by Dick Couch
And I recalled his advice for a very strong candidate whose attitude and demeanor were not to the cadre’s liking. “Son, we’re going to send you forward, but before you come back here for Phase II, you better sit down and have a good talk with yourself. Your performance here was very good, but you’ve given the cadre the impression that you think you’re better than everyone else. Your teammates peered you low for that very reason. Are you really that good?”
“No, Sergeant Major.”
“I recommend you find yourself a good ration of humility before you come back. Start thinking about others and stop thinking about yourself. You hear what I’m saying?”
“Roger that, Sergeant Major.”
“Say that again, a little louder.”
“Roger that, Sergeant Major.”
“One more time.”
“Roger that, Sergeant Major!”
“Good. That kind of response’ll take you a long way in this training.”
Most of the enlisted candidates who come before the Class 8-04 review board aren’t selected for Special Forces training, but many are. It seems to me the board is always looking for some way to keep a man in training—some positive input or rationale that will allow them to keep a marginal performer.
That input often comes from a cadre sergeant. “This is a kid who tries hard and who was an asset to his team; he peered very well. Physically, he needs work, but there’s no quit in him. If we’re going to bend a little, let’s bend for him.”
Usually, it is a board consensus that keeps a boarded candidate in training. “Congratulations,” Zorn tells one candidate, “we’re going to select you for Special Forces training.”
“Roger, Sergeant Major. Thank you, Sergeant Major.”
“Don’t thank me yet, soldier. You’ve some work to do before you’re ready for the next phase of training. You need to work every day on your upper-body strength and your overall conditioning. We all have weaknesses; we’ve talked about yours—it’s up to you to fix them before you come back here for Phase II. Can you do that?”
“Yes, Sergeant Major.”
“The board’s accepting some risk in sending you forward. Don’t let us down, you hear me?”
“Roger that, Sergeant Major.”
One soldier the board sends through to Phase II is an excellent performer but has an incident with spousal abuse in his record. He has also spent two years on deployment, a year in Afghanistan and a year in Iraq. The man is apologetic and forthcoming when he speaks about the incident, and talks about the counseling he and his wife received. Yet there is a special passion in the command sergeant major’s voice when he spoke to this candidate.
“There is something you better understand before you leave here. There’s no place for abuse or dysfunction at home—here or anywhere else in this man’s Army. I mean, absolutely none, understand? We take care of our teammates, and we take care of our families. This comes up again while you’re here at the training command and you are history. You hear me, soldier?”
“Yes, Sergeant Major.”
“I’ve got your name on my blotter, and I’m going to be looking for you,” First Sergeant Stew Donnally from Phase II tells him. “Your team sergeant and I are going to be closely monitoring your performance, and we’re going to be asking you how things are at home. You’re definitely on my radar, understood?”
“Understood, First Sergeant.”
As this candidate takes his leave from the board, First Sergeant Billy Sarno follows him out, wanting a further word with him before he left his phase.
The board addresses the officers in their final session. It’s my sense that they are far more critical and exacting with officer candidates than enlisted candidates. Most of the issues concerning the officers appearing before the board have to do with leadership and their performance on the SAREs, but not all. One officer is a very strong leader but has a two-year-old notation in his record for getting into a bar-room brawl. He is also a bit cocky.
“You’d better get straight on something, Captain,” Lieutenant Colonel Jackson tells him. “We don’t need guys who can fight in bars. In fact, we need guys who can walk away from a bar fight. You’re paid to use your smarts and your judgment to lead your detachment. We’re at war, and you need to channel any aggression you may have into leading your men and setting a good example, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’d better, or you are going to find yourself in another line of work. We hold our officers to a high standard. Understand this and take it to heart. Captain, you have all the tools to be a good detachment leader, but you have to be in control of yourself at all times. Are we clear on this?”
“Yes, sir, very clear.”
Of the six officers boarded in Class 8-04, four are selected to continue in Phase II. One is nonselected for his poor performance on the SAREs and another for his leadership deficiencies. Officer attrition can often be more dramatic. In a more recent class, twenty-nine officers began the selection process in a Phase I class. Twenty-four made it through to the end of the team events. Only sixteen were selected for Phase II.
After twenty-five days at Camp Mackall and the Rowe Training Facility, the books are closed on SFAS Class 8-04. Their numbers are close to the historical averages. One in three was selected and will move on to Phase II to continue along the road to the Green Beret. The success rate for the X-Rays is higher than for the regular soldiers. This, too, is about average. The continuous training cycle of basic training, then airborne training, then Pre-SFAS seems to bring these soldiers to the selection phase in better physical condition than their counterparts coming from the regular Army units. Another factor that seems to favor the X-Rays is their recent land-navigation training and the ruck marches during the 18X Pre-SFAS course.
The regular Army soldiers who were selected for continuation in Special Forces training will return to their units and await orders to return to Fort Bragg and Phase II. The X-Rays will stay in “the pipeline,” as they receive additional leadership and small-unit tactics training to prepare them for Phase II.
STUDENT ODA 811. Operational Detachment Alpha 811 musters outside its team room, ready for a four-day tactical field exercise during Phase II.
CHAPTER FIVE
SPECIAL FORCES TACTICS
The Special Forces Qualification Course, up to this point in time, has been focused on preparing and selecting men for Special Forces training—a process designed to screen for the right men. Phase II marks the beginning of the serious training that will train and equip those men to do the work of a Green Beret overseas. Phase II is all about small-unit tactics and leading in a small-unit tactical environment. To put a fine point on it, the phase focuses on small-unit tactics as applied to the unique environment of special operations. The regular soldiers who’ve earned the right to begin Phase II with SFAS Phase I Class 8-04 now return to their current duty stations. They’ll come back to Fort Bragg in two to six months and be assigned to a future Phase II course. Now that they’ve been selected for Special Forces, the Army will move them, along with their families, to Fort Bragg on a permanent change-of-duty assignment. Oddly enough, one in ten of those soldiers will elect not to continue with Special Forces training. I 153 asked about this. Why would a man undergo the rigors of selection and not choose to return for Phase II? There are several reasons.
Many of the soldiers who put in for Special Forces from regular Army units come to selection to see if this is for them—if this is how they want to spend their career in the Army. In the pressure cooker of the assessment and selection process at Camp Mackall and the Rowe Training Facility, they get those questions answered. A few of those take a hard look at the months of training ahead, the lifestyle, and the rigorous deployment schedule, and they decide that this is not for them or not for their family situation. Most experienced soldiers who come for selection are proven soldiers and leaders. They’ve enjoyed some measure of success in their conventional units. When they return to tho
se units after selection for Special Forces, some are approached by their first sergeants, command sergeant majors, and company officers and asked to stay on at their current unit. Sometimes they’re offered positions of increased leadership and responsibility within their unit. These are good men, and their current commands want that talent to remain in place for their next deployment rotation. So one in ten decline orders to Phase II and Special Forces training. Special Forces lose a potential Green Beret, and the regular Army retains a good man, perhaps a better soldier for his experience at SFAS. In any case, I’ll lose track of those nine in ten from SFAS Class 8-04 who will return for Phase II at a future date. I’m scheduled for the next Phase II class, as are the X-Ray soldiers who are to begin Phase II about five weeks from the completion of their selection. For the X-Rays, there are two interim courses they must complete before they begin Phase II: the X-Ray Special Forces Preparation Course, and the combined Primary Leadership Development Course/Basic Non-Commissioned Officers Course—SFPC and PLDC/BNCOC, respectively. Since these acronyms are a mouthful, I’ll refer to the former as the preparation course and the latter as the leadership course. The prep course is designed to give these new soldiers some background in small-unit tactics to better equip them for the intensive tactical training in Phase II. The leadership course is the requirement for leadership training before a man becomes a sergeant in the United States Army. All men who graduate from the Q-course and don a Green Beret and haven’t made sergeant, which includes most of the X-Rays, are then advanced to sergeant. Before they are allowed to sew on the coveted three chevrons of a buck sergeant, they must have completed this leadership requirement.
The X-Ray Special Forces selectees return to Fort Bragg for their Special Forces Preparation Course. They are once again in barracks that appear identical to those where they suffered through their Pre-SFAS Training. The prep-course barracks are located next to the Pre-SFAS Training buildings, but inside they’re arranged very differently. They are set up in “ODA configuration,” a living/working arrangement that’ll characterize much of their training in the Q-Course and much of their operational life as a Green Beret. Each floor of the dated, two-story structures houses a student Operational Detachment Alpha, or student ODA—a team of twelve to fourteen students. For much of the Special Forces Qualification Course, the trainees or students (they are no longer candidates) will train and learn in these ODA-sized student groupings. Most of these men will go to war as young sergeants in a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha. One end of the barracks houses a small head/ laundry/shower facility, much the same as the Pre-SFAS barracks. Next is a bay that takes perhaps half the assigned floor space. This is the team area, or team room, where the daily planning, preparation, and instructional life of the team takes place. Along the walls are racks for weapons, and lockers and shelving for ammunition and operational equipment. The interior of the team room is taken with a ring or U-shaped arrangement of tables surrounded by chairs—one for each member of the team. The tables encircle two sand tables—four-foot-square, shallow sandboxes where the student ODAs can build terrain models for operational planning. In and around this team bay are whiteboards, butcher-block paper pads, and easels for planning and briefing. These mission-planning/mission-briefing areas are where the new X-Ray selectees will spend most of their waking hours. At one end of the room is a stack of boxed MREs. When the student ODAs aren’t in the field, they’ll live and eat most of their meals in the team room. The third section of each team’s space is a small sleeping bay crammed with double bunks and just enough room for a man to slip between them and crawl into his rack. Special Forces detachments live in similar eat-sleep-work environments all around the world.
The prep course is a sixteen-day course of instruction that teaches individual movement, patrol movement formations, types of patrols (including reconnaissance, ambush, and raid patrols), mission planning, and troop-leading procedures. Unlike Pre-SFAS Training, the prep course is continuous, 24/7—no weekends off. The information is presented in the classrooms, and then the student teams move into the training areas on Fort Bragg to practice in the field what they learned in the classroom—a day in class, then a day out in the woods. These days begin with physical training (PT) at 0600 and often end with a patrolling practical at 2130 (9:30 p.m.). Each team has an assigned cadre sergeant who is a sergeant first class. This veteran Green Beret is assigned to each student team or student ODA in the prep course. My student ODA cadre sergeant is Sergeant First Class Owen Tell.
“We have a little over two weeks to get these soldiers through the basics of small-unit tactics. In that short amount of time, they’re literally drinking from a fire hose. Most of what we teach here they’ll see again in Phase II, but having seen it here, they’ll have a better chance of bringing their skills up to an acceptable level when it really counts. These men’ve had infantry training as a part of their basic training or OSUT. That training gave them the basics of soldiering in a platoon or company-level unit. But this only taught them to function as a rifleman in a rifle platoon, and to follow orders on the battlefield. Now we have to get them used to working, planning, and leading in a small-unit environment.”
“How are they doing?” I ask.
“They’re doing pretty well considering where they’ve come from and the limited time we have with them.”
Sergeant Tell is a short man with an efficient compact build, dark hair, and dark eyes that give him something of a Native American look. He joined the Army sixteen years ago after graduating from high school in Tucson. Before reporting to the Special Warfare Center and School, he had spent twelve years, his entire Special Forces career, with 3rd Group. Sergeant Tell can make himself understood in both French and Arabic, but is fluent in neither. He’s made deployments to half a dozen sub-Saharan African nations and one to Afghanistan. He struck me as a very measured and precise individual, yet there’s no misreading his passion for teaching and mentoring these young soldiers.
“They arrive the same day they graduate from Phase I and are selected for SF training,” Sergeant Tell says. “Naturally, they’re a little cocky, and they literally swagger as they get off the bus. The first sergeant has a quick talk with them and settles them in. ‘Congratulations,’ he tells them, ‘but now it’s time to get ready for the real Special Forces training.’ That first afternoon we have them lay out all of their gear, what they have and what we issue them. It’s a full-on personnel and equipment inspection, and we give them a little of the drill-instructor treatment. It refocuses them and gets their minds set for the serious business of learning small-unit tactics.
“Myself and the other cadre sergeants also talk to them every day about staying focused and keeping their goals and priorities in order—preparing for Phase II and working to earn their beret, nothing else. We spend a lot of our evenings here with them, talking about life in the groups and on deployment. We tell them not to get married, get engaged, buy a car, or get a tattoo. We also talk to them about drinking, not that these guys have much time for that, but one DUI or an incident in a bar and they’re gone.”
The preparation course trainees draw weapons for this training—real weapons equipped with blank firing adapters. These are metal appendages attached to the muzzles of their weapon that allow them to fire blank ammunition, either in single rounds or on automatic fire. As with their two previous phases, they take their weapons with them everywhere and are never to be more than an arm’s length from their weapon. These are real guns, and they come with real weapons safety violations. Except for the first day’s inspection, the Special Forces Preparation Course is a pure teaching environment. Very few students VW from this training, and there are few IVWs. The involuntary withdrawals that do occur are for safety violations; these are always taken seriously, even with blank-loaded weapons. Safety violations include sweeping someone with the muzzle of your weapon, inappropriate handling of the weapon, and an accidental discharge. Failing to have a round in the chamber and the weapon
locked (on safe) is also a safety violation, as it will be for the rest of their Special Forces training. In addition to M4 rifles, each student ODA is assigned two M249 squad assault weapons (SAWs) and a single M240 medium machine gun.
On day thirteen, they sit for a two-hour exam at their tables in the team bay. Following the test, Sergeant Tell gives them their operations order for their final field training exercise. The honor of leading Tell’s student ODA team on this final exercise is given to Specialist Tom Kendall.
“He’s one of the better soldiers in this group, and he’s already breaking out as a leader. He’s also a quick study in picking up the mechanics of small-unit tactics.” Sergeant Tell knows about Kendall’s martial-arts background, just as he knows the first name and background of everyone in his student ODA.
That afternoon Kendall puts out a formatted warning order, a short briefing that alerts his team of the mission, itemizes what equipment they need to prepare, and makes team assignments for the mission. The team plans for the mission most of the afternoon and evening and, at 2200, Kendall gives his team their operations order, a premission briefing that walks the men through the mission, start to finish. Various team members step before the group to give their portion of the briefing—weather, communications, routes to and from the objective, enemy forces in the area, and so on. All of them are in battle dress and their faces are camouflaged. Kendall gives the all-important actions-on-target portion of the briefing, using the sand tables on which scale models of the target area have been created. Sandbox 101 is a required course in Special Forces training. There are toy trucks, toy soldiers, and vegetation scrounged from the nearby woods. The mission is an ambush of a squad of enemy soldiers. Kendall covers setting the ambush, executing the ambush, searching the bodies, and the exfiltration plan. He also covers a dizzying array of details, contingencies, and procedural issues. The briefing concludes just before midnight. After a quick critique from Sergeant Tell, the squad saddles up for inspection and a brief rehearsal at nearby Pike Field. The team then boards a truck waiting for them outside the barracks. Other trucks are waiting or loading student ODA teams for other missions.