It was also possible to navigate by the stars, if, for example, something had happened to our compass. But we preferred the compass, because it was not weather dependent. Still, we had to learn the basic constellations—the Big Dipper, Orion, the Scorpion, in the Northern Hemisphere; Cassiopeia in the Southern. We learned that the two corner stars of the Dipper point to the North Star, which lies five times the distance separating the two pointer stars. So if we could see stars, we could find our way.
One final aspect of planning our route was to identify rallying points. That way, if we got ambushed or ran into some other enemy action, we could break contact and split up, and everybody would reassemble at the next rallying point, or the last one we had passed—depending upon whichever the commander designated.
There is a myth that Special Forces soldiers itch for firefights—that they are all Rambo-like killing machines with nothing better to do than waste enemies. There is zero reality in this myth. Special Forces soldiers are not killing machines; their value lies elsewhere. They are simply too highly trained, too valuable, to be placed in greater risk than is absolutely essential. That means they avoid fights when they can. They fade away into the woods rather than stand up and prove how macho they are. In fact, the Special Forces selection process selects against those types. No Rambos. No Tim McVeighs. Special Forces soldiers are fighters, and they can call upon that energy and skill to kill when they must; but they are expected to focus that fighter energy in a laser-sharp, mature way.
RESUPPLY Surviving in a covert or clandestine environment doesn’t come easily. Living conditions are apt to be paleolithic. Food comes from. wherever you can scrounge it. Water is more often than not contaminated. And a significant portion of the population is apt to have a desire to torture or kill the “American invaders,” even if another significant part of the population is glad to have them around.
Meanwhile, living off the land has limits. Despite their best efforts, the team may not find enough food to keep going. They may run out of ammunition or medical supplies. Wounded may have to be evacuated. And there you are, with many hostile miles separating you from the supply chain.
Demands for supplies can grow especially strong when forming or aiding a guerrilla band. Guerrillas may welcome them, tolerate their presence, or prefer to do without them, but they always crave the American bounty they are convinced the American soldiers are there to shower on them—food, medical supplies, uniforms, electronics, weapons, and ammunition. Showering such bounty is not a primary mission, yet often enough, the guerrillas may be more interested in the supplies than in the fight—thus yielding an opportunity for an A-Detachment to exercise its thinking and negotiating skills: “You do what we think is best, and we’ll provide you with food and weapons.”
In any event, the team has to know how to get in resupply. In rare circumstances, a team will be in a situation that permits a submarine delivery. Far more regularly, supplies are air-dropped or flown in.
Carl Stiner tells how this was done:
WHEN you needed supplies, you sent out a list of your requirements by tapping them out in code on your ANGRA-109 radio. How the supplies would be delivered—whether dropped or flown in—depended on the nature of the situation.
If you were going to be resupplied by parachute, you would have selected a place where you wanted the supplies dropped—a clearing in the woods, the edge of a field, an empty section of a road, an open hilltop. This drop zone information, together with the code letter you’d use to signal the pilot (formed by small flaming cans), would be included in the resupply request. Then a day or two later, you’d learn when you could expect the delivery. This was always at night, at a particular time. Let’s say 0330 on April 17.
On the seventeenth of April, you’d set up at the drop zone with your team and with the guerrillas you might need to secure the area and carry the supplies to the camp (if you were working with guerrillas). A few minutes before drop time, you would mark out the drop point with flame pots you’d make by filling C-ration cans (or any metal cans) with sand and gasoline. You would light these so they’d be visible two minutes prior to the designated drop time, and you left them lit for two to three minutes, but no more. If the plane wasn’t there by then, you put them out.
A single plane would usually be flying this mission. The pilot had to penetrate enemy airspace, come in low enough to avoid radar, set a course, and then find these little points of light during that five-minute window, drop, and then continue on the course he’d set, so no enemy who might be looking could track where the drop had been made (or if it had been made).
Naturally, if he didn’t find you during the five-minute window, you got no resupply. And you had to try again later.
The minute the plane was overhead, you put out the flame pots and prepared to grab the bundle that was parachuting down. Usually it came equipped with a tiny flashing light attached so you could see where it was coming down and start moving to where it was going to hit.
Once you had recovered the bundle, you had to recover the parachute and the cargo net the bundle was dropped in, then distribute the load among your carrying party (which might be just your team or it might be guerrillas), and sanitize the area so nobody could tell later that you had taken an airdrop there. This was all accomplished in the shortest possible time in order to avoid detection and compromise.
It was always interesting to find out what you were actually getting. Food, for instance, often came in the form of living animals. Sometimes you’d learn they had dropped a live animal when you heard moos coming from out of the sky. When that happened, you knew you had a problem. And if you had farm experience, you were grateful for it. Cows are never easy, and they aren’t trained to jump out of airplanes; and if they hit the ground and broke a leg, you had a real problem. But even if they came down uninjured, they were often not gentle enough to be led off easily. Either way, they often started bellowing and making all kinds of noise, so you had to kill them right there, and then quarter the meat on the spot, so your carrying party could carry the edible parts and bury what you couldn’t use.
Sometimes you might get a goat, a pig, or chickens. And on the whole, we preferred these to cows. They’re easier to come by, relatively easy to handle, they don’t weigh that much, and one person can usually carry them.
Eating out there in the woods was where I learned the value of hot sauce. Every Special Forces soldier carries a bottle of hot sauce in his rucksack. Once we got animals or birds back to camp and butchered them, well, you don’t do the best job of cooking in the world out there, so a little hot sauce covers a lot of errors—Louisiana hot sauce, Texas Pete, or Tabasco—it sure helps the taste. It also helps regular rations, which we often had dropped in.
Of course, the A-Detachment part is not all there is to know about the resupply story. Let’s look at it from the headquarters side:
Let’s say we had a mission to resupply an A-Detachment in the field. The mission would go to the NCO who was the S-4 (logistics) of the C-Detachment to which the A-Detachment belonged. It was his job to put it all together. If it was a goat, pig, cow, or chickens, he had to go buy it from some farmer (funds were provided to pay for it), and he had to build a cage for it.
Among the other details he had to know would be the kind of airplane that would fly the mission, including most crucially the dimensions of its exit door, since you couldn’t get anything in or out that was larger than the door. In other words, he had to take the size of the door into consideration in choosing an animal to air-drop and building a cage to contain it.
The NCO would then fly the mission, and he’d be the one who made the drop. While the pilot flew the course over the drop zone, the NCO had to put the animal, the cage, or the bundle out through the door at the right time to make it hit the drop zone that the A-Detachment had illuminated on the ground.
One time, while I was the S-3 of the C-Detachment, an A-Detachment had called in for resupply, and we had set up a drop that was to
fly in on an Armv U-10 Helio Courier. The U-10 was a high-wing, single-engine turboprop that was both very rugged and a super-short-field airplane, which could take off and land in a matter of yards (every time you landed in one, you thought you’d crashed, because you hit the ground so hard). Though it was technically a four-place aircraft, we usually took out the rear seats to make room for cargo.
The night this resupply mission was to be flown, I decided I was going to go along to see how it went. When I got to the airfield, I found the supply sergeant there getting ready to load a crate full of white Leghorns—both chickens and roosters all mixed together—onto the U-10, and the crate was about twice as long as the inside dimensions of the aircraft. So about half of it was sticking out. In fact, so much was sticking out that the sergeant had to ride on top of the crate and the parachute all the way out to the drop to keep it from getting jerked out the door.
When we cranked up, feathers started flying. The force of the prop was blowing them off the chickens. But I didn’t say anything; it was his show, not mine. And I kept quiet when we took off from the airport, although there was a cloud of feathers big enough to almost hide the plane.
From then on, things went pretty smoothly, and we went out and made a good drop.
The next morning, I went out to the swamp where the A-Detachment had their base camp area set up to check on how they were doing, and the first thing I saw was this one naked rooster, with a piece of heavy-duty cable looped around his leg, which was all they could find to tie him up with. The only feather on him was a tail feather sticking up, about three inches long, and it was broken.
When I asked them what in the world they were going to do with that rooster, they said, “Well, we haven’t decided yet, but we have decided one thing, and that is that he ought to live. Anything that went through that flight and lived deserves to survive for a while longer.”
DEALING with airdrops kept us busy, but we had a lot more to do when we had supplies delivered directly by aircraft. We had to know how to select and set up an airstrip, mark it, and then bring in an airplane at night. This was especially tough because we did all this totally on our own. We had no Air Force Combat controllers with us. We had only the members of our own detachment and the guerrillas, if we had guerrillas with us, to organize it. Then, when he came in, the pilot had to trust our judgment absolutely. He had never seen the airfield before. It was a blank to him.
In those days, we had several different kinds of aircraft available for this mission, all of them fixed-wing, because helicopters didn’t have range enough for it. The Army had U-10s and Caribous, which were both capable of landing on dirt fields. But we also had available larger Air Force C- 123s and C-130s, which had to be landed on roads, and there were even a few C-47s still around. And from time to time, leased indigenous aircraft would be made available for covert operations.
What you’d do then is work out the length your airfield had to be, whether it was on a dirt field, a dirt road, or a paved road; you’d walk every inch of that length to make sure it wasn’t too rough or rutted; and you’d get rid of rocks, power lines, and other obstacles. You’d check out the trees nearby and compute the approach glide path the plane would have to come in on, so it didn’t hit any of them. You (and the guerrillas, if they were available) would then lay out flame pots so that the length of the runway was marked out. Once all that was taken care of, you’d radio in all the data associated with the airfield—its location, its dimensions, and so on—and your mission would be scheduled. That is, your headquarters would work out the particulars of the mission and get back to you with them, something like: “The plane will be there on 23 June, at 0330,” which usually meant a window of five or ten minutes. “And it will be approaching on a certain azimuth.”
When the window itself approached, you wouldn’t have any radio communication with the pilot. He would land on your visual signal.
About the time the pilot was five minutes out, the flame pots would be lit. Meanwhile, whoever was running the airfield—officer or NCO—would take a flashlight with a colored filter on it (blue or green, usually—something pretty hard to see) and lie down on the approach end of the airstrip and wait.
The first thing the pilot would see was the flicker of the flame pots. When he saw those, he knew it was safe to land. That is, he knew not only where the field was and that you had laid it out, but that you had secured the area, and there was no enemy in the neighborhood. The next thing he’d see was the flashlight on the end of the runway, and he would then aim his left wheel at that light (because he was sitting in the left seat) and glide in about six feet above it. That meant that if you were the one holding the flashlight, you lay there absolutely still as he approached, seeming to come right at you, and stayed cool as several tons of airplane (if it was one of the big Air Force ones) lumbered in at man height over you. It was a hairy experience.
Once he had landed, we’d off-load the cargo and he would take on anything or anyone you had for him to bring out, and then he would turn around and take off in the opposite direction.
We practiced all that many times.
SURVIVAL AND ESCAPE-AND-EVASION Special Forces soldiers had to be expert at survival, escape, and evasion. They had to know how to live off the land, how to set up snares and traps to catch their food, what was edible and what was not. And they had to be expert swimmers.
Carl Stiner continues:
IN Vietnam, sometime in 1964—65, two NCOs drowned trying to swim a river while they were trying to evade capture. As a result, the requirement was established that we all had to be able to swim (I think it was a mile). And we had to be able to swim at least half a mile with our boots and combat gear on.
If you were carrying a rucksack and it was essential that you had to keep it, you built a raft out of your poncho for the rucksack and other heavy equipment and supplies, including your weapon. Then you towed this raft as you swam.
You also had to know how to assist your rescue in whatever way possible. Specifically, you had to know how to set up pickup zones, and how to signal searching aircraft with mirrors.
The officers were taught special code writing, in the event we were captured. It was a very complex and sophisticated system that involved the positioning of letters that were included in specially designated code words. That way, if we were allowed to write letters, we could include codes that would indicate where we were being held.
Detachment commanders must also have the technical expertise to set up and operate an escape-and-evasion net. The infrastructure available is, of course, critical—safe houses, drop points, and the transportation network. But even more critical is selecting the right people to operate the net (which means you need a system for vetting them to ensure that they continue to be people you can trust), and establishing compartments (cells), so that if one of your operatives or compartments is compromised, the remainder of the mechanism is not. If a cell system is established and operated properly, one cell does not know who is in the next cell.
Your transportation system must be organized and compartmented in the same way. If the plan is to take people from here to there and drop them off at a point where they can be picked up by someone else and taken to another cell’s safe house, only the detachment commanders should know the complete operation of the whole system.
Meanwhile, the “precious cargo” that enters this net has no say-so over their own security and destiny. Nor would they usually have any means of self-protection: Their lives depend absolutely on the people that make up the net.
DURING the time I was undergoing survival, escape, and evasion training, intelligence reports began to indicate—and in vivid detail—the horrific conditions and torture undergone by U.S. military prisoners held by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. As a consequence, another special area, resistance training, was added to our program of instruction.
Although what we got was not nearly as intense and realistic as the training given today, it was still pretty tough,
considering that we were getting a start-up program and didn’t have much available time left in our course. It was of great benefit to each of us.
Today—now that we have the experiences of those prisoners who endured and survived—nineteen days of intensified training have been added to the Special Forces Q Course, called SERE (Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion). During this training, students are placed in the role of prisoner and subjected (short of personal injury, and under the close watch and care of appropriate medical professionals) to the conditions and treatment they could expect if taken captive. SERE training brings them to the absolute limits of their mental and physical endurance, and is fundamental to survival in captivity.
Up until the time I went through SERE training, I had been satisfied that I had received the best training possible to develop me technically and tactically as a leader of men in combat. However, I had not yet actually experienced combat.
The Q Course, and particularly the SERE experience, prepared me for the real experience of combat in ways that everything I’d learned up until then had not. They revealed to me that in order for a leader to possess and project the courage expected by his men in combat, he himself must find the means to be at peace with himself. For me, this strength comes from an abiding faith in my relationship with Cod. This strength allows a person to live one day at a time without fear of death. I have never known an atheist in combat, and I do not ever expect to find one.
I do not believe that this is a revelation discovered only by Carl Stiner. Based upon my experience, it is a belief that serves as the inner strength and motivation of the greatest majority of all combat leaders, both officer and enlisted. I do not know of a substitute for this.
THE GRADUATION EXERCISE: GOBBLER WOODS/ROBIN SAGE