Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

Army posts are predictable places. Most of the time, you know what to expect — reveille in the morning, taps at night, squads, companies, battalions, PT, drills, marches, orders, regulations, tightly scheduled intense training, "sirs" and salutes — and wildlife management.

Most Army bases in the United States have game-conservation programs. On selected fields and training areas, corn, millet, sunflower, winter wheat, and other feeds arc planted so that doves, quail, grouse, turkeys, deer, and all manner of other wild creatures can mature and receive cover and protection from predators. As an added benefit, these same fields offer soldiers who like hunting splendid sites for game shooting. Every Saturday in season, you can find soldier-hunters out on some wildlife conservation area.

This particular Saturday, Captain Carl Stiner was at Fort Jackson, where he'd been assigned after completing the Advanced Infantry Course at Fort Benning, Georgia. He had served there for sixteen months. It was bright and warm, a fine day for dove hunting. Suddenly, out of the blue, a jeep came roaring up, blasting its horn and making a god-awful mess of the shooting. A pair of MPs leaped out and headed right for Stiner.

"Sir," the senior MP said, hustling up with urgency in his voice, "you have orders, sir, for reassignment, and you need to get back in to look at them. Right now, sir. You're going to have to move this weekend."

That was very unusual, so Stiner asked, "What's the nature of the orders?"

"We don't know, sir. We were told they're classified, and you need to come back in."

"Who sent you out here?" Stiner pressed.

They named a warrant officer assigned to the training center headquarters.

"Well, that explains it," Stiner said to himself; he knew the man well. The warrant officer was a famous trickster.

He said to the MPs, "Well, I'm not going back in right now. I'll come back after a while. Just tell him not to worry about it." So they left. . with visible misgivings. And Stiner stayed at the dove shoot.

Still, the MPs' message couldn't help but gnaw at his brain. He continued to agitate over what had just happened, until, some time later, the jeep returned. This time the MPs had no hesitation. "Sir, you have got to go back in. They're classified orders, and the post is preparing to move you and your family this weekend."

At which point, Stiner thought, Maybe nobody's playing a trick on me after all.

The reassignment was to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He had a building number where he was supposed to report, but the MOS (Military Occupation Specialty) was indeed classified. Stiner had no idea what he was about to get into, but whatever it was, the Army had told him to move, so that afternoon, he and his wife, Sue, began to get themselves and their infant daughter, Carla, ready.

The next day they checked into a rental trailer near Fort Bragg, since no quarters were available, and on Monday Stiner reported in at the building he'd been given. When he showed up, a line of maybe fifty officers, most of them captains, but also a few first lieutenants, was there, all of them in the same boat. They had all been pulled in on short notice, and none of them had any idea what was going on.

Welcome to the Special Forces.

When Stiner was called into Special Forces, he knew very little about who they were or what they did. Their secretive, closed nature extended to the rest of the army. He did know the Special Forces were highly selective and highly trained, and that as army units went, they were small (in 1964, approximately 17,700 people, including PSYOPs and Civil Affairs). And he knew they were unconventional in their thinking, their organization, and their mission — even their headgear was unorthodox: green berets. The rest he would have to find out as he went along.

At the lineup, Stiner was assigned to A Company of the recently activated (because of the Vietnam buildup) 3rd Special Forces Group, and told to check in with the company XO, a diminutive major by the name of LeBlanc, who was wearing — Stiner couldn't help but notice — a Bowie knife strapped to his leg.

When Stiner walked smartly into LeBlanc's office, the major looked up and frowned. Stiner was wearing the standard flat-topped green service hat with a bill, and the XO wasn't pleased. "That will never do," he announced. "But I'll get you straightened out before you see the old man.

"The first thing you are to do is get that flying saucer thing off of your head, and don't let me see it back on your head again as long as you are in this outfit. For if you do, I'll have to stick it where the sun doesn't shine.

"What you're going to do is go down to the supply room and draw you two berets. Understand you're not authorized to wear the flash yet." The flash was his unit colors, and showed he was a real Green Beret. "But you can wear the chocolate bar," a little bar that represented the colors of what would be in the big flash when he earned it. "You'll wear that until you arc Prefix Three-qualified," which meant he had successfully passed the Special Forces Qualifying Course (called Q Course). This normally took ten weeks.

From there, the XO got down to the real business at hand. "What you're here for is you're going to be an A-Detachment commander. That means two things are imperative. One is you've got to learn to send and receive Morse code at the rate of six words a minute. If you can get faster, that's better, but six is the minimum. And you will have to take your turn on the radio and the generator just like each member of the team does."

Though a captain commanding a conventional unit — normally a company of 100-plus men — is expected to be proficient on such equipment as the radio, he is not expected to be an operator in the field. Special Forces A-Detachment captains are different. There are only twelve people on the team, and because there's only so much twelve people can do, especially when they are miles behind enemy lines, everybody has to take a turn at many of the jobs, with no discrimination because of rank. The primary means of field communication in the early '60s was by Morse code on ancient ANGRA-109 radios (pronounced "Angry"). These were powered by a heavy, hand-cranked generator (there were no batteries), and it took two men to operate them. One man strapped the key to his leg so he could send and receive, while the other one sat nearby and cranked the generator.

LeBlanc went on: "The second imperative is that you have to learn the Last Rites of the religion of every man in your detachment, because there won't be chaplains with you most of the time, and you'll have to be able to do them. You can expect there'll be three or four religions and beliefs in your twelve-man detachment, twelve counting yourself."

And that was the extent of his guidance.

"Now go down and get your equipment."

Next came the "old man," the company commander, Lieutenant Colonel Perry. Stiner made sure he was wearing the green beret by then.

"When was the last time you jumped?" Perry asked.

All Special Forces soldiers had to be parachute-qualified. Some obtained the qualification after joining Special Forces, while a few others might not have jumped in some time when they arrived at Fort Bragg.

"It's been about six years," Stiner answered.

"Well, we've got a different kind of parachute now than you used, so you'll have to have a little refresher training. We've also got a policy around here: Your first jump is usually at night — and you will enjoy jumping at night. It's the closest thing to going to bed with your wife."

And then, "The last thing you need to know is we get together every Friday afternoon at four o'clock for happy hour. You're expected to bring your wife; and you're expected to have a 3rd Special Forces Group mug — which I just happen to sell for three dollars." In fact, he had a case of them underneath his desk, and Stiner shelled out for one. "You can either bring it with you when you come," Perry announced, as he handed Stiner his, "or else display it on the wall behind the bar down at our officers' club annex" — a one-story World War II building.

This little ritual of happy hours and mugs might jar people in these politically correct times, but that was simply the way the Army was back then — rougher around the edges, more freewheeling. The social culture in the Army as a whole was far less structured than it is now, and a far greater range of behavior was tolerated. Socializing tended to center on gatherings where everyone drank; Friday-afternoon "happy hours" were the norm, and there were those who drank too much. Today, an officer who gets a DUI might as well hang up his career. Back then, the Army was far more forgiving. "Officers' clubs were anything but bastions of decorum," Stiner notes. "I was never surprised if a fight broke out; there were crap and poker games, and all kinds of teasing, strutting, and showing off — male stuff. It was pretty much the accepted culture.

"I'm not saying that Army life centered on all this. Far from it. It was a very small part of our lives. When we were on duty, we worked long and hard hours, we trained hard, we respected each other and looked out for each other's lives, just as we do now. But we also played hard.

"Remember that we're talking about only a few years after the end of the Korean War. The Army was not as sophisticated or professional as it is now. For example, in those days commanders were not nearly as involved in the training of their soldiers or in the taking care of families. That culture did not really begin evolving until the draft was done away with and we became a volunteer force. After that, the training of officers and NCOs became much more formalized and institutionalized — as did off-duty social events. Except for large unit-level social events, social life doesn't center on the officers' clubs anymore. In fact, very few military installations have even been able to retain centralized officers' clubs owing to financial management parameters legislated by Congress. Instead, commanders tend to host dinner parties at home for the officers and their spouses. It's relatively relaxed and informal, and drinking is limited.

"There are pluses and minuses in all this. We probably don't have as much spontaneity in today's Army as we did back then, and that's a loss; but fewer make fools of themselves, and that's a gain."

TRAINING

Now Stiner had to learn how to be a Special Forces soldier.

In 1964, the Special Forces mission was primarily focused on unconventional warfare (UW), and the chief threat was Soviet expansion in Europe. The entire Special Forces 10th Group was stationed in Europe, and money, weapons, and supplies had been cached in Eastern Europe and in the parts of Western Europe that might be overrun by the Soviets. In the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion, A-Detachments could be dropped behind the lines, or else they could hide and reappear after having been passed over by invading forces, then link up with friendly guerrillas and partisans. Their mission: sabotage, subversion, and organizing and equipping resistance movements. All of this required a high level of independence, analysis, and decision-making.

The Leadership Reaction Course was one of the ways they trained and tested for these qualities. It emphasized teamwork, imagination, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and, of course, leadership, and started with a physically and intellectually difficult puzzle. For instance, imagine a moat in which the water is eight or ten feet deep and the distance from one bank to the other is twelve feet. A team in training is provided with a fifty-five-gallon drum of gasoline and three pieces of timber, two of them ten feet long and the third eight feet. The team's job is to get the barrel (and themselves) across the moat using the materials provided. If the team has what it takes to become Special Forces soldiers, they'll work out a way to do it.

Another method of training was by sensory deprivation. Operating on their own behind the lines in enemy territory puts extraordinary demands on soldiers. One of the most difficult of these is the absence of emotional support. Friendships, trust, and confidence belong to a soldier's makeup as much as obedience, and readily available support provides a powerfully counterbalance to the uncertainty in a soldier's life. Many excellent soldiers stay up to speed primarily because they are praised. They need the certainty that comes from knowing somebody above them considers them to be a good and solid performer.

That is not the case with Special Forces soldiers, who must operate in environments in which every kind of support is minimal, absent, or transitory. Some soldiers have the spirit and will to handle that situation, but many others don't.

The Special Forces sensory-deprivation training program is designed to find who has what it takes. Soldiers are not told the goals or the standards they are expected to reach, or whether they're doing well or badly. A soldier might be told one day: "You show up at this road junction at 0600 hours in the morning with your rucksack." When he arrives, an NCO will be waiting with a piece of paper that contains his next instructions, which might be: "You are to move from this point to this point" — say. twenty-five miles. And then he's left on his own, with no help other than a map and a compass, no idea of how long he has to get from point to point. When — or if — he shows up at the appointed location, his presence is simply acknowledged. He is not told whether he passed or failed, or if he made the journey in the correct time. Success in this exercise comes not only from accomplishing a difficult task, but from doing it totally out of his own internal resources.

Much of Special Forces training is conducted according to similar "rules."

In the meantime, the Special Forces soldier must also train for specific skills. As previously noted, in an A-Detachment, soldiers not only have to handle their own specialty, but be prepared to handle everyone else's.

When Stiner met the A-Detachment that he was to command for the next eight months, he was impressed. The members of his detachment were all professional Special Forces soldiers with considerable experience. Most were years older than Stiner, and maybe half were Lodge Act volunteers originally from Eastern European countries. They were already proficient in unconventional and covert warfare and spoke one or two other languages. At the same time, they were more or less new to one another, having been reassigned within the Special Forces following the forming of the 3rd Group, and so had not trained together as an A-Detachment. During the weeks Stiner was taking the Q Course, his A-Detachment was learning what it needed to know to function as a group.

In the '60s, everyone in an A-Detachment was trained in the following skills:

Each soldier had to be an expert marksman on his individual weapon (a pistol) and his M-16 rifle, and be familiar with weapons, such as AK-47s, that he might encounter in the part of the world in which he might be employed. He had to be able to shoot them with reasonable accuracy, and to take them apart and maintain them. In the case of larger weapons such as mortars and machine guns, he had to be able to emplace and employ them properly so they could provide the protection and support they were designed to give.

Each soldier was trained in explosives. He learned the kind of charge, the shape, and the placement for bringing down a bridge or power lines, for cratering charges or breaching, for getting inside a sealed and defended building with the minimum damage to the Structure or to hostages who may be inside. If he had no explosives of his own, he was taught how to obtain what he needed to make them from local sources.

Each soldier received communications training — sending and receiving Morse code, and code writing. If a team was actually working behind enemy lines, they'd only come up on the radio at preappointed times every day or two, when the communications sergeant would get up on his telegraph to send his message. Everyone on the team, however, was capable of operating any kind of communications gear they might be using.

Each soldier received advanced first-aid training.

Each soldier learned how to conduct clandestine and covert operations; how to establish intelligence nets and escape and evasion nets; how to conduct resupply operations at night; how to set up a field for landing airplanes and bring them in, and how to set up parachute drop zones. He learned clandestine infiltration and exfiltration techniques, land navigation, and special (or deep) reconnaissance, in which he would operate in total stealth, in order to put eyes directly on anything an enemy might not want him to see. Often this meant living for days in hide sites — holes in the ground a team would dig and then cover over with dirt, branches, or other concealment.

Each soldier was provided with a working knowledge of the principal language in his group's area of focus — German, say, for members of the 10th Group in Europe, or Swahili for the 3rd Group. Later, language proficiency was increased enormously, and Special Forces soldiers were expected to devote as long as six months or a year, full-time, to attaining fluency in their language. In 1964, fluency was not required, but soldiers were expected to communicate in a simple and rudimentary way.

Similarly, each soldier was provided with cultural training, as appropriate, so that when he went into a country, he knew how to behave in ways that would win friends and not alienate the people he was there to help, and thus harm the mission.

Finally, although each A-Detachment commander had an operations sergeant and a weapons sergeant, it was an officer's responsibility to know indirect fire support — artillery fire and mortar fire — and how to employ it most accurately and effectively. He had to know how to plan defensive fires, or call in air or naval gunfire, if these ever became necessary.

Every Q Course is a mixture of classroom instruction and field training, but with a heavy overbalance toward the field. For Carl Stiner and those fifty or so other officers who were called in with him, it was — once again — an accelerated program, seven weeks rather than the more normal ten. Today the Q Course is even longer.

In the '60s, most classes were conducted at the Special Forces headquarters complex in the Smoke Bomb Hill area of Fort Bragg, in rickety World War II — vintage converted weatherboard barracks or, less frequently, in smaller single-story orderly-room-type buildings. Air-conditioning was not even a dream. Guys didn't go there expecting comfort.

After a week of primary instruction, everyone moved to the field for another couple of weeks to practice the techniques studied in the classroom. This sequence was the norm throughout the course.

Field instruction and practice were conducted in training areas on Fort Bragg and neighboring Camp MacKall, and in the Uwharric National Forest fifty miles away in western North Carolina. In later years, Camp MacKall was transformed into a well-equipped training facility for Special Forces; but in those days, the Camp MacKall training facility did not exist, and there was nothing out there except the remains of a World War II training airfield for the gliders of the 82nd Airborne Division and the concrete foundations of torn-down buildings.

Finally, all the instruction and training were brought together in a major exercise, at the time called Gobbler Woods, and now called Robin Sage, in the Uwharrie National Forest area.

Gobbler Woods worked like this: The student-officers would be formed up into simulated A-Detachments deployed to a fictional country (often, for the sake of the game, called Pineland). There they were expected to contact indigenous Pineland natives and to turn them into guerrillas. These were normally played by soldiers from support units at Fort Bragg (maybe 250 of them), who dressed and acted like civilians.

The A-Detachment's job was to work with the guerrilla chief (who always made it a point to be difficult), mold his followers into guerrilla units, and get them to do what the A-Detachment wanted them to do — blow up bridges, blow down power lines, set ambushes, and perform other unconventional warfare — type tasks — as well as civil affairs work aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the local people.

Soldiers who did this successfully were rewarded with the flash on their green berets. If not, they were given the opportunity to take another Q Course or they'd be sent back to the conventional forces. Of those who took the course with Stincr, most passed.

That is not the case today. Today there are more washouts, partly because standards are higher, and partly because Stiner and the other officers with him had been carefully selected for assignment to Special Forces. The Army wanted them there. Today, Special Forces is a totally volunteer force—"a three-time volunteer force," as Stiner likes to point out, "once to join the Army in the first place, second to get parachute-qualified, and third to join Special Forces."

Then or now, it wasn't easy. Those who successfully completed it could be proud of the accomplishment. More important: They could be counted on by everyone else.

After the Q Course came still more training. For example…

CLANDESTINE ENTRY

There are several ways to get into a country where American soldiers are not wanted. They can come in covertly — as tourists, workers, or businessmen — or clandestinely — by submarine, boat, or aircraft — or they can drop in by parachute, which is more often than not the way it gets done.

That means Special Forces troops spend a lot of time jumping out of airplanes.

Carl Stiner talks about the way they did it in 1964:

When a lot of people are dropping out of a formation of large aircraft, the first priority is getting them all down safely. Conventional airborne units jump with a standard (not maneuverable) parachute in order to minimize the risk of midair entanglements — a good way to get seriously hurt, or killed. The other priority is keeping them together in some kind of order, so thousands of soldiers are not scattered all over the countryside. This priority is handled by a technique called "cross-loading": squads, platoons, and crews are loaded on each airplane so that they exit near where their mission is to be accomplished on the ground. This minimizes assembly time after landing and maximizes the fighting effectiveness of the units.

On a jump mission, the pilot flying the airplane is in charge overall, but the jumpmaster in the back is responsible for all the jumpers. That means he has to know where he is at all times. And he does that by communicating with the pilot, by studying the map, and by plotting checkpoints on that map — points on the ground such as rivers, bridges, or natural features that he can recognize from the air en route to the drop area.

Meanwhile, since the pilot is up in the cockpit where he can see more, he helps by calling out, "We have crossed such and such a river," or, "We're approaching such and such a terrain feature."

When you were inserting an A-Detachment into what we called denied territory (territory where we weren't welcome and where it could be dangerous to be an American soldier), you wanted the team to be able to land as close to each other as possible.

By that time, Tojo parachutes had replaced the older, simpler parachutes on which I had originally trained. In those days, the Tojo parachutes were steerable to a degree. Not steerable enough for you to aim at a point on the ground and hit it, but enough to permit the detachment to assemble in the air and then come down in the same immediate area.

The Tojos looked like your regular umbrella canopies, but they had a twenty-square-foot orifice in the back in the shape of an oval, and out of this would come thrust of about eight knots. The chute had a system of slip risers on rollers that you activated after you exited the airplane. By tilting the canopy one way or another, that allowed you to direct that thrust.

When you jumped, the slip risers were secured to your harness with forks. Once you were in the air, you pulled the forks out, and the risers were released to slip on the rollers. Then if you wanted to turn to the right, for example, you'd reach back with your right hand and grab the right rear riser, and with your left hand you'd grab the left front. Then you'd pull the right rear down and push the left front up. That would tilt the canopy so you would turn to the right. When you got turned around as far as you wanted to go, then you'd center them again and you'd straighten out…. Or you tried to, because you never really kept going in that direction.

The big problem for the jumper was orienting the chute to face the wind as he was coming in for his landing. (If a jumper came in running with the wind, he would hit the ground at the speed of the wind, plus the eight knots of thrust coming out of the chute's rear orifice.) The tendency of the parachute was to turn and run with the wind, which meant that jumpers had to work at the risers constantly to keep themselves properly oriented. Since most Special Forces jumps were at night, the best indication of wind direction was the sensation of it on a jumper's face.

If everything was going right, the team would leave the airplane as a chalk or string. The lead jumper would normally face into the wind and hold until everybody else could assemble on him by steering their parachutes. They'd try to work it so they'd be about a hundred feet apart. Fifty to a hundred feet was the normal separation distance for experienced jumpers. That way, all of the detachment had a better chance of landing close to each other and defending itself upon landing. You're vulnerable on the drop zone!

The separation distance was very important, because if chutes became entangled there was a serious risk of a canopy collapse. This was especially true of the Tojo chutes, because these chutes tended to push each other.

Each jumper also had a reserve chute that was good as long as you were more than 500 feet up. Should it become necessary to activate your reserve, you would pull the handle with your right hand while holding your left hand in front of the reserve in order to catch it when it popped out of its container. Then you worked your right hand underneath the skirt of the reserve and threw it down and to your left as hard as you could to facilitate inflation.

If this didn't work, you would have to try again. Sometimes the reserve would just go up partially inflated and wrap around the main chute, which was not fully inflated. People who get hurt jumping usually get hurt when they land. But when you get an entanglement, you're looking at real trouble.

Nowadays, reserve parachutes are much improved. These arc equipped with a cartridge that propels the canopy far enough out to give you a much greater percentage for inflation, regardless of the malfunction with your main chute.

A jumper was also taught not to look for or reach for the ground on a night parachute jump. Rather, he was trained to look for the silhouette of the tree line, which would tell him he was thirty to fifty feet from the ground and could start preparing to land by making sure he was facing into the wind and by holding his feet and knees tightly together, which allowed the jumper to roll instantly in the direction of drift, and thus minimize the risk of a broken leg.

After everyone had assembled on the lead jumper, he would aim as best he could to drop into the drop zone — there was normally not much space, maybe a small opening in the trees, a clearing perhaps two or three hundred yards wide. Once he was on the ground, the other jumpers, who by now have stacked themselves above him, could aim directly on him and could usually land within a circle of a hundred feet.

After you were down, the first order of business was defending yourself as a team, but you had to do something about the parachute, and you had two options. You could take it with you or you could bury it. You could never leave it lying where you landed, because if you did, it could be spotted either from the ground or from the air.

Of the two options, taking your parachute with you was the least desirable choice. It was a lot of extra weight and volume to lug around. The best solution was to move off the drop zone, find a secure location in a gully or wooded area, and bury it so it couldn't be found.

Either way, you wanted to get out of the drop site almost immediately, carrying the parachute. Once you had reached a concealed location, you could usually bury your parachute in about fifteen or twenty minutes.

And from there you moved out in accordance with your plan for accomplishing the mission.

LAND NAVIGATION

Finding your objective was far from a given. It was nighttime; the terrain was unfamiliar, the people potentially hostile, and in those days there were no night-vision goggles or GPS satellites to help you find your way. The teams had to be expert at land navigation and find their objectives the old-fashioned way — the way they'd probably learned to do it in Ranger training — by relying on maps, compasses, and the stars.

They had to be dead-certain expert map readers, they had to be equally proficient using compasses, and they had to know how to count their pace.

Carl Stiner continues:

AN important part of the preparation for a mission involved studying the maps of the area where we'd be operating. We had to make ourselves absolutely familiar with that territory. Not only was there very little room for error in linking up with our objective (which might be a guerrilla band or a place where we could hide while we set up for our larger mission), but we also had to avoid blundering into one of the many places where we were not welcome. That meant we memorized everything we might need to know — all the landmarks — rivers and streams, dams, bridges, roads, crossroads, transmission towers, power transmission junctions, and other infrastructure elements, as well as towns, villages, police, and military facilities.

When we were in the field, one man would keep track of the compass, while two pace men working in conjunction with each other would keep count of the pace. And anybody in the team could handle these jobs. The detachment commander usually kept himself free to manage and orchestrate the operation. The important thing was to keep an accurate count no matter what happened (so we'd have two men counting). But we also had to make sure that we didn't lose count if we ran into an ambush or some other event that might cause somebody to forget the count.

Meanwhile, even though we had memorized the map and had confidence in our compass reading and pace counting, every once in a while it was a good idea to make sure we were still on track. And that meant checking our map — not an easy thing to do in the dark when you can't show any light.

The way we did it was to use our GI flashlights and get under a poncho. Our GI flashlights had a series of filters that were kept in the cap that covered the battery compartment. One of these was a red filter, and that was the one we used, because red light has less effect on your night vision. While everyone else in the team circled around the poncho and stood guard, the commander, his second (whoever would take over if something happened to him), the compass man, and the pace man would get under the poncho and study the map to determine if they were exactly where they should be. If they had deviated, then they'd work out the adjustments they had to make.

It was also possible to navigate by the stars, if, for example, something had happened to our compass. But we preferred the compass, because it was not weather dependent. Still, we had to learn the basic constellations — the Big Dipper, Orion, the Scorpion, in the Northern Hemisphere; Cassiopeia in the Southern. We learned that the two corner stars of the Dipper point to the North Star, which lies five times the distance separating the two pointer stars. So if we could see stars, we could find our way.

One final aspect of planning our route was to identify rallying points. That way, if we got ambushed or ran into some other enemy action, we could break contact and split up, and everybody would reassemble at the next rallying point, or the last one we had passed — depending upon whichever the commander designated.

There is a myth that Special Forces soldiers itch for firefights — that they are all Rambo-like killing machines with nothing better to do than waste enemies. There is zero reality in this myth. Special Forces soldiers are not killing machines; their value lies elsewhere. They are simply too highly trained, too valuable, to be placed in greater risk than is absolutely essential. That means they avoid fights when they can. They fade away into the woods rather than stand up and prove how macho they are. In fact, the Special Forces selection process selects against those types. No Rambos. No Tim McVeighs. Special Forces soldiers are fighters, and they can call upon that energy and skill to kill when they must; but they are expected to focus that fighter energy in a laser-sharp, mature way.

RESUPPLY

Surviving in a covert or clandestine environment doesn't come easily. Living conditions are apt to be paleolithic. Food comes from. wherever you can scrounge it. Water is more often than not contaminated. And a significant portion of the population is apt to have a desire to torture or kill the "American invaders," even if another significant part of the population is glad to have them around.

Meanwhile, living off the land has limits. Despite their best efforts, the team may not find enough food to keep going. They may run out of ammunition or medical supplies. Wounded may have to be evacuated. And there you are, with many hostile miles separating you from the supply chain.

Demands for supplies can grow especially strong when forming or aiding a guerrilla band. Guerrillas may welcome them, tolerate their presence, or prefer to do without them, but they always crave the American bounty they are convinced the American soldiers are there to shower on them — food, medical supplies, uniforms, electronics, weapons, and ammunition. Showering such bounty is not a primary mission, yet often enough, the guerrillas may be more interested in the supplies than in the fight — thus yielding an opportunity for an A-Detachment to exercise its thinking and negotiating skills: "You do what we think is best, and we'll provide you with food and weapons."

In any event, the team has to know how to get in resupply. In rare circumstances, a team will be in a situation that permits a submarine delivery. Far more regularly, supplies are air-dropped or flown in.

Carl Stiner tells how this was done:

When you needed supplies, you sent out a list of your requirements by tapping them out in code on your ANGRA-109 radio. How the supplies would be delivered — whether dropped or flown in — depended on the nature of the situation.

If you were going to be resupplied by parachute, you would have selected a place where you wanted the supplies dropped — a clearing in the woods, the edge of a field, an empty section of a road, an open hilltop. This drop zone information, together with the code letter you'd use to signal the pilot (formed by small flaming cans), would be included in the resupply request. Then a day or two later, you'd learn when you could expect the delivery. This was always at night, at a particular time. Let's say 0330 on April 17.

On the seventeenth of April, you'd set up at the drop zone with your team and with the guerrillas you might need to secure the area and carry the supplies to the camp (if you were working with guerrillas). A few minutes before drop time, you would mark out the drop point with flame pots you'd make by filling C-ration cans (or any metal cans) with sand and gasoline. You would light these so they'd be visible two minutes prior to the designated drop time, and you left them lit for two to three minutes, but no more. If the plane wasn't there by then, you put them out.

A single plane would usually be flying this mission. The pilot had to penetrate enemy airspace, come in low enough to avoid radar, set a course, and then find these little points of light during that five-minute window, drop, and then continue on the course he'd set, so no enemy who might be looking could track where the drop had been made (or if it had been made).

Naturally, if he didn't find you during the five-minute window, you got no resupply. And you had to try again later.

The minute the plane was overhead, you put out the flame pots and prepared to grab the bundle that was parachuting down. Usually it came equipped with a tiny flashing light attached so you could see where it was coming down and start moving to where it was going to hit.

Once you had recovered the bundle, you had to recover the parachute and the cargo net the bundle was dropped in, then distribute the load among your carrying party (which might be just your team or it might be guerrillas), and sanitize the area so nobody could tell later that you had taken an airdrop there. This was all accomplished in the shortest possible time in order to avoid detection and compromise.

It was always interesting to find out what you were actually getting. Food, for instance, often came in the form of living animals. Sometimes you'd learn they had dropped a live animal when you heard moos coming from out of the sky. When that happened, you knew you had a problem. And if you had farm experience, you were grateful for it. Cows are never easy, and they aren't trained to jump out of airplanes; and if they hit the ground and broke a leg, you had a real problem. But even if they came down uninjured, they were often not gentle enough to be led off easily. Either way, they often started bellowing and making all kinds of noise, so you had to kill them right there, and then quarter the meat on the spot, so your carrying party could carry the edible parts and bury what you couldn't use.

Sometimes you might get a goat, a pig, or chickens. And on the whole, we preferred these to cows. They're easier to come by, relatively easy to handle, they don't weigh that much, and one person can usually carry them.

Eating out there in the woods was where I learned the value of hot sauce. Every Special Forces soldier carries a bottle of hot sauce in his rucksack. Once we got animals or birds back to camp and butchered them, well, you don't do the best job of cooking in the world out there, so a little hot sauce covers a lot of errors — Louisiana hot sauce, Texas Pete, or Tabasco — it sure helps the taste. It also helps regular rations, which we often had dropped in.

Of course, the A-Detachment part is not all there is to know about the resupply story. Let's look at it from the headquarters side:

Let's say we had a mission to resupply an A-Detachment in the field. The mission would go to the NCO who was the S-4 (logistics) of the C-Detachment to which the A-Detachment belonged. It was his job to put it all together. If it was a goat, pig, cow, or chickens, he had to go buy it from some farmer (funds were provided to pay for it), and he had to build a cage for it.

Among the other details he had to know would be the kind of airplane that would fly the mission, including most crucially the dimensions of its exit door, since you couldn't get anything in or out that was larger than the door. In other words, he had to take the size of the door into consideration in choosing an animal to air-drop and building a cage to contain it.

The NCO would then fly the mission, and he'd be the one who made the drop. While the pilot flew the course over the drop zone, the NCO had to put the animal, the cage, or the bundle out through the door at the right time to make it hit the drop zone that the A-Detachment had illuminated on the ground.

One time, while I was the S-3 of the C-Detachment, an A-Detachment had called in for resupply, and we had set up a drop that was to fly in on an Armv U-10 Helio Courier. The U-10 was a high-wing, single-engine turboprop that was both very rugged and a super-short-field airplane, which could take off and land in a matter of yards (every time you landed in one, you thought you'd crashed, because you hit the ground so hard). Though it was technically a four-place aircraft, we usually took out the rear seats to make room for cargo.

The night this resupply mission was to be flown, I decided I was going to go along to see how it went. When I got to the airfield, I found the supply sergeant there getting ready to load a crate full of white Leghorns — both chickens and roosters all mixed together — onto the U-10, and the crate was about twice as long as the inside dimensions of the aircraft. So about half of it was sticking out. In fact, so much was sticking out that the sergeant had to ride on top of the crate and the parachute all the way out to the drop to keep it from getting jerked out the door.

When we cranked up, feathers started flying. The force of the prop was blowing them off the chickens. But I didn't say anything; it was his show, not mine. And I kept quiet when we took off from the airport, although there was a cloud of feathers big enough to almost hide the plane.

From then on, things went pretty smoothly, and we went out and made a good drop.

The next morning, I went out to the swamp where the A-Detachment had their base camp area set up to check on how they were doing, and the first thing I saw was this one naked rooster, with a piece of heavy-duty cable looped around his leg, which was all they could find to tie him up with. The only feather on him was a tail feather sticking up, about three inches long, and it was broken.

When I asked them what in the world they were going to do with that rooster, they said, "Well, we haven't decided yet, but we have decided one thing, and that is that he ought to live. Anything that went through that flight and lived deserves to survive for a while longer."

Dealing with airdrops kept us busy, but we had a lot more to do when we had supplies delivered directly by aircraft. We had to know how to select and set up an airstrip, mark it, and then bring in an airplane at night. This was especially tough because we did all this totally on our own. We had no Air Force Combat controllers with us. We had only the members of our own detachment and the guerrillas, if we had guerrillas with us, to organize it. Then, when he came in, the pilot had to trust our judgment absolutely. He had never seen the airfield before. It was a blank to him.

In those days, we had several different kinds of aircraft available for this mission, all of them fixed-wing, because helicopters didn't have range enough for it. The Army had U-10s and Caribous, which were both capable of landing on dirt fields. But we also had available larger Air Force C- 123s and C-130s, which had to be landed on roads, and there were even a few C-47s still around. And from time to time, leased indigenous aircraft would be made available for covert operations.

What you'd do then is work out the length your airfield had to be, whether it was on a dirt field, a dirt road, or a paved road; you'd walk every inch of that length to make sure it wasn't too rough or rutted; and you'd get rid of rocks, power lines, and other obstacles. You'd check out the trees nearby and compute the approach glide path the plane would have to come in on, so it didn't hit any of them. You (and the guerrillas, if they were available) would then lay out flame pots so that the length of the runway was marked out. Once all that was taken care of, you'd radio in all the data associated with the airfield — its location, its dimensions, and so on — and your mission would be scheduled. That is, your headquarters would work out the particulars of the mission and get back to you with them, something like: "The plane will be there on 23 June, at 0330," which usually meant a window of five or ten minutes. "And it will be approaching on a certain azimuth."

When the window itself approached, you wouldn't have any radio communication with the pilot. He would land on your visual signal.

About the time the pilot was five minutes out, the flame pots would be lit. Meanwhile, whoever was running the airfield — officer or NCO — would take a flashlight with a colored filter on it (blue or green, usually — something pretty hard to see) and lie down on the approach end of the airstrip and wait.

The first thing the pilot would see was the flicker of the flame pots. When he saw those, he knew it was safe to land. That is, he knew not only where the field was and that you had laid it out, but that you had secured the area, and there was no enemy in the neighborhood. The next thing he'd see was the flashlight on the end of the runway, and he would then aim his left wheel at that light (because he was sitting in the left seat) and glide in about six feet above it. That meant that if you were the one holding the flashlight, you lay there absolutely still as he approached, seeming to come right at you, and stayed cool as several tons of airplane (if it was one of the big Air Force ones) lumbered in at man height over you. It was a hairy experience.

Once he had landed, we'd off-load the cargo and he would take on anything or anyone you had for him to bring out, and then he would turn around and take off in the opposite direction.

We practiced all that many times.

SURVIVAL AND ESCAPE-AND-EVASION

Special Forces soldiers had to be expert at survival, escape, and evasion. They had to know how to live off the land, how to set up snares and traps to catch their food, what was edible and what was not. And they had to be expert swimmers.

Carl Stiner continues:

In Vietnam, sometime in 1964—65, two NCOs drowned trying to swim a river while they were trying to evade capture. As a result, the requirement was established that we all had to be able to swim (I think it was a mile). And we had to be able to swim at least half a mile with our boots and combat gear on.

If you were carrying a rucksack and it was essential that you had to keep it, you built a raft out of your poncho for the rucksack and other heavy equipment and supplies, including your weapon. Then you towed this raft as you swam.

You also had to know how to assist your rescue in whatever way possible. Specifically, you had to know how to set up pickup zones, and how to signal searching aircraft with mirrors.

The officers were taught special code writing, in the event we were captured. It was a very complex and sophisticated system that involved the positioning of letters that were included in specially designated code words. That way, if we were allowed to write letters, we could include codes that would indicate where we were being held.

Detachment commanders must also have the technical expertise to set up and operate an escape-and-evasion net. The infrastructure available is, of course, critical — safe houses, drop points, and the transportation network. But even more critical is selecting the right people to operate the net (which means you need a system for vetting them to ensure that they continue to be people you can trust), and establishing compartments (cells), so that if one of your operatives or compartments is compromised, the remainder of the mechanism is not. If a cell system is established and operated properly, one cell does not know who is in the next cell.

Your transportation system must be organized and compartmented in the same way. If the plan is to take people from here to there and drop them off at a point where they can be picked up by someone else and taken to another cell's safe house, only the detachment commanders should know the complete operation of the whole system.

Meanwhile, the "precious cargo" that enters this net has no say-so over their own security and destiny. Nor would they usually have any means of self-protection: Their lives depend absolutely on the people that make up the net.

During the time I was undergoing survival, escape, and evasion training, intelligence reports began to indicate — and in vivid detail — the horrific conditions and torture undergone by U.S. military prisoners held by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. As a consequence, another special area, resistance training, was added to our program of instruction.

Although what we got was not nearly as intense and realistic as the training given today, it was still pretty tough, considering that we were getting a start-up program and didn't have much available time left in our course. It was of great benefit to each of us.

Today — now that we have the experiences of those prisoners who endured and survived — nineteen days of intensified training have been added to the Special Forces Q Course, called SERE (Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion). During this training, students are placed in the role of prisoner and subjected (short of personal injury, and under the close watch and care of appropriate medical professionals) to the conditions and treatment they could expect if taken captive. SERE training brings them to the absolute limits of their mental and physical endurance, and is fundamental to survival in captivity.

Up until the time I went through SERE training, I had been satisfied that I had received the best training possible to develop me technically and tactically as a leader of men in combat. However, I had not yet actually experienced combat.

The Q Course, and particularly the SERE experience, prepared me for the real experience of combat in ways that everything I'd learned up until then had not. They revealed to me that in order for a leader to possess and project the courage expected by his men in combat, he himself must find the means to be at peace with himself. For me, this strength comes from an abiding faith in my relationship with Cod. This strength allows a person to live one day at a time without fear of death. I have never known an atheist in combat, and I do not ever expect to find one.

I do not believe that this is a revelation discovered only by Carl Stiner. Based upon my experience, it is a belief that serves as the inner strength and motivation of the greatest majority of all combat leaders, both officer and enlisted. I do not know of a substitute for this.

THE GRADUATION EXERCISE: GOBBLER WOODS/ROBIN SAGE

The graduation exercise, an unconventional warfare field-training exercise, which is conducted approximately seventy-five miles northwest of Fort Bragg in the Uhwarrie National Forest and surrounding communities and lasts approximately three weeks, is the culmination of the Q Course. During this period the Special Forces students, now organized as A-Detachments, put into practice the skills they have learned in their training.

For the purposes of the Gobbler Woods exercise in which Stiner participated, the training area became the fictional country, Pineland, which was run by a corrupt leftist government, backed by a larger Communist country. An insurgency was striving to overthrow the government and bring in democracy, but they needed help. The Communist country had meanwhile pledged to send forces to help the Pineland government crush the insurgents.

The exercise was made as realistic as possible. For example, local civilians played various parts, and provided support to both sides. The counterinsurgency force, usually an active-duty brigade, and the guerrilla force, approximately 100 to 150 soldiers, were drawn from various support units at Fort Bragg.

The fledgling Special Forces soldiers were evaluated on their specialties, tactical skills, and overall performance within their A-Detachment.

Carl Stiner continues:

I have participated on both sides of this exercise, both as a student and as a guerrilla chief. This is a particular exercise from 1964:

After they'd been given the mission, the A-Detachment entered an "isolation area" to begin their preparation (the isolation area is part of the preparation for every Special Forces mission). While there, they saw no families, friends, or anybody else who was not involved in preparing them for their mission. For the Gobbler Woods exercise, the isolation period lasted about a week; for a real-world mission, it could last up to six weeks. During this time, they developed their operations order and studied every aspect of the operational area where they would be inserted — the government, terrain, climate, personalities, the guerrilla force, the people, the culture, and anything else appropriate. They were assisted in this by a pool of experts with advanced degrees who provided instruction in specific areas.

The final phase of isolation was the briefback, usually to the Group Commander and his staff. This covered — to the "nth" degree — every detail of the mission and how it would be accomplished. This had all been committed to memory. No orders or paperwork were carried by any member of the team. After the briefback, the judgment was made whether or not they were ready to go. If that decision was a "yes," they moved directly from the isolation area to the departure airfield ready for launch.

While the A-Detachment was making its preparations, the guerrilla chief (usually a Special Forces major or captain) had moved to the operational area and begun working at winning the hearts and minds of the local people in order to establish a support infrastructure for the guerrilla force.

When I played guerrilla chief, the most effective technique 1 found was to drive up on a Sunday morning to Albemarle County (in Pineland) with Sue, and spend the day meeting people. I would visit country grocery stores and restaurants and any other gathering I could find. I was looking for people who needed some kind of help.

At one stop, for example, I learned that a man with a large dairy operation was having a rough time getting his cows milked on time and was way behind getting his crops in, mainly because his wife was in bad shape with cancer.

I went to see him, explained who I was, and told him about the training exercise that was about to take place. Though he'd heard of it, he told me, he hadn't participated in the past. I also told him that I grew up on a farm in Tennessee and was well aware of the challenges he was facing working a farm and taking care of a sick wife.

"In a couple of days," I said, "I'm going to have about 150 soldiers, all wearing civilian clothes, who're going to serve as my guerrillas. I'll be glad to pick four or five farm-raised boys out of this group and let them live and work with you. You can let them bunk in chicken houses, or the dairy barn, or wherever you want them, and they are yours to work to help bring in the crops and to help with the milking, or whatever.

"All I ask is for you to protect them if the counterinsurgency force" — the 101st Airborne, in this case—"comes around trying to police up my guerrillas. If they do, I just want you to say, 'I don't know anything about that. I don't fool with these things. And I don't want you running over my fields with your trucks.

"All I ask in return is for you to let me use one of your trucks, maybe a couple of nights a week, to haul fifteen or twenty of my guerrillas over to simulate blowing up a bridge or some similar target."

"That's fine with me," he told me. "And I appreciate very much the help."

"That's wonderful, I said. "But how about talking to some of your friends to see if some of them also need some help?"

He told me he'd do that, and he did.

I then reminded him about how important it was for us to trust each other. "If we don't," I said, "we stand to lose all of our guerrillas and then we won't be able to help you or your friends."

He told me he understood that, and he did.

And so, with this farmer's help, I was able to establish other contacts that ultimately became a key part of my infrastructure throughout the community.

I also contacted local pastors to find out who in their congregations might need some help, and they offered me good sources that provided protection and support for small groups of my guerrillas.

It's amazing how you can organize people for our kinds of causes. They all want to get in there and support — sometimes more than you really want. I USUALLY brought my guerrillas out a week before the Special Forces students jumped in, in order to allow time for blending with the local people and getting our operating base set up properly. On the day they arrived, I selected those who'd be going out to work for and live with the contacts I'd made, like the dairy farmer.

But before they did that, I laid down the law about standards, principles, and conduct: "There is to be absolute integrity," I told them. "Respect for the human dignity of each and every person; respect for property; no abuse (verbal or otherwise); no hanky-panky; and no incidents that would degrade your morality and our ability to live and operate among the people. We are here to help them, and they will help us if we do. We cannot survive without their protection and support. One bad incident from you, and you are gone — and so is your career. And by the way, no alcohol!"

I would also tell them, "Co to church, sing in the choir if you can, and get to know everybody in that church. If you blend into that community and cause them to respect you, they will protect you and we'll have their cooperation in everything we do."

1 always tried to put my guerrillas in key parts of the community. They and the people that support them were my intelligence network. That way I always knew what was going on all over the county.

A couple of days before the A-Detachment was to jump in, my guerrillas would come together in order to organize our "base camp" and develop plans for the linkup and reception of the A-Detachment. There was also a rehearsal for securing the drop zone.

After the jump, the assistant guerrilla chief (a Special Forces NCO) usually made the linkup and guided the detachment to the base camp. Once there, they were told they would meet the guerrilla chief the next morning. The A-Detachment spent the rest of the night in the base camp, usually guarded by the guerrillas.

At the morning meeting, which usually took about an hour, the guerrilla chief always played hardball. He made his initial demands as tough as he could, so it would be close to impossible for the A-Detachment commander to meet them. We did this in order to evaluate the A-Detachment commander's ability to establish rapport and gain enough of the confidence of the guerrilla chief to accomplish the mission.

After the meeting, the guerrilla chief presented a list of the supplies and materials he wanted and gave a rundown of the capabilities of his force and the training assistance they needed.

The A-Detachment commander, having done his homework during the detachment's isolation back at Bragg, then presented his training plan for the guerrillas.

The initial phase of formal training usually started the next morning. While this was under way, the A-Detachment assessed and validated the training readiness of the "G" (guerrilla) force for conducting operations. Meanwhile, the detachment commander and the guerrilla chief formulated an operation plan together, with specific targets for accomplishing the overall strategic objective.

In addition to the tactical aspects of the plan, psychological operations and civil affairs played a vital role to ensure the support of the people. The entire effort had to be truly integrated, with the parts supporting the whole.

Of course, I had already started civil affairs work within the community by providing selected guerrillas to work with people like the dairy farmer whose wife had cancer. But more could be done — such as medical assistance missions, for example, where our medic treated minor illnesses in the more remote parts of the county where medical help was scarce. We also had guerrillas (free labor) clean up playgrounds and cemeteries and the like. And to widen and strengthen my intelligence net and base of support, I provided guerrillas (in pairs) to the city and county maintenance departments.

The A-Detachment itself had been augmented with a psychological operations specialist, who (among other things) could produce leaflets (though in a very rudimentary way compared with what we can do today). Nevertheless, we produced and distributed leaflets designed to degrade the will, loyalty, and combat effectiveness of the counterinsurgency force, and to bolster and widen our support among the people.

We distributed our leaflets by airdrop at night, or by hand; and they were amazingly effective, especially in inhibiting the counterinsurgency force. For example, landowners and farmers would prevent them from using or even crossing their land — while at the same time harboring us and providing support.

1 guess this was the beginning of my understanding of the real power of psychological operations. If you can influence and control people's minds, then you are well on the way to winning, while keeping the loss of lives to a minimum.

By the end of the first week, the training of the guerrillas was going well, and they were hitting one point target (a bridge, for instance) each night. Meanwhile, local farmers, bread-delivery distributors, and the county maintenance department were providing trucks for our transportation — and were even scouting some targets for us. By the end of the second week, the guerrillas had progressed to platoon-size (thirty to forty men) raids on larger targets. By the third and final week, they were making even larger raids.

Throughout all this activity (while operating in a community we had never known before), we didn't lose a single man to the counterinsurgency force — although they chased us day and night. Nor did we have a single bad incident from either our A-Detachment soldiers or the guerrilla force. Nobody did anything we would not be proud of.

As a result of our operations, the leftist government of Pincland was overthrown and replaced by a democracy.

Was it now time for the A-Detachment to go home? Not quite yet.

An important aspect of unconventional warfare is bringing it to closure. Quite simply, no new government can exist for long without the support of the force that helped to bring it to power, nor can they risk having a formidable armed band running around out of control. The best way to deal with these possibilities was for our guys to work out a plan to disarm and disband the "G" force. And they had to do it before they could go home. (In real life, the smoothness of this operation usually depended on concessions made by the new government to the guerrilla leader.)

And so ended the Q Course of 1964. I'm proud to say that all the SF students who participated earned the "flash" that made them fully qualified as Green Berets.

SPECIAL FORCES TRAINING TODAY

In recent years, Special Forces mission areas have expanded. As this has happened, so has the scope of the selection process and the training program. Thus today, the initial phase of formal qualification training lasts between twenty-four and thirty-six months, depending on the MOS of the student.

Applicants are all volunteers. They must be airborne-qualified, in good physical condition, and have nothing in their backgrounds that would prevent a security clearance to at least the SECRET level.

The Special Forces Qualification Course breaks down as follows:

Phase I (Camp MacKall): SF Assessment and Selection—25 days

Phase II (Camp MacKall): Land Navigation, Small-Unit Training, Live Fire—48 days

Phase III (Fort Bragg): MOS Training: 18B (Weapons)—2 months18C (Engineers)—2 months18D (Medic)—12 months18E (Commo)—4 months

Phase IV (Camp MacKall): Training to include Robin Sage (2 weeks)—39 days

SERE: Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion (Camp MacKall): 19 days

Graduation: Flash Awarded Language Training: 4–6 months

The toughest part physically is the SF assessment and selection phase, during which soldiers are continuously assessed to determine whether or not they have what it takes. The first week is designed to evaluate a soldier's emotional and psychological makeup, mainly by means of written and practical tests. The second week is structured to test the soldier's endurance, strength, will, and mental toughness. It involves a complete range of physical tests, including timed runs, obstacle courses, rucksack marches, day and night land navigation, and swimming wearing uniform and boots. During this week, the soldier's ability to function effectively in a high-stress environment is also evaluated by means of sleep deprivation and more psychological testing. The third week evaluates his leadership abilities as an individual and as part of a team.

At the end of the three weeks, a board of impartial senior officers and, NCOs reviews each candidate's performance record and makes the final determination about his suitability for Special Forces training. The board also recommends a military occupational specialty for each soldier.

The Assessment and Selection course is conducted eight times a year. In the past, the average selection rate has averaged about twenty-nine percent. Recently, however, the rate has risen to fifty percent. A more stringent preliminary screening process and better-quality applicants have meant that the higher rate has been accomplished without sacrificing quality. Soldiers who fail to make the selection are sent bach to their units with a letter of commendation. Some are allowed to try again, and some of them will make it on the second go.

Meanwhile, those who were selected mill enter the Q Course (Phase II), where they must satisfactorily complete whatever their MOS requires (including Robin Sage and SERE training).

After graduation and award of the "flash," each soldier is assigned to a unit, but before he joins his A-Detachment, he must complete six months (or more) of language training (depending on his unit's area of orientation).

Now he has mastered the basics, but as a member of a team his training continues for the rest of his career. His next formal course of instruction (which comes very soon) will likely he military free-fall (parachute) or combat diver (scuba) training. Additionally, he will hegin to receive intense formal instruction in the culture of his area of focus.

CARL STINER, GREEN BERET

During the two months after graduation from the Q Course, Stiner attended Jumpmaster School (two weeks at Fort Bragg) and continued to improve the proficiency of his A-Detachment in field-training exercises in the Uhwarrie National Forest.

In January 1965, and for the next six months, he was commander of a B-Detachment in A Company, 3rd Special Forces Group. More field, training followed, and on a larger scale.

One exercise I particularly remember (modeled after "Cobbler Woods") involved two B-Detachments — mine in a counterinsurgency role against Captain Charlie Johnson's in a UW role. This exercise was conducted in an area of Florida, bounded in the north by the city of Titusville, in the south by the city of Melbourne, in the west by the St. John's River, and in the cast by the Atlantic Ocean. All of this was civilian-owned land, and virgin territory for military training activities. A large segment of the civilian populacc was organized and trained by one or the other B-Detachment, and they participated enthusiastically. Army aviation was used extensively in support. Air boats were also used by both sides (great preparatory training for Vietnam!).

At the conclusion of the exercise, and in an effort to desensitize and reunite our civilian friends who had participated (some had gotten a little too involved — they actually wanted to keep fighting their "enemies," some of them with guns), we hosted a barbecue supper — and military demonstration — for the entire community. This worked. Peace was restored.

As we were flying back to Fort Bragg the next day, I noticed a commotion up near the front of the airplane.

Some NCOs had been trying to smuggle a four-foot alligator back as a company mascot. When I checked out the commotion, I discovered that the alligator had gotten loose, and they were trying to subdue him. They eventually did, binding him with rope from one end to the other.

When we landed, we were met by our commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hoyt, and Sergeant Major Arthur. the sergeant major immediately detected the smuggling operation, and took the four smugglers, along with the gator, to the company area and had them spend most of the night digging the gator a pond. They secured him there with leg irons so he would not get loose and cat the real company mascot, a dog.

It didn't stop there. The NCOs allowed that the gator had to be "airborne-qualified, especially since the dog was. So they connived with the riggers into making him a harness and a special parachute. About a week later, during a scheduled jump on St. Mere Eglise Drop Zone, they threw the gator out of an aircraft and followed him to the ground. He made it down just fine, but when they got to where he'd come down, all they found was the harness and chute. He'd eaten his way out of the harness and disappeared.

Thirteen years later, the Fort Bragg game warden discovered a seven-foot alligator in the swamp at the western end of St. Mere Eglise Drop Zone, the only gator ever at Fort Bragg — and it remains a mystery to this day how he got there.

Soldiers, and especially Special Forces soldiers, are always looking for imaginative ways to entertain themselves, and there is nothing wrong with it, so long as it is legal, ethical, and no one is hurt.

In July 1965, following the training exercise in Florida, I became the Company S-3 (Operations Officer), responsible for the training and readiness of the company. 1 remained in that position until the spring of 1966, when I left Special Forces to attend the Command and Ceneral Staff College at Leavenworth, Kansas.

During this period, when all the services were undergoing the buildup for Vietnam, large numbers of draftees were being brought into the Army, and the training centers were filled to capacity.

In August, the entire company, which consisted of the headquarters and two B-Detachments (the third B-Detachment was on mission to Ethiopia), had deployed to the Pisgah National Forest in western North Carolina for training in the higher and more rugged parts of the mountains. This had been ongoing for about a week, when I received a call on my FM radio from Lieutenant Colonel Hoyt, who, I could tell, was in a helicopter, asking me to meet him at a road intersection about ten miles away from our base camp.

I jumped into my leased pickup truck and headed for the intersection, thinking as I went that it was unusual for him to fly this far (more than a hundred miles). Whatever the reason, it must be important.

I arrived at the intersection before he did, and marked a landing zone in a small clearing beside the intersection with the orange panels that we always carried.

When he landed ten minutes later, he came running up to me (the helicopter did not shut down). "How long will it take you to get the company back to Fort Bragg?" he asked — the first words out of his mouth.

"It'll take a while," I answered, "because they are spread out all over these mountains in various operating areas, and we don't have enough transportation to move the entire company in one lift. I guess with the vehicles that we have, and with what they can come up with through their local civilian contacts, we could all close Fort Bragg sometime during the night."

"Good," he said. "Go back and get them organized and moving."

Then he explained: "The training centers have overflowed, and just this morning we received the mission to conduct basic entry-level training for approximately five hundred new infantry draftees that will arrive at Bragg within three to four days.

"Group is working on where to house them," he went on, "and what parts of the training might be done more efficiently by committee" — weapons training and the like—"and this should be pretty well finalized by the time I get back.

"You have more training experience of this nature than anyone else in the Group," he continued, "and the Group Commander" — by then Colonel Leroy Stanley—"and I want you to lead a group of selected cadre to Fort Jackson, departing at six in the morning, to observe how they conduct Basic Combat Training" — in this case he meant the first eight weeks—"and bring back all the lesson plans you can gather up."

"No problem, sir," I answered. "I'll get the company moving right away. As for the basic training part, I've got this cold, from beginning to end, and can teach all the subjects blindfolded. But we'll have to give our cadre some preliminary training to get started, and I can do that in a couple of days, and continuing as we progress through the training cycle.

"What you can do, sir, to facilitate organizing for training," I told him, "is to go back and begin to pick and structure the cadre for a training battalion that will consist of three companies." And then I laid out how the structure ought to work: "These should be commanded by captains, with a sergeant major or master sergeant as first sergcant; four platoons per company should be commanded by a lieutenant, with a master sergeant or sergeant first class as platoon sergeant; and each platoon should consist of four squads, each led by a staff sergeant or sergeant." I also told him that it would be very beneficial if I could take to Fort Jackson with me our three company commanders and one representative (officer or NCO) from each platoon (a total of fifteen), to observe firsthand how it is done.

"Okay," Hoyt said. "You'll be commanding one of the companies. And while you're putting your guys together out here, I'll go back and ensure that the right people are ready for the trip to Fort Jackson."

On my way back to our base camp, I was thinking, "Man, what an opportunity to turn out the best-trained and — motivated battalion ever. With all of these outstanding NCOs, there's no limit to what we can do for these new men."

At the same time, I couldn't help but contrast the performance of our Special Forces guys in a training situation with what I'd had to handle in my last training company at Fort Jackson: It was me and an outstanding first sergeant (Ned Lyle, to my knowledge the only man in the Army authorized to wear the bayonet as a decoration), a Specialist 4 company clerk (who was pending charges for hoarding mail and possessing pornographic materials), four NCOs (all possessing medical profiles that precluded their making the morning twenty-minute run; instead I kept them posted at strategic locations where they could police up the stragglers while I ran the company), a mess sergeant who was addicted to paregorie, and a supply scrgcant I didn't trust. This was all that I had to work with, and I thought we did a good job — considering.

During one period at Jackson, I had two companies of more than two hundred trainees each in cycle at the same time: One company was in its seventh week of training, and the other was just beginning its first week. We managed the training so that one NCO stayed with cach company at all times. The two other NCOs and I would train one company from 4:00 A.M. to noon, and the other from 1:00 to 9:00 P.M.

In other words, considering the talent and caring leadership we were about to bring to bear on this mission, it would be a piece of cake and a very rewarding experience for us and the new recruits.

After Lieutenant Colonel I Ioyt left, I called base camp and instructed my radio operator to have all detachment commanders standing by for a conference call when I arrived.

During the conference call, I advised the commanders of the new mission, then instructed them to move their units by "infiltration," so as to close on Fort Bragg by midnight. "Infiltration" means authority to move by individual vehicle over multiple routes, rather than by convoy over a single route. I didn't tell them how to do it, because I knew they would figure out the "how."

This was about 3:00 P.M.; they had nine hours to get back.

The next morning at 5:00, I met Lieutenant Colonel Hoyt at the company headquarters. He had followed through on his part. Not only had the names of personnel been slated against the battalion structure I had recommended, but the group selected for the visit to Fort Jackson was standing by and ready to go.

Before we left, I asked him for one other thing: "In order to bring these new troops on right, we need to have the barracks ready in advance, including having the beds made. The sooner we can get this done, the more time we'll have available for training the trainers before the new troops arrive." I knew that some of the older NCOs would probably bitch about making the beds, but I also knew that before the training cycle was over, they would see it was a wise move. This would be reflected in the attitude and motivation of the new troops, who'd have realised they were fortunate to be in the hands of caring professionals.

The day at Fort Jackson proved very worthwhile. We observed the training in action, talked with the cadre, and gathered up all the lesson plans to bring back with us.

After our return to Bragg, we spent the next three days getting organized and putting our common training areas in order. Then we went through a two-day train-the-trainer program, which took us through the first couple of weeks of the training cycle.

And then at 4:00 P.M. on the fourth day after notification, we received about five hundred new inductees straight from civilian life.

The next eight weeks proved a memorable and rewarding experience both for our cadre and the trainees. The cadre demonstrated incredible professionalism and caring, and the training battalion responded with incredible receptivity, motivation, and esprit.

Even though the trainees eventually ended up in Vietnam as individual replacements, many chose to make the Army a career, and some found their way back to Special Forces as outstanding NCOs. Others — the better-educated ones — ended up as commissioned officers.

Vietnam was also demanding ever more from Special Forces. Especially important at that time were trained B-Detachments, and this became our priority mission. For my final seven months in the 3rd Croup, we organized, trained, and deployed three B-Detachments to Southeast Asia (to Thailand and Vietnam).

Since increased emphasis was now being focused on counterinsurgency and advisory activities in Vietnam — organizing, training, equipping, and employing Montagnard tribesmen for thwarting the infiltration of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units; MIKE force reaction units; and advisory activities for South Vietnamese Army units — the main thrust of the tactical training was focused on tactical operations at battalion and lower levels, including the employment and integration of fire support, aerial as well as artillery.

I was in fact scheduled to deploy with each of the three units we sent over. But then, about a month prior to their deployment, I was told that I had not been cleared to go by the office of Officer Personnel Operations (OPO). The reason, I finally learned from OPO, was that I had been selected to attend the Command and General Staff College, and then I'd go to Vietnam (though this was not specifically stated, 1 understood that I most likely would not be assigned to a Special Forces unit there).

I left A Company, 3rd SFG, in late May 1966.