by Tom Clancy
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 th
e 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 buil
dings.
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…