by Tom Clancy
Naturally, the computer operators inside opened the hatch. "You know you can't come in," they said. "This is—"
"That's all right. We have a message from the Corps commander that they want you to send out." And it was two red smoke grenades. They chucked them through the hatch and slammed it shut.
Pretty soon, the fresh air generators cranked up, and red smoke came rolling out of the exhaust ports. It was quite a sight.
Other members of the strike team "killed" the remaining computer operators in their tents — with lipstick, their normal method of "slitting" friendly throats.
As one NCO described it: "We crawled into the tent where they were all sleeping and waited under the bunks where we could reach up with our fingertips and find them, and then we'd take the lipstick and draw it right across their necks.
"But one of them, a female, just gave me all kinds of problems. I kept trying to find the head, and I couldn't find it. Then 1 heard this screech: 'Eeeeeeek.' So I didn't move for a while. I just laid under her cot till she went back to sleep. But because of her eeeeek, I knew where her head was, and after she was asleep again, I found her neck."
(Incidentally, if all of this had been a real Soviet penetration, the loss would have been catastrophic for the Corps in the near term, but it would not have permanently stopped Corps operations, only significantly interrupted things for twelve to twenty-four hours until the damage could be repaired.)
When the day came for us to give the action report, the general said, "I want the team members to come up and give a debriefing to the entire Corps staff."
Soon after that, the strike team, in their regular uniforms, were setting up the debriefing in a big theater, when a suspicious colonel came in (it turned out he was responsible for security and counterintelligence operations). "What are you people doing?" he asked.
"We're up here to brief the general."
"What are you briefing the general on?"
"We're briefing the general on the infiltration of VII Corps tactical CPs in the field."
The colonel's face went white, and he turned around and left in a fury. In fact, pretty soon most of the corps staff, from colonels on down, were equally incensed — especially as the debriefing proceeded and we described, in detail how we had broken into everything they had.
This led to a lot of hard feelings.
Another example of the kind of thing that would really incense the rest of the Army happened in 1978, when we were scheduled to participate in that year's REFORGER (Reinforcement or Germany). Beforehand, all the leaders had to go up to the V Corps to be briefed about what everyone was going to do.
At the end of the briefing, the commander got up and said, "As the United States V Corps commander, I will not allow the so-called elite units to disrupt the exercise. They will not be allowed to run any mission I do not directly, personally okay." He didn't want to let us operate — that is, to make him or his exercise look bad.
Well, we were sitting in the back of the room, while the big chiefs — the Corps commanding general, his G-3 and G-2, and the Allied commanders participating in REFORGER — were up front on a kind of stage looking at us get painted as black sheep. It didn't sit well with us.
So REFORGER continued down the road, and we looked like we were just cooling our heels; but what we really did was select one of the division headquarters. "Before the exercise is over, we are going to destroy the division headquarters," we promised ourselves. And then we prepared and deployed a small reconnaissance team from one of the A- Detachments to check out the operational area.
The team, which wore civilian clothes and spoke fluent German, made the initial preparation by studying the operational area and deciding on individual cover stories, in case they were stopped by German authorities or in some way became involved with American military units. To the Germans, they were Americans on leave and carried the proper documents. To the Americans, they were local Germans, and carried authentic-appearing German documents.
The division field CP was the focus of the operation, with the operations center, communications center, and computer center the primary items of interest.
The strike team then remained in isolation /mission preparation at Bad Tolz and planned/rehearsed, according to the information they were receiving from the recon team. This primarily focused on movement by helicopter, rappelling from the helicopter with operational equipment, movement to the objective area, linkup with the recon team, attacking the division CP, movement out of the area, and pickup by helicopter in an isolated area. Again, we also rehearsed snipers to cover the attack and withdrawal from the target.
Finally, the general thought he'd delayed us long enough to keep us from running an exercise against him or one of his units. So eighteen hours before the end of the exercise, he okayed us to run operations. What he didn't know was that we already had the operations set up and cut.
At that time there were storms all over Germany, but we flew the helicopters carrying the strike teams in and out of them, putting the teams about five miles away from the division headquarters. It was all a piece of cake; we came straight through: the command post, the operations center. In fact, the SF guys were taking the maps down off the wall and rolling them up when the assistant division commander came in. Here's this general standing there with a fish-out-of-water look on his face, and here are these three or four other guys, all in black paint and balaclavas, dismantling his CP.
"Well, who are you?" he asked.
"We're Special Forces," they said. "We're destroying your division headquarters." And then one of them turned around and shot him with a blank and said, "And, General you're supposed to fall down on the floor, becau-se you're dead."
This next story comes from a strike team member at a nuclear weapons site we'd also decided to take out. "You know," he recounts, "there was this big ol' female lieutenant — she was really pissed off. She was just going wild at the idea that we would take down her little kingdom. I thought we were going to have to handcuff her before we finished. In fact, we did handcuff her. We not only handcuffed, her, we handcuffed her dog — a big German shepherd. We duct-taped his muzzle. I'm sure even today that lady still hates us, because, one, we got in her installation, and, two, we did what we were there to do."
When it was all over, we didn't actually do anything to the sites. We just went in, left them a card that said: "We would have destroyed you, " and left.
At the debriefing, the commander didn't like what he was hearing — at least at first; but as the debrief continued, he began to get very interested and to participate with some energy, particularly when he realized we were just doing what we had been instructed to do by USAREUR and were not laughing at him or his unit.
"We could have done whatever we wanted to do," we told him. "We took your CP and weapons sites. We passed through the outside security force like butter, and we took it all down so quickly that we didn't set the alarms off; and that gave us a window of time to do whatever we wanted."
We then submitted a detailed report to USAREUR, as required by our instructions, and they used the report to make improvements in their operations for real-world operations.
Small wonder that there was friction. Playing "Gotcha" made the SF guys feel good — and they were doing what they were trained to do — but it's hard to blame the "big" Army for not welcoming them as brothers.
As a result, Special Forces eventually became a bill payer for the rest of the Army. Pentagon finances tend to be a zero-sum game: Your gain is my loss — a battalion less for me, a battalion more for you. Those who have power, influence, or backers at the Pentagon are happier with their budget than those who are seen as marginal or out of fashion. That was the Special Forces.
When the cutbacks first began to hit Special Forces in the early '70s, they were assigned few real-world missions outside the United States, despite the fact that "slow-burn" wars, both Communist- and non-Communist-inspired, continued to fester in the Third World. So the Special
Forces had to find ways to keep themselves occupied. Major General Hank Emerson, the SF commander, conducted benign real-world SF-type missions inside the United States — missions that had the added benefit of providing needed services to poor and isolated communities, migrant farm workers, prison inmates, and especially to American Indians.
Green Berets parachuted into Arizona and linked up with Indians at Supai. Together they built a bridge across Havasu Creek, which allowed the Indians to take their farm machinery across the creek and into their fields. Later, Green Beret veterinarians checked Indian livestock for disease, gave inoculations, and offered classes in animal care.
Among the Seminoles, Green Berets taught local officers law-enforcement techniques; gave written and spoken English classes for Seminole children and adults; provided instructional programs dealing with drug and alcohol abuse, first aid, and nutrition; and provided increased health and dental services. They provided similar services for the Cheyenne and other native peoples.
None of this was their "real" mission, but the training allowed the much weakened and reduced Special Forces to keep themselves tuned up and ready for when the call came again.
An example of the kind of challenge they faced came in 1982. The 5th SF Group at Fort Bragg had been given the assignment to support the recently created Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) — which two years later became CENTCOM — in its planning for Southwest Asia. Iran was then a major focus. According to the conventional wisdom, the Soviets could possibly roll down through Iran, grab its warm-water ports, and of course, its oil, thus affording them the strategic position to control the flow of all oil out of the Cuff. The RDJTF's mission was to make sure that did not happen.
Operating in Southwest Asia meant deserts, of course, but as a consequence of the chaos after Vietnam, no one in Special Forces had desert training.
Jim Cuest, then the 5th Group commander, tells the story:
The 5th was a big group. In 1982, we had fifty-four A-Detachments, but our entire training budget was only $350,000. Major General Joe Lutz, the commander of the JFK Center, told me, "I want you to train your group to go to war in the desert."
"Yes, sir," I said. "I'll do that."
But when I started checking into the realities of desert training, I realized that nobody in SF had actually trained there. I told General Lutz that we needed a site in the desert where we could start training the troops.
"We don't have any money for that," he told me. "But go ahead and do it, and we'll find the money somehow." And he did.
So we got started.
I sent a major and a couple of captains out west, and they found a post near Fort Hauchucha, Arizona, near Tombstone, where the local desert matched up pretty closely with the deserts in the Middle East; it was the harshest desert we could find. We then put a training unit out there.
At the same time, I commissioned a desert study, which concluded, "In Vietnam, the engagement range for the enemy was usually fifty to three hundred meters. In the desert, it starts at fifteen hundred meters. To fight there, you need bigger, more accurate weapons."
Other important conclusions: First, you must prepare yourself psychologically to operate in such a strange and hostile environment. Second, mobility is a must. You need a vehicle. You can't just walk in the desert very far and survive; the rough terrain nears you out. And you need something to carry water, equipment, and survival gear. In most other operational areas, we carry all this in rucksacks. But not in the desert. Third, you must be able to navigate by the stars, like ships at set. And then you also must know how to camouflage in the desert, how to estimate distances, how to make expedient repairs on vehicles and other pieces of key equipment (its a long way bach to your support).
Then we got the group together, and I told them right up front: "Most of you are veterans of Vietnam, where — unfortunately — we fought in the jungle. Now you're going into the desert to learn how to fight there, because you don't know how. That means we're going to have to shift the total thinking of the group."
We trained for seventy-six days, and the guys learned how to survive and navigate. Navigation is damned difficult. You either have a haze, which keeps you from seeing far enough to orient yourself, or if it's clear, everything appears far closer than it actually is, and when you get off the post, it's really harsh. We had a lot of trouble getting accustomed to navigating in the desert.
After four weeks of orientation and general learning, we put them out in the desert in A-Detachments, and took everything away from them — no food, no water — and they had to survive for two weeks. Live or die, it was up to them. (Of course, we had our own outpost to watch them.)
After they'd been out for a while, somebody came up to me and said, "You know, the guys out there look like that movie, Quest For Fire" (where cave-men roamed around a desert trying to survive.) He was right; they did. In the daytime, the sun was so hot they stayed under shelter, and when they had to go out, they tied rags around their heads, like Arabs. They hunted and traveled at night, with homemade spears, slingshots, anything they could get. And they hunted anything they could find — porcupines, birds, snakes.
Special Forces are very cunning. After they came back in, they told us, "As we wandered along the wadis, we kept seeing these little holes. 'What the hell are they?' we kept asking ourselves. And it finally dawned on us that they were rat holes. And that meant rattlesnakes were going to come out at night and hunt them. And that meant we could get them both.
"I don't know how many rattlesnakes we killed and ate, but we depopulated some of those areas."
After we found out about the rat holes, we always put guys in areas where there was a good supply of them.
The same thing went for water. We always put the guys in areas where they could find it. Before they went out, they'd study maps, which showed where they could dig down and get water; it would seep up under dried streambeds. In some places, little springs trickled up, but they had to be careful about these, because some of them were alkaline.
After we'd been doing this for a while, we realized we needed vehicles, not only for the reasons already mentioned but to use as weapons platforms for. 50-caliber machine guns and TOWs. Our area studies had convinced us that any enemy with the potential to hurt us in the desert would be mounted on vehicles — or, in some cases, camels.
We needed vehicles, but there was no money And since We couldn't get anybody to give us anything, we took our own trucks, painted them desert brown (for camouflage), and cut their tops off. We had to do that so the trucks could be easily dismounted — but also so we could mount the weapons and have 360-degree observation on the move. In the desert, you need to see in every direction — especially for protection against surprise or helicopters.
"Cut the tops off very carefully," I told our mechanics. "If we ever have to turn one of the trucks back in, we can just set it down and weld the top back on, and nobody'll ever know."
Sometimes we went to the Property Disposal Yard (the PDO yard) and picked up vehicles the army was throwing away or selling. We would take three or four broken-down and beat-up vehicles to a place our mechanics and maintenance people had set up out in the desert, and rebuild them ourselves. We cut two or three vehicles in pieces, and welded the good pieces together to make one workable truck.
A lot of people thought we were nuts, hut it was just Special Forces ingenuity once again.
The payoff came when we went on an exercise a year later with some elite Arab units, and it turned out that we were more at home in their desert than they were. We could navigate in the desert. We could live in the desert. And they couldn't. They didn't know how to live and fight there. In fact, we had to give them water. This gave us a great deal of confidence.
After the exercise, we asked them, "How do you guys get around in the desert when we're not here?"
"Oh, we get the Bedouins to help," they told us.
NEW LIFE
By the late 1970s, Special Forces funding stood
at one-tenth of one percent of the total defense budget (it is now 3.2 percent) — and even this was an improvement over their earlier share of the pie. Training, tactical mobility, and optempo[18] suffered; and there was no significant modernization.
The world was changing, however. Insurgencies were spreading and international terrorism was on the rise. Operational failures, such as the Desert One tragedy and the failed Mayaguez rescue,[19] only emphasized the obvious: America was losing its ability to respond to unconventional threats, and something had to be done about it.
Actually, it wasn't obvious to most in the military high command, but a few people saw the writing on the wall. One of them was General Edward C. "Shy" Meyer, the Chief of Staff of the Army during the early '80s. In an article titled "The Challenge of Change," in the 1980—81 Army Green Book, an annual publication reflecting the opinions of the senior leadership of the Army, he wrote:
"Today, the cumulative effect we seek for the U.S. Army is the speedy creation of the following: Forces with the flexibility to respond globally, in NATO or in other more distant locations; forces capable of sustained operations under the most severe conditions of the integrated battlefield; forces equally comfortable with all the lesser shades of conflict." A graph showing the possible spectrum of conflict demonstrated why the last was particularly critical. Because "low-risk, high-leverage ventures, such as activities on the lower end of the spectrum, are the most likely military challenges to occur, [we need] forces that are created most wisely so as to make best use of our national resources."
And General Meyer was as good as his word. Putting his muscle and prestige on the line, he instituted sweeping initiatives, which led to the following:1. Changes in the Special Operations command structure, to include all Army units with related capabilities — all Special Forces, Ranger, Psychological Operations, Civil Affairs, and Army Special Operations aviation units.2. Immediate development of a Special Forces modernization action program, a Special Operations Forces Functional Area Assessment, and a United States Army Special Forces Master Plan.