by Tom Clancy
In the spring of 1972, MACVSOG was disbanded.
Not many months after that, the NVA no longer needed the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
VII
BETWEEN THE WARS
In 1966, Special Forces had seven active component groups—the 1st, 3d, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 10th Special Forces Groups, four of which were augmented with PSYOPs, civil affairs, engineers, support, etc., to meet other special requirements.
After Vietnam, Special Forces were drastically cut back, and by 1978 their force structure had been reduced to only three active groups—the 5th, 7th, and 10th. Promotions dried up and the overall scope of activities was severely diminished. The focus of the military establishment withdrew from operations involving foreign internal defense and development, and returned to the tried-and-true conventional doctrines and procedures in which professional soldiers had long found comfort. The main emphasis now was seen as preparing for a potential major land war against the Soviets, and that called for modernized conventional forces, not the more unorthodox ways of special operations.
The survival of Special Forces itself was never in doubt, but the survival of the organization that people such as Bill Yarborough had envisaged, capable of performing a multitude of roles on a big stage, was.
This was despite the fact that SF had had many successes in Vietnam. The 5th Special Forces Group had operated long and hard there; it was the most highly decorated unit in the conflict, and had more Medal of Honor winners than any other regiment-sized unit. Many young officers who served in SF assignments in Vietnam went on to achieve flag rank, and sevcral of them became four-star generals. Many NCOs retired with the rank of sergeant major. Nevertheless, many of the regular officers who had risen to higher positions of authority on the conventional side would see a lesser role for unconventional-type units in future conflict—and Special Forces did not have a champion in the higher levels of decision-making. There was a lot of discord between SF and the main army in Vietnam.
And it had to be said that Special Forces did not always help matters. Retired Special Forces Major General James Guest explains:
IN Vietnam, the 5th Special Forces Group operated independently for the most part. It had a small staff section that would get missions from the field force commander, an Army three-star general. The SF units that came in to do the missions didn’t work for the division commander or for the senior adviser, but for the overall commander, and were forbidden to brief lower commanders on their missions. Because of the urgency of the missions, it often happened that neither the field force commander nor the units explained them to the local division commanders, and in the process they also ran over a lot of bureaucratic staff officers. This inevitably led to bad feelings. What many division commanders and their staffs saw was uncontrolled wild men running around in the bushes.
Now we had our characters on those kinds of missions. And they were high-stress missions. That kind of stress sometimes leads to bizarre behavior.
Some of our guys stayed on teams three and four years, running some kind of intense operation. When they came back into a base camp, they often just let it all hang out in ways that upset the others.
The A camps, whose missions were area control and interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, were particularly misunderstood. They were perceived by the conventional forces as country clubs established by SF, with all the amenities of home—refrigerators and things like that. Yet nobody stopped to think about how it would be to live in one of those places. They were exposed. The Camp at Lang Vie, for example, was overrun by North Vietnamese tanks.
A similar kind of situation went on out in the A camps themselves. They were normally out in the hills, but close to divisions, so the people in the divisions could see that the way the SF guys did things was not necessarily the way everybody else in the Army did them. And, of course, on occasion, SF might “liberate” equipment from the division—which had a lot of equipment. They needed it, so they took it.
Or one of the SF guys might come into the division, and he just didn’t look like an American soldier. He might have long hair, and be wearing tiger fatigues and big, brass Montagnard bracelets (which meant a great deal to the Montagnards), and be carrying a Sten gun or other foreign weapons. In the context of the A camp, all this was perfectly appropriate (Special Forces have always trained to use foreign weapons), but to everyone else, it was bizarre—nonregulation.
FURTHERMORE, the Special Forces habit of rubbing the rest of the Army the wrong way did not end with the war in Southeast Asia. Since most of the Army distrusted them, the Special Forces tended to react accordingly, to overplay their skills, and then rub in their triumphs in a way certain to cause resentment.
In 1977 and 1978, Jim Guest was with the 10th SFG at Bad Tolz in Germany, a unit often called upon to mimic Soviet special-operations units, particularly those trying to “penetrate” secure facilities. Guest’s penetration teams were almost invariably successful—to their delight and the consternation of their targets.
On one occasion, the VII Corps deputy commander had Guest run an operation against the VII Corps Tactical command posts.
Jim Guest relates what happened:
“WHAT do you want us to do?” I asked.
“I want you to attack the CP as if you were Russian operatives, Soviet Special Forces,” the general answered.
“Yes, sir,” I said. Then we went to work. Of course, he didn’t tell the corps staff to expect us, and neither did we. Part of the game was to avoid tipping off corps headquarters.
We assigned one and a half A-Detachments to run the actual operation—ODA-6, reinforced by a six-man Ranger team from the Ranger detachment stationed at Bad Tolz, where they normally ran the USAREUR (U.S. Army Europe) survival training course. The team rehearsed in several ways. It moved into the operational area, occupied mission support sites, cached equipment, established observation on the targets, identified the critical parts of each target and selected routes into and out of the target areas. There were attacks on the targets, immediate-action drills, helicopter operations, sniper operations in which the snipers were used to secure the mission support sites and to provide overwatch for the attacking elements during attacks in the Corps areas, and finally, VII Corps field SOP—especially those items that would apply to the team as they conducted operations. The detachments were particularly interested in the way the Corps military police operated, since they planned to operate as MPs.
Meanwhile, we gathered all the open data on the corps we could find—how the Corps uniforms were worn, how their vehicles were marked, the normal separation distance between elements of the Corps field CP, how the VII Corps specifically provided security forces, and their estimated reaction time, and what kind of equipment we could expect to be confronted with. We also studied everything available about communication systems, about how to visually recognize secure facilities, and about antennas. We identified the different CP locations by the types of antennas, and we knew where the units were because of the orientation of their antennas. And finally, we made mock-ups of how the CPs looked laid out on the ground.
When the time came to run the operation, we did a little recon near the gates. I had soldiers hang around until they heard the challenge and the password, then we immediately passed the info on to the strike team. When they were ready to go, we put the strike team itself into VII Corps MP uniforms, and took our own jeeps and marked them up like MP jeeps. That’s how our guys made the initial infiltration.
Once they were inside, they successfully penetrated and knocked out all the communications installations, simulated an attack on the operations complex with standoff weapons (81mm mortars carried in the trailers of our look-alike MP jeeps), and took out the critical technicians, such as the computer operators.
The teams successfully gained access to all its target elements in the Corps area, with the primary emphasis on the operational complex and on the areas with technicians.
Then, for show and tell, the team
took pictures with KS 99 cameras. They photographed the antenna configurations, the operational complex, vehicles (with identifying markings prominently displayed). Corps security points, the technicians’ living and working areas, helicopter pads with helicopters parked, the Generals’ Mess, where all the key leaders and staff officers congregated on most nights for the evening meal, and routes in and out of the Corps areas, including the vehicle parks.
Here is how they took out the computers:
In those days, their scarcity value made computers more important than they are now; there were so few of them and they were so big and cumbersome. So our guys found the big van where they kept the ultracomputers, and went down, again dressed as MPs but carrying satchels like couriers, and banged on the hatch.
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 i
n 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.