by Robin Moore
The civic action portion of Special Forces operations can and should be reported factually. However, this book is more concerned with special missions, and I saw too many things that weren’t for my eyes—or any eyes other than the participants’ themselves—and assisted in too much imaginative circumvention of constricting ground rules merely to report what I saw under a thin disguise. The same blend of fact and “fiction” will be found in the locations in the book, many of which can be found on any map, while others are purely the author’s invention.
So for these reasons The Green Berets is presented as a work of fiction.
It would have been impossible for me to write this book if I myself had not had Special Forces training and the proper letters of accreditation from the Department of Defense.
For, truly to understand and appreciate Special Forces operations, one really has to know the nature and the details of Special Forces training . . .
It was early in the spring of 1963 and I was in Washington anxiously waiting for the Special Forces officer to show up at the Pentagon meeting. Various information officers had discussed my project, but now it needed the approval of a representative from the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
A lean, rugged-looking major entered the room. His weathered face, hard eyes, and erect carriage were exactly what I had expected of a man who wore the green beret. We shook hands and he regarded me with an appraising, unwavering stare. My eager smile he returned with a bleak one of his own.
“I understand you want to write a book about us.”
“I’d like to, Major,” I replied.
The information officers then outlined my proposal.
“So you want to come down and see what we do,” he said, when they were finished. “Good, we’ll be happy to have you.”
My smile of satisfaction spread from jowl to jowl.
The Fort Bragg emissary gave a sidewise look at my slightly protuberant belly—and politely dropped a smoking white-phosphorus grenade in my lap.
“First, of course, you’ll have to go to the airborne school at Fort Benning. Then, when you’re jump-qualified, there’s the three-month guerrilla warfare course—you’ll make night jumps, live out in the swamps on exercises, run a couple of miles a day, get in some hand-to-hand combat training.”
“But I’m thirty-seven, almost thirty-eight,” I blurted. “If I could just get with the guys. I’m a very good listener,” I suggested hopefully.
“We don’t have any short cuts in this business,” the major said impassively. “If you really want to understand us, you should be able to go through our training. Then you’ll begin to see what this green beanie means.”
A twitch of amusement played at the comers of his lips. “So let’s take it by the numbers. First jump school. If you get through that we’ll discuss putting you through the guerrilla course. If you graduate from the Special Warfare School, you’ll begin to understand Special Forces. Then, maybe, you’ll be qualified to write about the green berets . . .”
One month after the Pentagon meeting, I turned up at Fort Benning, Georgia, to become enrolled in the airborne school. I was issued jump boots and fatigues, and before I could say something appropriate, like “Geronimo,” I found myself up at 5:00 every morning for muscle-tearing PT, followed by a brisk three- or four-mile run around the training areas.
As we ran, we sang (gasped):
“Airborne, airborne have you heard?
We’re going to jump from the big-ass birds.”
Jump school was the most physically punishing three weeks of my life. The weather was oppressively torrid at Fort Benning during June of 1963; years of good living poured from my body, and every morning I knew for a fact I wouldn’t make it through the day. After two weeks on torturous devices simulating parachute jumps and landings, I faced the moment of truth. The class was ready to go up in an airplane and jump out.
From my position halfway down the stick of jumpers, I looked from the open door down to the ground 1,200 feet below.
“Get ready!” the jump master cried.
My stomach knotted.
“Hook up!”
The blood drained from my fingertips as I hooked my static line into the cable running the length of the roof of the fuselage.
“Stand in the door!”
A reserve colonel, even older than I, took his place in the door.
“Go!”
They’re kidding, I thought, as the prop blast sent me hurtling through the air . . .
What in God’s name was I doing here anyway?
What I was doing there all started in August of 1962 when I met the then Vice President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson. I was living at the time in Jamaica in the West Indies, and he had come down to represent the United States at that Caribbean country’s independence celebrations. I had a chance to meet the Vice President and his military aide, Colonel William Jackson, and to give them copies of my book on guerrilla warfare in the Caribbean, The Devil to Pay.
I told Colonel Jackson I wanted to write my next book about Special Forces. A close look at this exciting young unit of the Army—distinguished by its green beret headgear—had never been encouraged. Special Forces operated mostly in secret; in those days few people not directly involved knew anything about it. Certainly there was little or nothing definitive in print about this highly trained unit of guerrilla-warfare experts fighting in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
The good offices of the then Vice President and Colonel Jackson had been responsible for the Pentagon meeting with that hard-bitten Special Forces major. And this had been responsible for the fact that a C-119 was sweeping past above me as, at a terrific rate of speed, I plummeted to earth.
Fortunately I made it down in one piece, and after five jumps (they gave us more equipment to carry on each jump, which, added to the stepped-up training, wiped out about one fourth of the class) the commandant of the school awarded me the first pair of silver jump wings won at the school by a civilian.
The next stop was Spartanburg, South Carolina, where the biggest war games ever to include guerrilla teams, Swiftstrike III, were going on. There I met the originator of the rugged schedule I was to follow if I wanted to write The Green Berets.
Major General William P. Yarborough, then commanding general of the Special Warfare center, is a young-looking man to be wearing two stars; he is as lean and mean as his men. By this time I was pretty lean too.
The general had a surprise. He had scheduled me for a night jump into the swamps of South Carolina where a Special Forces team would take me to their snake-infested swamp headquarters.
“Night jump?” I murmured uneasily. “Snakes?”
After a week of assorted “assassinations,” “kidnappings,” “ambushes,” “bridge and equipment destruction,” and “raids,” I was exfiltrated by a heliocourier or U-10, as this tough, short-takeoff and -landing airplane is known to the military, and a few days later I started the murderous guerrilla course at the Special Warfare Center.
My classmates, including Cuban exiles and Vietnamese, were officers from twenty-two friendly nations. They ranged in age and grade from 1st lieutenants in their mid-twenties to lieutenant colonels in their mid-forties.
Three separate courses are given at what is now known as the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center. Counterin-surgency, Psychological Warfare, and Unconventional (guerrilla) Warfare—for “tigers” like me! I had no choice; the guerrilla course produced wearers of the green beret.
The qualifications for officers who entered the Unconventional Warfare Course were awesome. All of them had to be airborne. All required top-security clearance. Most of them were Ranger qualified. Intensive psychological testing and examination of service records went into determining which officers would make good unconventional fighting men.
All that had been learned since the beginning of World War II about guerrilla warfare was taught at the School. I was fascinated at the vast number of weapons with
which we were required to be familiar. Whether it was a Russian AK submachine gun, or a Swedish, Czech, East German or French weapon, Special Forces men learned to fire and fieldstrip it blindfolded. We were trained on the crossbow, the longbow, and the garrote (for instant strangulation).
One of the most intricate portions of the course concerned advanced demolition techniques—all important to guerrillas behind enemy lines. We were schooled in chilling stratagems, such as mining a ditch beside the killing zone of an ambush to wipe out any troops still alive who try to take cover—a trap I saw sprung with deadly effectiveness a few months later in Vietnam.
In the techniques of hand-to-hand combat we learned to make our kill in the first thirty seconds—or stand a slim chance of living to do it at all.
Such new developments as Sky Hook were taught, in which a man can be jerked out of the jungle by airplane and winched to safety up in the sky. There are elaborate blends of many skills, as in the precision operation of a HALO-SCUBA infiltration. Fifteen to twenty thousand feet over the water—high enough to be invisible from the ground—a plane drops an infiltrator near the enemy coastline. The jumper freefalls, moving horizontally as well as vertically, and at fifteen hundred feet or less he opens his ’chute, hits the water and keeps going down, disengaging the parachute which sinks to the bottom. Using a breathing apparatus he then continues his infiltration underwater.
The course was also concerned with peaceful applications of Special Forces training. Special Forces isn’t all fighting; many missions are designed to prevent a guerrilla war from ever starting. Civic action projects, such as digging wells for villagers, establishing schools and hospitals, and even helping remote peoples improve their economic standards, were especially stressed.
By the time my classmates had completed the course and had been fully briefed on what they could expect in Vietnam and other trouble spots of the world, they were hard-eyed, serious men. As the instructors pointed out—and it proved to be all too tragically true—many friends we made during the rough days and nights of training would be lost in the coming year. One of my classmates, a tall, rugged captain—Roger Hugh Donlon—would sustain four wounds and win the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam seven months later.
But I made it. I had graduated from the Special Warfare Center and really thought I was some kind of a guerrilla. Now, I said to the authorities, I did it your way. How about it? I want to go to Vietnam and see this training translated into action.
It was pathetic how much I still had to learn in the vicious, no-quarter jungle war in Indo-China.
Letters of accreditation were prepared. The Department of Defense sent out a teletype message to Military Assistance Command, Vietnam and to Colonel Theodore Leonard, commanding officer of U.S. Army Special Forces Vietnam, requesting I be given full cooperation. If the experienced combat officers of the Special Forces detachments who all received copies of the TWX setting forth my qualifications realized that perhaps I was far from the trained guerrilla fighter I at first considered myself, they were patient with me. Most important, because I was a graduate of jump school and the Special Warfare Center, these Special Forces men for the first time accepted an outsider—and a civilian at that—as one of their own.
On 6 January 1964, I arrived in Vietnam for a six-month tour. I was fortunate—at least from the standpoint of writing an authentic book—to be allowed to go into combat all over the country just as though I were a Special Forces trooper. In spite of the fact that correspondents traditionally are never armed, I never made a move without an automatic rifle—which accounts for the fact that I made it home to write this book. Toward the end of the tour, A detachments began paying me the supreme compliment of sending me in place of another sergeant as the second American with an all-Vietnamese or montagnard patrol.
Special Forces, formed in 1952, traces its lineage back to the guerrilla operating teams of the OSS (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA) and to such World War II-born units as the Rangers, the British and Canadian Commandos, Merrill’s Marauders of Burma, and especially the Airborne Infantry or paratroopers.
Originally part of the Psychological Warfare Center which was moved from Fort Reilly, Kansas, to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Special Forces was the brainchild of Colonel Aaron Bank, an OSS operator who had been preaching the need for a trained guerrilla unit within the Army for several years. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the need for behind-enemy-lines guerrilla units became apparent.
As part of a guerrilla group known as UNPIK (United Nations Partisan Infantry Korea), Special Forces men first saw action behind Communist lines late in 1952 and in 1953. A few years after the war, the original 77th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg expanded to become the 7th Special Forces Group (Abn) at Bragg and the 10th Special Forces Group (Abn) at Bad Tölz, Germany. Today there are eight Special Forces groups stationed around the world.
Some means were sought to give the elite Special Forces man a distinctive type of insignia, and the green beret was adopted. The original crest on the beret was a silver Trojan horse worn on the left side above the ear. Now the flash denoting the wearer’s group is worn directly above the left eye.
Conventional Army generals disliked the jaunty headgear and outlawed it. But the late President John F. Kennedy, recognizing the value of Special Forces, threw his full support behind the unit and restored the green beret in a message that exhorted the men to “wear the beret proudly, it will be a mark of distinction and a badge of courage in the difficult days ahead.”
A green beret was returned to President Kennedy under the most tragic of circumstances two years later. Special Forces men formed the honor guard at the President’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery. At the ceremony’s end Sergeant Major Francis Ruddy sorrowfully took the beret from his head and placed it on his commander-in-chief’s grave. It (that is, its replacement) is still there, along with the hats of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Special Forces men insure that a fresh green beret will always lie above the President, who so loved and respected his tough, highly competent guerrilla fighters.
The basic unit of a Special Forces group is the 12-man A detachment or A team.
The A team is commanded by a captain, the CO. The XO (executive officer) is a 1st lieutenant (there are no 2nd lieutenants in Special Forces). There are ten intensively trained and experienced enlisted men on the A team, most of them senior sergeants. These are undoubtedly the most multiskilled enlisted men in the armed forces today.
The team sergeant is a master sergeant and—the officers will be the first to confirm—runs the detachment. One of the primary jobs of the sergeant specialists is to train their officers in the skills they have spent many years perfecting. Only after an officer graduates form the Special Warfare Center and forms his team does his training really begin.
The second-ranking enlisted man on an A team is usually the intelligence sergeant who keeps track of what the enemy is doing and recruits and trains agents—particularly tricky in Asia for an American.
There are two medical specialists on the A team, skilled in the exotic diseases to be found in the remote areas to which teams are sent. Much of their training is in war wounds. Two communications experts, who could probably make radios out of sea shells should the need arise, keep the A teams in touch with each other and with the B and C teams which are field headquarters for the operational A detachments.
Two demolition-engineer specialists can do everything from building bridges to blowing them up. Demolition men receive a richly deserved extra $50 a month in hazardous-duty pay. One light- and one heavy-weapons specialist complete the team. These two men have to be good teachers since they must instruct native or indigenous troops in the use of the latest weapons. Many of the local people have never seen anything more modem than a cross-bow before a Special Forces A detachment comes to their area.
Besides their specialties, the men on a Special Forces team have further capabilities.
Every man on an A team speaks a second language, some several tongues. On any given A team all the languages in use in the area are spoken, including those of the enemy. Every man is cross-trained in at least two other basic team skills. A medic, say, can not only efficiently patch up the wounded and care for the sick but knows how to lay down a deadly accurate mortar barrage and blow up the enemy’s rail lines and bridges.
In hand-to-hand combat the men of Special Forces have no superiors, blending judo, karate, wrestling, and boxing techniques into their own lethal brand of barehanded, close-in fighting.
All Special Forces men are expert parachutists.
The Special Forces role is twofold. In a hot war situation the A detachment infiltrates enemy territory by parachuting in, or coming in by sea either in boats or with underwater apparatus, or across land routes. The job of the team is to build up, equip, train, and direct a guerrilla force of indigenous people. Special Forces men are carefully trained in all aspects of psychological warfare to both fan the flames of anti-Communist feeling among their civilian irregular troops and the citizens of the enemy country they are subverting and keep the enemy government frightened and off-balance at all times.
In the type of counterinsurgency operations the United States had been backing in South Vietnam, the Special Forces teams train and equip the civilian irregular defense group (CIDG) troops, known as a strike force when organized in a Special Forces camp, as opposed to the conventional U.S. Army advisers in Vietnam who are assigned to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) regular troops. The strikers, as strike-force men are called, sign a contract to fight in a Special Forces-advised strike-force battalion for periods ranging from six months to two years. Basically, the A teams in Vietnam are training civilians to fight the communist Viet Cong guerrillas as anti-guerrillas—much the same as killer submariners go after enemy subs.
In direct command of a strike-force camp is the CO of the Vietnamese Special Forces team, which is modeled on the American Special Forces plan. The American role is to advise the Vietnamese Special Forces (known by their Vietnamese name, Luc-Luong Dac-Biet, or LLDB) in training and leading its CIDG troops in combat. Thus, each U.S. Special Forces adviser has his Vietnamese LLDB counterpart at every camp.
