Each soldier, therefore, should be required to fully perform every task to the standard expected of him for success in combat. This kind of training builds confidence at the individual and unit level—the kind of confidence and teamwork between the soldiers and within the unit that allows them to fully perform their mission without fear of being killed by friendly fire. No “simulation” or technology can ever take the place of this.
Realistic scenarios developed from unit war plans and other contingency requirements should serve as the basis for all training. Training should then always be conducted under the most demanding and realistic conditions possible—simulating nothing except for the safety of the participants. In other words, all training, particularly at the small-unit and combined-arms levels (battalion and below), should be live fire, and conducted at night. If this is not possible, then MILES devices, which are lasers, accompanied by receiving devices on each soldier, should be used to let soldiers know when they have screwed up and been hit.
Here are a few training principles that I have tried to live by:A commander should always have his unit ready to go to war, without any required train-up period. If he has been given the resources he needs, there is no reason why his unit should not be ready at all times. If some reason is beyond his control, he should have identified it a long while back and brought it to the attention of his commanders, so something could be done about the problem.
A commander must be in the field personally supervising and evaluating training. Otherwise, he will never know the true status of the training readiness of his unit, and how to structure future training for correcting both unit and individual weaknesses.Neither can a commander make an honest judgment on what his unit can or cannot do unless he knows the unit’s training readiness—inside and out.
Time is a commander’s most crucial asset, and it should never be wasted—not a single minute.A training opportunity exists in everything a unit is required to do—no matter if it is mission-related or not—and it is the leader’s responsibility to look ahead and identify these opportunities and take advantage of them. It could be guard duty, police call, burial details, or many other administrative activities. These should be performed by squads and conducted in a way that allows each individual and the unit itself to emerge better-trained and feeling good about their performance.
For example, if transportation is scarce, many training opportunities—such as counterambush drills—are available during tactical foot marches to the designated training areas.
Every officer and NCO in the chain of command must always have “hip-pocket training” ready for his unit in order to take advantage of unprogrammed and unanticipated time that could become available for training. For example: “The trucks that were supposed to show up will arrive thirty minutes late. Let’s get in some mortar practice.” Oftentimes, small-unit leaders fail to recognize and plan appropriately for these opportunities—a situation that requires leader training by the commander.
Time lost can never be recovered.
If a unit fails to meet the standard for a given training event, then the commander should adjust the schedule to keep the unit in the field until they get it right—no matter how long it takes. Don’t ever say, “We’ll correct the deficiency next time out.” There may not be a next time before they are committed to battle.
The responsible commander (brigade, battalion) should never be satisfied with “just” meeting the standard. He should keep “raising the bar,” with an ultimate goal of maximizing the technical and tactical proficiency of every individual. For example: Every soldier in an infantry squad should qualify for the Expert infantry Badge, every medic should qualify for the Expert Field Medical Badge, every mortar crew member as Master Gunner, and so on. A great ancillary benefit also comes from this—unit pride, cohesion, and individual early promotions.
Cross-training between skills is also very important, especially within crews of crew-served weapons that are vital to unit effectiveness in combat. Replacements are not always readily available on the battlefield.
Nothing I have said is new to any successful commander. We have lived by these principles and tenets in fulfilling our responsibilities for preparing those entrusted to us—the cream of America’s youth—for success in battle. This responsibility is a sacred trust, directed not only toward success in battle, but also to the lives of the men and women we command. This includes bringing them safely back to their families, and having them feel good about themselves for what they have done for our nation.
Soldiers will unhesitatingly lay their lives on the line because of this trust in their commander and their fellow soldiers. They have no one else to look to.
This means, finally, that a commander’s unit, no matter what kind it is, will be only as good as he is, a direct reflection of his principles and values, and of his dedication, his motivation, and his love and respect for his troops. A commander must therefore give it whatever it takes. No one else will do it for him.
During most of my Army career, I have been fortunate to serve in combat units where training and preparedness for no-notice contingency operations were an imperative—and for having had this opportunity I indeed feel privileged.
V
FEW ARE CALLED, FEWER ARE CHOSEN
September 1964. Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
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 t
old 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 pa
rtisans. 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.