, it became evident to Bill Yarborough that the criteria for Special Forces would have to include far more than just expertise in guerrilla warfare. Personal character became extremely important — the judgment, maturity, self-discipline, and ability to work harmoniously with people who were culturally very different from Americans.

What kind of soldier operates effectively in such an environment?

First of all — and this is as true now as it was in 1961—it is one who thinks in ways that conventional soldiers are not expected to. Like all soldiers, Special Forces men work under a chain of command, but unlike the others, they may not always have direct or even regular communication with their superiors. That means that at times they need to act on their own, which means they inevitably make decisions on their own — though based, it is hoped, on a clear understanding of their commanders' and their nation's intent. At times these decisions have an impact far greater than those that more conventional soldiers may be called on to make. They may not only radically change lives or lead to deaths, they may also affect policy decisions going all the way up the chain of command to the President.

At the same time, tough problems come up that only Special Forces soldiers can solve. Many of these problems are practical — a Special Forces soldier might be required to deliver babies, extract teeth, or design a bridge and supervise its construction. Others are psychological — Special Forces soldiers may well need to persuade, cajole, or manipulate a not-very-friendly local leader to work for goals that may be in the United States' interest but not obviously in his. Either way, the problems are typically unexpected, complex, and open-ended, and there is no guarantee of help from above.

In addition, Special Forces soldiers cannot focus their individual tactics, techniques, capabilities, and thinking on a few specifics. They can't simply rely on well-honed soldier skills. They are taught, and arc expected to think, in the broadest terms. When they work a problem, they are not merely trying to solve it in the best way for their team but in the best way for the United States. They need to be able to see and handle such problems in all their complexity.

Soldiers are called "special" in part because they can be trusted to make such decisions.

Empowered though he was by the President to make those soldiers, Bill Yarborough had a big job ahead of him. He had to take the "old" Special Forces and turn it into the "new" Special Forces — and not all of the "old" wanted to become "new." He had to grow the small and marginal outfit into a force of significant size with greatly increased output, yet bring into the force the very best recruits. This meant "raiding" the rest of the Army for people nobody in the rest of the Army was willing to give up (he was empowered to do so, but at the cost of much resentment). He had to weed out those who did not make the mark, while educating and training to the very highest standards the picked and tested men who remained, and then he had to fill these men, individually and collectively, with pride and self-esteem. Meanwhile, he had to study the nature of the enemy and the ways others had learned to combat such an enemy; he had to do it to a depth rarely — if ever — accomplished by a military organization; and he had to find ways to make his Special Forces not just learn these insights, but incorporate them into their blood and sinews. And finally, he had to continue to sell his always fragile and vulnerable Special Forces to the "big" Army and to the American people.

A NEW KIND OF FIGHTING FORCE

Bill Yarborough faced a big job, but first he had to clean house — which involved raising the bar.

Not long after he took over Special Forces in 1961, Yarborough came to realize that a significant portion of the SF old-timers did not measure up to the standards his new fighting force required. These old guys were a rough lot — fire-breathers and flame-spouters. They were extraordinary soldiers, but not all of them could be counted on to operate well in politically and psychologically sensitive situations.

"The ones 1 was especially anxious not to retain in the Green Berets," Yarborough remarks, "were the 'old jockstrap commandos,' the Ranger types. And I must say there were considerable numbers of those in Special Forces.

"I'd fought with Rangers during World War 11, and I had known and admired them for their best qualities: They were gallant 'bloodletters.' They were fighting machines. They were anything but diplomats, and rejected any suggestion that they ought to be. And they paid little attention to what we might call the more humane qualities, like compassion, pity, and mercy. If such things suited the occasion, all right; but if they didn't, that was all right, too. They were there to cut a swath. Wherever you turned the Rangers and commandos loose, boy, there they would go. There wasn't any question about it.

"Well, some of my Army colleagues in key positions in the Department of the Army continue to look upon Special Forces as a kind of commando. They have never been able to understand why we had to get rid of so many of the old jockstrap guys, or why later we had to have such a high attrition rate in the Qualification Course. They couldn't understand the attrition rates for judgment, or for inability to understand humanity…. A guy who wouldn't get down on his belly alongside a Montagnard and show him the sight picture [in aiming a weapon] was no use to me.

"We continually got called to task about our high attrition rate, but as long as I had anything to do about it, we didn't bend one inch, and I would back to the limit every man who came out of that cauldron, out of that system."

Some of the old SF guys were a rough lot off-duty as well as on — and that presented Yarborough with yet more problems.

Because Special Forces was a marginal outfit where promotions were scarce, the best officers tended to avoid the assignment if they could. In those days, the level of SF training for officers was also low; the Q Course, for example, could be waived for field-grade officers, and often was.

For various reasons, the future for good Special Forces NCOs was brighter, and NCO quality tended to be higher. The NCOs' expertise also tended to be high (many of them were World War II and/or Korea veterans with considerable experience in the field; most had been shot at), and Yarborough wanted to make the most of their expertise in teaching his younger soldiers. But they also tended to act as though they had carte blanche to do things pretty much as they pleased. They tended to run a bit wild when they were out there with the younger guys.

They had to be reined in.

The officers, though, were a bigger problem. There were outstanding exceptions, but too many officers looked at the assignment as a place to park and have macho fun — drinking, wild parties, womanizing, playing around with other guys wives.

That had to stop.

Early on in his command, Yarborough took his officers — captain and higher — out into the pine woods on the base and told them straight what he expected of them. He was not gentle.

The event was long remembered as Yarborough's "Talk in the Woods."

"As long as I'm in charge of Special Forces," he told them, "the rules are going to change. There'll be a new start.

"First, there will be no womanizing, no drunkenness, no wild parties, no adultery. There'll be no troublemakers. No wild men. From now on all that stuff is out — and there will be no deviations. There will be moral standards, there will be disciplinary standards, there will be appearance standards.

"Second, all officers will go through the Q Course. No exceptions. No matter what his rank.

"Third, everything I'm saying applies to all ranks. No exceptions. So you're going to make it all clear to every one of your NCOs.

"Finally, if you don't like it, you can deal with it in two ways. You can end your career. Or you can come to my office and request to be transferred out. Otherwise, if you want to stay in this unit, there will be big changes."

The worst got out. The best stayed. And Yarborough moved on to the real work that remained.

Meanwhile, Special Forces officers and NCOs began to find promotions coming their way. If you got into Special Forces, and you could cut it, you could expect to get promoted very quickly and look forward to a long Army career, if you wanted it.

So Special Forces stopped being the end of the road for wild men, misfits, and has-beens. It became the place you wanted to be. It was the place where the action was.

Soon after the Kennedy administration had identified "counterinsurgency" as an official instrument of United States foreign policy, it became clear that some of the major weapon systems needed for counterinsurgency would have to be forged from among the resources specific to the behavioral and social sciences — psychology, anthropology, political science, economics, history, and international relations. The problem would be to integrate these disciplines with more direct military functions to produce an effective instrument in the murky environment of actual counterinsurgency campaigns.

The Special Warfare Center had to explore this new field.

Bill Yarborough was himself a scholar and an intellectual, and his experience in intelligence and counterintelligence had taught him a great deal about how to go about understanding ones adversaries (and one's friends). He knew where and how to look for sources of knowledge and inspiration.

He went first to Roger Hilsman, who had already played a major role at the State Department and White House in promoting the concept of counterinsurgency and the convoluted world of irregular warfare. Hilsman came down to the Special Warfare Center on several occasions, and provided Yarborough and his staff and students with background information and insights.

Yarborough and his staff also studied positive and negative examples: Positive in the case of the British, whose triumph in Malaya pointed the way toward a workable counterinsurgency doctrine — a combination of sophistication about native cultures and a willingness to be uncompromisingly brutal in infiltrating local insurgencies and then uprooting them from the people. Negative in the case of the French defeat in Indochina and their phony victory in Algeria.

Others who regularly gave him counsel included experts like Charles M. Thayer, the head of the U.S. military mission to Yugoslavia during World War II and who later headed the Voice of America; Dr. Jay Zawodny, then professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who had fought with the Polish underground in Warsaw during the Second World War and later authored numerous works on irregular warfare and psychological operations; and several others of equal expertise.

Some of the sources consulted and studied were controversial. Yarborough was not afraid to shock his students. Conventional thinking was not going to get the job done.

The left-leaning French soldier-writer Bernard Fall, for example, was a frequent lecturer at the Special Warfare School's irregular warfare classes. The author of the now classic history of the French war in Indochina, Street Without Joy, which was used as a text at the school, Fall was sharp-tongued, abrasive, and contemptuous of American efforts in Southeast Asia, and more often than not sparked heated reactions from his soldier audiences. "On his side,"Yarborough writes, "were facts, figures, history, and personal experience. On the students' side were usually emotional distress stemming from hurt pride and an inadequate database."

Eventually, Fall's contempt for American policy in Vietnam brought his appearances at Fort Bragg to the attention of "those guys there in the Pentagon." This brought Yarborough a telephone call from Washington: "The Frenchman Bernard Fall is no longer welcome at the Special Warfare School," he was told. But when Yarborough demanded that this order be put in writing, the demand was withdrawn, and Fall's catalytic presence continued to shake up the young Green Berets at the school.

Another controversial source of insight on irregular warfare was a larger-than-life Air Force colonel named Edward Lansdale — a real-world character who had seemingly leapt out of a spy novel. His story, in fact, inspired more than one novelist; he was the model for Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Lederer and Burdick's The Ugly American (their character also contains elements of Roger Hilsman). Though controversial — his conduct in Vietnam was questionable — his accomplishments were real. During the '50s, Lansdale was loaned to the CIA and assigned to the Philippines, where he gave the Agency its greatest victory against Communist insurgents there, called the Huks.

He did this in several ways. First, he promoted an undeniably great man, Ramon Magsaysay, as an alternative to the Communists. Magsaysay, arguably the Washington and Lincoln of the Philippines, became president of that country, but was killed in an air crash after too short a time in office. Second, Lansdale had a kind of mad genius for the art of what later became known as "black" psychological operations — lies that damage an enemy. For example, he had the rumor spread in rural villages that men with evil in their hearts would be food for the local vampire. He then had his people drain the blood out of a dead Huk, punch holes in his neck, and leave him in the middle of a well-traveled road. Word got around very quickly that the Huks were vampire bait. But third, and most important for Bill Yarborough's delvings into the heart of irregular and political warfare, "Ed Lansdale made me understand," he writes, "the relationship between what we clumsily call Civic Action and the ability of a regular army to function among the people. This insight was responsible to a great degree for the effectiveness of the counterinsurgency operation in the Philippines. It made the people feel that the military were not oppressors. Rather, the man in uniform represented the government; and, if they were eager to assist and help the people, then the government must be of the same frame of mind." The good acts of the men in uniform argued to the benevolence, right intentions, and honor of the government.

"Later on in my research, he continues, "I discovered that Ed Lansdale was not the author of this concept… but Mao Tse-tung. Mao was the greatest modern proponent of this philosophy.

"In studying Mao's campaigns leading to the expulsion of Chiang Kai-shek from mainland China, I found that, in the beginning, the Nationalist armies were very much greater numerically than the Communist forces. But as Mao withdrew along the route of his long march, his soldiers treated people very generously and kindly, and with great respect. And so instead of fleeing to get out of the way of the Communists, in the normal way of civilians and armies, the people welcomed them.

"This behavior goes back to Mao's Nine Rules of Conduct, which his Red Army troops were made to memorize (they were even set to music and sung daily). These rules were strictly enforced. A man who violated them was severely punished, perhaps executed."

Here's a sample:

• There shall be no confiscations whatever from the poor peasantry.

• If you borrow anything, return it.

• Replace all articles you damage.

• Pay for everything that you purchase.

• Be honest in all transactions with the peasants.

• Be courteous and polite to the people and help them when you can.

This meant practically, Yarborough continues, "that the ordinary rules soldiers were used to in the field did not apply. Civilians were not kicked out if they got in the way. A soldier was encouraged to share his last crust of bread with a peasant. If a door was taken off a house for a soldier to sleep on, the custom in China, it would be replaced before the troops left. The best place for a gun position might be in the center of a tomb. Even so, the Red Army would respect the people and place the gun somewhere else.

"In consequence, the Red Army swelled, while Chiang Kai-shek's forces lost the confidence of ever greater numbers of people."

Careful study of Mao, as well as other Communist authorities such as Che Guevara and the Vietnamese Vo Nguven Ciap and Truong Chinh, rounded out further the picture of multidimensional warfare. (It should be noted that such study was not exactly encouraged by "those guys at the Pentagon.") Their brand of irregular warfare, Yarborough's studies revealed, featured the following ingredients:

• Political awareness on the part of all ranks.

• Intensive wooing of all the "little people" to the side of the insurgent.

• The weakening of the enemy's morale by constant propaganda and terrorist harassment.

• Constant offensive action against enemy personnel and sensitive points, but only when tactical advantage is on the side of the irregulars.

• The avoidance of pitched battles with equal or superior forces.

• Defense only when it is essential to survival or to aid another element to withdraw.

• The consideration of the enemy's supply system as your own — making him haul the materiel to dumps, then seizing it from him.

• Constant striving to grow undercover forces into regular forces, ones capable of meeting the enemy on his own ground when the time and circumstances make victory certain.

With these studies as a guide, the new direction of Special Forces became clear.

If their job was to teach armed forces of a threatened nation how to combat a local insurgency, then their first task there was to demonstrate carefully thought out and executed military and nonmilitary actions that would allow those forces to win and maintain the support of the people. All of this would require the highest level of discipline on the part of not only the Green Berets but also the local forces. Such discipline would ensure a high level of conduct and moral behavior among the people in politically sensitive areas.

Though conventional soldiers don't normally concern themselves with the civilians who find themselves caught up in the tides of war, when it became obvious that the political and psychological fallout from this lack of concern could negate a brilliant battlefield victory, military leaders had to seriously adjust their thinking. In the U.S. Army, the Special Forces were the first to be taught this lesson officially and put it into practice as a principle of war.

Before long, Green Berets, using an American version of Mao's "Rules for Conduct," began to have a powerful impact on the lives of "little people" in Third World nations living in remote, often jungle, areas. Previously, such people did not much figure in the overall scheme of military maneuver. And for their part, the "little people tended to be suspicious of foreign soldiers in their midst. However, a combination of personal qualities and soldier skills soon began to increase cooperation and mutual trust, and these came to grow into admiration and friendship.

The Green Berets paid attention to all kinds of little things that other soldiers rarely cared about. For example, they helped a villager increase his water supplies by showing him a simple well-digging technique. They worked side by side with him to build a log bridge that would save a half-mile trudge around a swamp to reach his primitive patch of farmland. They showed him how to dig an irrigation ditch. They gave him seeds that grew into better vegetables than he had ever imagined possible. But strangest — and most heartwarming — of all, they paid attention to the villager as an individual. They could speak to him in his own dialect — maybe not fluently, but enough. And they shared the lives of the village people. They ate their food and drank their drink; they sat around their fires in the evening and chatted with them; they slept in huts like theirs.

Once friendship had been established, the military task of defending the village began. Green Berets traced village fortification outlines, and villagers placed row on row of sharpened stakes in the ground, angled toward approach routes. With Green Beret help, they dug protective shelters inside the village perimeters. They set up an alarm system, using an old tire rim or an empty artillery shell case, to warn of attack. During all this time, Green Berets worked alongside the villagers, and when attack came, they fought side by side with them.

Green Beret A-Detachments have always featured medical expertise — two highly trained medical specialists, with each of the remaining eight troopers cross-trained in medical skills.

The justification for this expertise came out of the original Special Forces mission, which was to organize and train guerrilla and insurgent forces. During their early days, guerrillas are exceedingly vulnerable. To protect themselves while they grow in strength, they must hide in difficult-to-reach areas such as jungles, swamps, or rugged mountains. Under such conditions, day-to-day survival is often a triumph in itself. If a guerrilla is sick or wounded, he has no outside help on which to rely.

Here is where Green Beret medical skills enter the picture. Green Beret medics could provide the medical knowledge to keep guerrillas going as functioning fighters.

Those skills were put to similar use in the villages, which were scarcely less isolated than the guerrilla bases, and provided even more reason for friendship and trust. Often for the first time, villagers had access to basic dental care, prenatal care, antibiotics, vaccinations, and nutrition and disease-prevention advice.

Training for these missions was intense, difficult, and as realistic as possible. Green Berets returning from foreign missions were sucked dry of information, and they helped train the men replacing them. Replicas of villages were constructed, accurate to the finest detail. In order to prepare for a mission, the Berets lived exactly as they expected to live in the field — food, shelter, work, language, everything.

As a training aid, Yarborough had a portion of a Vietnamese guerrilla village constructed at Fort Bragg, complete with artifacts, livestock, and escape tunnels. On one of his later trips to Vietnam, Yarborough was both amused and gratified to find a replica of his replica village being used by the Vietnamese army at their Infantry Training Center.

Bill Yarborough's devotion to intense Special Forces preparation also included uncommon (for the Army) attention to specialized personal equipment, such as clothing, medical kits, and rations. Predictably, the "big" Army monolith had a hard time handling this.

Bill Yarborough takes the story from here:

I have always felt that equipment for a Special Forces soldier was primarily for the purpose of keeping him alive and it had little to do with weaponry. The health of the soldier was what counted, and we could best take care of this by making sure he had the best clothing, field medical gear, and rations. As a matter of fact, I felt that if the American had a superior weapon when he was out among indigenous forces who had to make do wath something more basic, his own credibility suffered. I was not convinced, for instance, that the M-16 should be a Special Forces weapon; a survival weapon was more the kind of thing an SF soldier wanted. Or else, if he didn't have the right weapon for particular conditions, he'd take it from the enemy or improvise.To this end, the training system at Fort Bragg included an extraordinarily wide variety of weapons collected from worldwide sources. A Special Forces soldier mas expected to be familiar with all of them and be able to assemble and use them.I didn't see the Special Forces soldier as a direct combat instrument. I saw him as a catalyst who could gather around him those whom he could then train and lend help to lead, and what weapon he carried was secondary.So I put an enormous amount of time in personal equipment and special uniforms, even though such things were not looked on kindly by the Quartermaster Corps and others, who looked at such views as overly romantic, and that in the Army, the essential thing is to give a soldier a good weapon, enough ammunition, clothes on his back, shoes on his feet, and transportation.In 1961, I went to the Quartermaster Depot at Natick, Massachusetts, to see what kind of tropical gear we had in stock for the guys who were going to Southeast Asia. When I got there, I was in for a shock. They didn't have anything suitable for jungle action. All the World War II experience fighting in the jungle and the tropics was apparently down the drain.I did find in the Quartermaster Museum what they called "tropical fatigues." But these had the same imagination as ordinary dung shovelers' fatigues. No utility whatever. There was a shirt and pants. The shirt had two small breast pockets and no lower pockets. The pants had ordinary pockets, no cargo pockets. The cloth, though, was okay. It was the kind of cloth that was close-woven enough to make it impervious to mosquito bites.So I said, "Well, let's see. The cloth is good. We can start with that. "And I went from there. "Send me one of those down," I told them, "and we'll doctor it up a bit and see what we can do about making it a little more worthy for combat. " So I took what they were calling "tropical fatigues" and put cargo pockets on the trousers and two large pockets with bellows pleats on the shirt. I angled the upper pockets on the shirt to allow easier access when web equipment was worn, added epaulets, and also buttoned tabs at the waist to allow the blouse to be gathered. The sleeves were designed to be rolled up, if there were no mosquitoes around and weather permitted.Little by little, with our help, the Quartermaster had a jungle uniform for Vietnam — even though they never admitted they had a requirement for one.Yet making it happen was a hard thing. The paperwork alone for the issue of the jungle uniform weighed many pounds. And with the first batch of uniforms came orders that they would only be worn in the field, and only by Special Forces.That of course changed.It was most fortunate for the United States Army, he concludes with masterful understatement, that when U. S. troops were eventually sent to Vietnam in huge numbers, the tropical field uniform we designed for Special Forces was available for general use.

Meanwhile, as Bill Yarborough was forging his new breed of soldier, the "big" Army continued on its more traditional paths, casting an ever-colder eye on the oddball operation in North Carolina, with its presidential favor, its substantial funding ("What they get, 1 lose" — the military has always operated in a zero-sum mode), and its license to raid the best units for their best men — especially their best NCOs — and "take them out of the Army," as one four-star general put it.

Generals, as generals will, began to murmur among themselves against the Green Beret upstarts and Bill Yarborough's "private army." The talk never became public, but a consensus was building in favor of the tried and true: "They've been feeding soldiers Laotian food down there at Fort Bragg. What the hell for? Firepower wins wars. Not lousy food." Or more generally: "They're going their own way down there. They don't respect the rules. They do things their way and not the Army way."

Some of these charges were not without substance. Though Yarborough never actually broke regulations, he bent them; and where there were holes, he slipped through them. A strict interpretation of regulations would not have been kind to him.

In his defense, he was never dishonest. When you have to improvise, you almost inevitably find yourself slipping between rules. In fact, it's hard to imagine how else to build an organization the rules never foresaw.

The negative currents came to a head soon after John Kennedy's assassination. General H. K. Johnson, the Army's very conventional-minded new chief of staff (he took over from General Maxwell Taylor when Taylor became ambassador to South Vietnam), was one of those generals who simply did not understand the new breed of soldier. He was terribly bothered by what Yarborough was doing. He was just getting away with too much.

Johnson's solution: He had to show Bill Yarborough who was the boss. The Army had several layers between Yarborough and the President. In Johnson's view, Yarborough had ignored them.

Johnson was, in fact, a good and honorable man, and a hero — he'd been a Japanese prisoner during World War II. Before he moved, he visited Yarborough's s operation — and he left very impressed. "I'll tell you," Johnson told another general friend, "he's put together a heck of a fighting team."

Even so, Yarborough had to go. And besides, he had been on the job for four years. It was time to move on.

By then, Yarborough had gotten his second star, as major general, and he was sent to Korea, where he represented the UN command as the Senior Member of the Military Armistice Commission at Panmunjon. There he dealt with the North Korean and Chinese negotiators in a way that only his experience in Special Forces could have prepared him for. The job called not only for negotiating skills, but also for PSYOPs and propaganda skills. Most observers called him the toughest negotiator the Communists faced at Panmunjon.

From Korea, he served at the Pentagon, where his most important job was to run Army Intelligence (his official title was Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence). IIe was later (in 1966) promoted to Lieutenant General and given command of I Corps Group in Korea, and then in 1969 he moved on to Hawaii as Chief of Staff and Deputy Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Army, Pacific. He retired in 1971, after thirty-six years of active service.

During Bill Yarborough's tenure as commander of Special Forces, his Green Berets not only carried out their mission in Southeast Asia but were also active in a number of other parts of the world.

From a base in Panama, several teams were sent to the countries of Central and South America, always at the invitation of those countries. In Colombia, for example, ten years of insurgency, called "La Violencia," had vielded something like 300,000 deaths. Green Berets and Colombian security officials worked together to produce the first comprehensive plan — based on civic action to help the local economy, health, and education — to deal with the terror. Though Colombia was to suffer from later terrors, La Violencia ended.

Green Berets in arctic gear worked their way by dogsled, snow weasel, and airplane around the northernmost perimeter of the United States, bringing medical and dental care and planning skills.

Other Green Beret teams worked in the Pacific on islands of the American Trust Territories, building roads, schoolhouses, and recreational facilities. Others worked in the Philippines. Still others worked in Ethiopia and Congo (later Zaire, later Congo again).

When Bill Yarborough took command of Special Forces in 1961, he presided over four years of metamorphosis and explosive growth, and left as a major general. No matter how often and how badly he'd ruffled the feathers of his superiors fighting for his beloved Green Berets, his career had prospered.

During those four years of ferment, a great many warriors joined the now-transformcd U.S. Special Forces. One of them was a young captain named Carl Stiner. It is now time for his story.