Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

  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 buildings.

  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 ...

  CLANDESTINE ENTRY There are several ways to get into a country where American soldiers are not wanted. They can come in covertly—as tourists, workers, or businessmen—or clandestinely—by submarine, boat, or aircraft—or they can drop in by parachute, which is more often than not the way it gets done.

  That means Special Forces troops spend a lot of time jumping out of airplanes.

  Carl Stiner talks about the way they did it in 1964:

  WHEN a lot of people are dropping out of a formation of large aircraft, the first priority is getting them all down safely. Conventional airborne units jump with a standard (not maneuverable) parachute in order to minimize the risk of midair entanglements—a good way to get seriously hurt, or killed. The other priority is keeping th
em together in some kind of order, so thousands of soldiers are not scattered all over the countryside. This priority is handled by a technique called “cross-loading”: squads, platoons, and crews are loaded on each airplane so that they exit near where their mission is to be accomplished on the ground. This minimizes assembly time after landing and maximizes the fighting effectiveness of the units.

  On a jump mission, the pilot flying the airplane is in charge overall, but the jumpmaster in the back is responsible for all the jumpers. That means he has to know where he is at all times. And he does that by communicating with the pilot, by studying the map, and by plotting checkpoints on that map—points on the ground such as rivers, bridges, or natural features that he can recognize from the air en route to the drop area.

  Meanwhile, since the pilot is up in the cockpit where he can see more, he helps by calling out, “We have crossed such and such a river,” or, “We’re approaching such and such a terrain feature.”

  When you were inserting an A-Detachment into what we called denied territory (territory where we weren’t welcome and where it could be dangerous to be an American soldier), you wanted the team to be able to land as close to each other as possible.

  By that time, Tojo parachutes had replaced the older, simpler parachutes on which I had originally trained. In those days, the Tojo parachutes were steerable to a degree. Not steerable enough for you to aim at a point on the ground and hit it, but enough to permit the detachment to assemble in the air and then come down in the same immediate area.

  The Tojos looked like your regular umbrella canopies, but they had a twenty-square-foot orifice in the back in the shape of an oval, and out of this would come thrust of about eight knots. The chute had a system of slip risers on rollers that you activated after you exited the airplane. By tilting the canopy one way or another, that allowed you to direct that thrust.

  When you jumped, the slip risers were secured to your harness with forks. Once you were in the air, you pulled the forks out, and the risers were released to slip on the rollers. Then if you wanted to turn to the right, for example, you’d reach back with your right hand and grab the right rear riser, and with your left hand you’d grab the left front. Then you’d pull the right rear down and push the left front up. That would tilt the canopy so you would turn to the right. When you got turned around as far as you wanted to go, then you’d center them again and you’d straighten out.... Or you tried to, because you never really kept going in that direction.

  The big problem for the jumper was orienting the chute to face the wind as he was coming in for his landing. (If a jumper came in running with the wind, he would hit the ground at the speed of the wind, plus the eight knots of thrust coming out of the chute’s rear orifice.) The tendency of the parachute was to turn and run with the wind, which meant that jumpers had to work at the risers constantly to keep themselves properly oriented. Since most Special Forces jumps were at night, the best indication of wind direction was the sensation of it on a jumper’s face.

  If everything was going right, the team would leave the airplane as a chalk or string. The lead jumper would normally face into the wind and hold until everybody else could assemble on him by steering their parachutes. They’d try to work it so they’d be about a hundred feet apart. Fifty to a hundred feet was the normal separation distance for experienced jumpers. That way, all of the detachment had a better chance of landing close to each other and defending itself upon landing. You’re vulnerable on the drop zone!

  The separation distance was very important, because if chutes became entangled there was a serious risk of a canopy collapse. This was especially true of the Tojo chutes, because these chutes tended to push each other.

  Each jumper also had a reserve chute that was good as long as you were more than 500 feet up. Should it become necessary to activate your reserve, you would pull the handle with your right hand while holding your left hand in front of the reserve in order to catch it when it popped out of its container. Then you worked your right hand underneath the skirt of the reserve and threw it down and to your left as hard as you could to facilitate inflation.

  If this didn’t work, you would have to try again. Sometimes the reserve would just go up partially inflated and wrap around the main chute, which was not fully inflated. People who get hurt jumping usually get hurt when they land. But when you get an entanglement, you’re looking at real trouble.

  Nowadays, reserve parachutes are much improved. These arc equipped with a cartridge that propels the canopy far enough out to give you a much greater percentage for inflation, regardless of the malfunction with your main chute.

  A jumper was also taught not to look for or reach for the ground on a night parachute jump. Rather, he was trained to look for the silhouette of the tree line, which would tell him he was thirty to fifty feet from the ground and could start preparing to land by making sure he was facing into the wind and by holding his feet and knees tightly together, which allowed the jumper to roll instantly in the direction of drift, and thus minimize the risk of a broken leg.

  After everyone had assembled on the lead jumper, he would aim as best he could to drop into the drop zone—there was normally not much space, maybe a small opening in the trees, a clearing perhaps two or three hundred yards wide. Once he was on the ground, the other jumpers, who by now have stacked themselves above him, could aim directly on him and could usually land within a circle of a hundred feet.

  After you were down, the first order of business was defending yourself as a team, but you had to do something about the parachute, and you had two options. You could take it with you or you could bury it. You could never leave it lying where you landed, because if you did, it could be spotted either from the ground or from the air.

  Of the two options, taking your parachute with you was the least desirable choice. It was a lot of extra weight and volume to lug around. The best solution was to move off the drop zone, find a secure location in a gully or wooded area, and bury it so it couldn’t be found.

  Either way, you wanted to get out of the drop site almost immediately, carrying the parachute. Once you had reached a concealed location, you could usually bury your parachute in about fifteen or twenty minutes.

  And from there you moved out in accordance with your plan for accomplishing the mission.

  LAND NAVIGATION Finding your objective was far from a given. It was nighttime; the terrain was unfamiliar, the people potentially hostile, and in those days there were no night-vision goggles or GPS satellites to help you find your way. The teams had to be expert at land navigation and find their objectives the old-fashioned way—the way they’d probably learned to do it in Ranger training—by relying on maps, compasses, and the stars.

  They had to be dead-certain expert map readers, they had to be equally proficient using compasses, and they had to know how to count their pace.

  Carl Stiner continues:

  AN important part of the preparation for a mission involved studying the maps of the area where we’d be operating. We had to make ourselves absolutely familiar with that territory. Not only was there very little room for error in linking up with our objective (which might be a guerrilla band or a place where we could hide while we set up for our larger mission), but we also had to avoid blundering into one of the many places where we were not welcome. That meant we memorized everything we might need to know—all the landmarks—rivers and streams, dams, bridges, roads, crossroads, transmission towers, power transmission junctions, and other infrastructure elements, as well as towns, villages, police, and military facilities.

  When we were in the field, one man would keep track of the compass, while two pace men working in conjunction with each other would keep count of the pace. And anybody in the team could handle these jobs. The detachment commander usually kept himself free to manage and orchestrate the operation. The important thing was to keep an accurate count no matter what happened (so we’d have two men counting). But we also had to make sure that we d
idn’t lose count if we ran into an ambush or some other event that might cause somebody to forget the count.

  Meanwhile, even though we had memorized the map and had confidence in our compass reading and pace counting, every once in a while it was a good idea to make sure we were still on track. And that meant checking our map—not an easy thing to do in the dark when you can’t show any light.

  The way we did it was to use our GI flashlights and get under a poncho. Our GI flashlights had a series of filters that were kept in the cap that covered the battery compartment. One of these was a red filter, and that was the one we used, because red light has less effect on your night vision. While everyone else in the team circled around the poncho and stood guard, the commander, his second (whoever would take over if something happened to him), the compass man, and the pace man would get under the poncho and study the map to determine if they were exactly where they should be. If they had deviated, then they’d work out the adjustments they had to make.