Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces

by Tom Clancy

  General Shelton: Robin Sage was called “Cherokee Trail” then, but it did the very same kinds of things. That part of the course has been very consistent. I think that today’s course is a little bit tougher than it was when I went through, to tell you the truth. Certainly the great work that we do on the front end throughout SOF now, in the assessment and selection process, is primarily responsible for the tremendous force that you have in the community today. I mean you start off with great people, physically and mentally up to the challenge, and then build on that.

  Tom Clancy: Did the local North Carolina residents help out as they do today, formed into the “Pineland Auxiliary” [locals who play roles in the excercises]?

  General Shelton: I’ve never forgotten it, without a doubt! I mean the compartmen- tation among the locals in terms of knowing whose side everyone is on is incredible. It’s become a multigenerational family affair, and they’re always trying to “break” the other side in terms of the various “cells.” For example, is the guy who runs the (dry) cleaners working for “Pineland” [the bad guys] or the local insurgent militia [the good guys—our allies]?

  The reason I mention the guy who was the dry cleaner was that when I took the course, he had a step van. Of course, he was the guy who came by and rendezvoused with us out on the road at a predetermined point and transported our demolition team through two checkpoints that were out looking for us. He delivered us to the bridge that we were going to blow up, where we all jumped out almost on the fly. We made our way down the bank, rigged the bridge for destruction, got back up and rendezvoused, and he got us back through the checkpoints. He just looked at them and said, “Hey, Joe, I’m just delivering my dry cleanin‘!” It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen! I’ll bet he’s still down there with the same van today.

  Once he’d earned his Green Beret, Captain Shelton left his wife and young son behind, and headed to Vietnam for the first of two combat tours in Southeast Asia.

  Tom Clancy: Would you please tell us a little about your first tour in Vietnam with the 5th Special Forces Group?

  General Shelton: I actually went into Fort Bragg in about August of 1966, working at the JFK Special Warfare Center. I then went through the “Q” Course, with my first son being born on the same day that Cherokee Trail started. I graduated about two weeks later, took some leave, and then departed for Vietnam in December of 1966.

  Tom Clancy: Where were you initially assigned in 5th SFG?

  General Shelton: I went into, as everyone else did at the time, the 5th Group headquarters at Nha Traug, and they asked me what I desired to do. You know, typical administrative kind of thing, what kind of assignment was I looking for?

  My thought process was that I was a good swimmer. There’s a lot of water down in IV Corps. I like the water. Why not go to IV Corps? So I told them I wanted to go to IV Corps down in the Mekong Delta. The officer noted that on the form, and after a little discussion, he departed.

  There were about eight or nine of us who arrived that day, all lieutenants. We reported back around four or four-thirty that afternoon, and he handed me my paper and said that I was going to Detachment B-52, 5th SFG. When I asked what Detachment B-52 was, he told me that it was Project Delta, and that it was right down the street.14

  Back at (Fort) Bragg, Project Delta had a reputation as one of those supersecret organizations that does a lot of “behind the lines” operations, has a high mortality rate, etc. When I pointed out that I had requested duty down in IV Corps, he told me that they needed eight more captains over at Project Delta right now, and that I was one of them. I said, “Okay, I’ve got it.” So I went down, and I’ll never forget it.

  The XO [Executive Officer] of Project Delta, a major (who shall remain nameless), got three of us that reported in first and said, “I’ll brief you on what this is all about.”

  We went into this supersecret conference room, which had all kinds of video equipment and was pretty “high speed” for those days. The place even had sliding doors that were electronically controlled. Once inside, he gave us the command briefing. He then told us, “Now you three guys need to understand one thing. Statistically, two out of three of you are going to die, so make sure you’ve got your affairs in order.”

  How’s that for a welcome? I might add that this was just after Charlie Beckwith had left, having taken a .50-caliber round in the gut. That really set the stage for us. I mean, here’s the commander of the outfit getting whacked!

  From there on, we went out and tried to make the best of it, and we went to see what kind of training we were going to get.

  Then I met the group of the NCOs that were there, many of whom had been there for quite some time, over a year, and I saw in them a great group of professionals and felt pretty good about being there.

  The next day the commander (a lieutenant colonel) called me back in and said, “Listen, I’ve decided I’m gonna send you back.” He told me I was too tall! This was because they worked with South Vietnamese and former North Vietnamese and he felt I would stand out like a sore thumb. He said that if I was out with a recon team, I would be the target of choice, because the enemy would know I was an American. So all of a sudden I found myself begging him not to send me back. I liked this outfit, this was what I wanted to do. He finally acquiesced, and said, “Okay,” and a few other “choice” things that I won’t repeat here, and told me, “You’re staying!”

  I said, “Thank you!” and departed. It turned out to be a great assignment.

  Tom Clancy: General, if you were losing two out of three of your lieutenants, how was it for the NCOs?

  General Shelton: Well, we took casualties, though I’m not sure of the exact statistics. There were a lot more NCOs in the unit than there were officers. We ended up with eight officers, and we had a total of thirty-two two-man teams we could put together. Each was composed of two NCOs, or an NCO and an officer. So the NCOs casualty rate was not as high as the officers, but we still lost a lot of good people in the process.

  The most important thing, though, was that it was a really good organization! We had our own helicopters, for example, eight [UH-1 “Huey”] “slicks” [transports] and four [UH-1] gunships that stayed with us; we trained together as teams. When you were “put in” [inserted] with your team, the same pilot that put you in was going to come back and get you. And if he went down in flames, the guy who was his alternate was going to come in and get you. So, it really tightened things up, in terms of everyone understanding what the other one was doing, and having a good, tight team.

  Despite his positive first-tour experience, Hugh Shelton did not come away unscathed. Like other veterans of the Vietnam conflict, he saw his share of bad policy decisions.

  Tom Clancy: What are a couple of your most important memories and lessons that you brought back from that first tour in Vietnam?

  General Shelton: By the time I came back around December of 1967, there was starting to be a lot of debate about Vietnam, and whether we should be there or not, etc.

  But it was a debate I had a hard time with. The Montagnards, who I had served with in my area, were basically good, hard-working people who were really oppressed and taxed heavily by the Viet Cong and NVA [North Vietnamese Army]. Therefore, my initial impression was that we were right, that we were going to make a difference if we stayed with it and helped keep these people from having to live under that regime.

  In other words, I believed that what we were doing at the time was right, but I really did not fully understand the great debate that was going on. Certainly, as a young captain, I accepted the orders to go and do my duty; and I went over trying to do the very best that I could, given what I had been trained to do.

  Tom Clancy: Like many senior officers of your generation, you have the experiences of Vietnam and the post-war 1970s as part of your personal memories. Can you share with us some of the personal lessons and promises that you made to yourself in these tough times?

  General Shelton: Vietnam was a wa
tershed event for all Americans, not just for those of us who served in uniform. There are four distinct lessons that I took away from Vietnam.

  The first was that Vietnam underscored the importance of recognizing that every war has its own military, cultural, geographic, political, and economical context. What works in one conflict will not necessarily work in another.

  Second, Vietnam showed the need to carefully consider the costs, and to fully and publicly debate them before embarking on a major foreign policy commitment. The political objectives may or may not turn out to be obtainable through the use of military forces. It also showed us that we need to consider the end state that we’re looking at before making a commitment to use our military forces.

  Third, Vietnam taught us that while military force is a powerful and effective tool, it is only one of the foreign policy tools that is available to the president. As someone once said, “The military is a great hammer, but not every challenge that we face is a nail!”

  Lastly, if we commit our military, we need to do it in an overwhelming manner, using every element of our military power available to win decisively and expediently. And we must not allow the enemy to have sanctuaries or to have any aspects of his resources or his power base that is placed off-limits to the military forces.

  I hope these lessons are really never forgotten, because if we send America’s sons and daughters to fight and die on foreign soil, we as a nation must be prepared up front to support them.

  Tom Clancy: You were obviously in Vietnam during the heyday of Special Forces operations there. Do you have any memories of any particularly colorful or interesting SF?

  General Shelton: My experience in Special Forces at that time caused me to come away with two different views. First and foremost, what a tremendous asset Special Forces provides to our nation in terms of augmenting our conventional forces, in terms of being a multiplier to what the conventional guys bring. Consider the counterinsurgency scenario we were in then. With every twelve-man “A-Team” [Operational Detachment Alpha, the basic building block of Special Forces units], I was able to support five South Vietnamese/Montagnard companies. We then were able to go out and expand the influence the United States had. It was a great multiplier.

  Second was in the area of people. The Special Forces selection process in those days was not anywhere near what it is today, in terms of the selection and assessment up front. You didn’t weed out the way we can today some of those who should not have been there. What I found was one of the most professional Non-Commissioned Officer corps I’ve ever known. I’ve always had very fond memories of our NCOs.

  That was not true, though, on the officer side. When I looked at the senior officer leadership, and General Lindsay [the first CINCSOC] and I shared this one day talking about our own Special Forces experience in Vietnam, we didn’t see senior officers that we wanted to be like or emulate, per se. There was not a lot of coaching, teaching, or mentoring, and you did not see very many you aspired to say, “I want to be like that someday.”

  What has changed so drastically since then is that today, especially since the Army has made Special Forces its own branch, we have grown those kinds of individuals.

  But to go back to the original question about special or unique individuals.

  One I remember particularly was Doug Coulter, a Harvard graduate who came to Vietnam when that was not a very popular war and said, “I’m going to do my duty. My number came up and I’m going.” He did and was a very professional guy, one of the best officers I saw during my two years over there. Today he teaches Harvard business case studies in China. Before that, he also taught in Russia. He’s as professional as they come, and went out on some missions and did some things that would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. All out of range of U.S. forces and artillery (though we did have air support we could call in). He was truly good. Then there was a guy named “Doc” Simpson, an 18D medical technician, and an NCO in Delta. Doc never smiled, and I always worried about him, because we could not make him laugh. Yet anybody going out on patrol would want Doc as a partner, because this guy knew the [Special Forces] business backwards and forwards. I mean he knew the business cold! He was the most experienced guy we had, and Doc was on his second or third year in Delta when I got there, and he’d been doing this for a living.

  Most people after about six months of that would just as soon go do something else for a living. And until about the time I got there, for every three missions you went on, MACV-SOG [the parent organization of Project Delta] used to give you a week’s rest and recuperation back in your choice of locale—Hong Kong, Bangkok, Hawaii, etc. But Doc Simpson didn’t bother to do that very often. He’d rather go out and do another mission. I don’t know exactly what happened to him. I lost track of Doc later. Hopefully, he’s still alive and prospering.

  Then finally, back at the “C” Team in Da Nang [Operation Detachment “Charlie,” the battalion headquarters], there were a couple of NCOs, sergeant majors by the name of Hodge and Thomas. Hodge’s nickname was Preacher, while Thomas was part American Indian. These two guys were the living embodiment of your Special Forces sergeants. I mean, if you wanted to cast a guy [in a movie about Special Forces], it would not be John Wayne. It would be Hodge or Thomas. Very competent, very professional men, and you looked at them and could say, “There lies the real strength of the Special Forces, in its NCOs.”

  Tom Clancy: By the way, were you wounded in Vietnam during any of your tours?

  General Shelton: I was. We were on a patrol one night, looking for a Chinese hospital. Supposedly the Chinese were advising the [North] Vietnamese, but we never did find the hospital.

  But right at nightfall, our point man was shot and killed, and we came under tremendous fire from the top of a hill. We knew we were close and it [the hospital] had to be in the immediate area. So from there we fanned out the Montagnard company that was with us (myself and an NCO). We pressed them up and started running up the hill to try and get them [the Montagnards] to move in. The enemy were fairly good woodsmen and had good fieldcraft. They had in fact put out early warning devices [noisemakers on tripwires] and Pungi Sticks.15 All of a sudden, I felt a sharp, searing pain and got jerked to a stop. I reached down and felt the tip of the stick that had come out of my calf and gone in the front. I was able to get out my trusty K-Bar [Marine] knife, and with great pain was able to slice the ends of the Pungi Stick off, then went up the hill.

  Later on that night, we took the rest of the stick out. The NCO I was with was a medic also, and he was saying that we need to call a medevac [Medical Evacuation helicopter—Dustoff]. I was saying, “No, we’ve got to finish the job we were sent in for.” So the next day they flew me out to have it [the wound] treated and sewn up. To this day, I know to be careful when you run in the dark! Ironically, we had the boots with the steel sole inserts, but the stick actually went above that into my calf. It was coming up out of the ground at an angle, and it turns out there were quite a few of them [Pungi Sticks] around there. I was able to see that the next morning when we walked back down into the area where I had been wounded.

  One would think that with such a powerful first-tour experience behind him, Hugh Shelton would want to make Special Forces a career. Unfortunately, there was a problem—one of the many that would haunt Army SOF professionals for the next two decades: The Army did not then recognize SF as a career specialty. Special Forces were then part of the Infantry community, which meant that if an officer wanted to pursue promotion possibilities, he would be forced to leave SF for a more “balanced” Army career. That meant that he had to leave the SOF world for what turned out to be a two-decade hiatus. Nonetheless, the lessons he had learned at the JFK School and with the 5th SFG would stay with him.

  What followed were tours with some of the top infantry units in the Army, including the 173rd Airborne Infantry (with which he served his second Vietnam tour) and in the 1980s command in the 82nd Airborne Division.

  Tom Clancy:
Moving forward a bit, after you finished your first tour in Vietnam, it seems that your career took a move back toward the conventional forces. Can you tell us a bit about that?

  General Shelton: I’ve been really fortunate in that way. When I came back from Vietnam after the Special Forces tour, I wanted to go to Fort Bragg and the 82nd Airborne. I sent my “dream sheet” [career preference statement] in, and I got orders to go to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. For the first and only time [in my career], I called up the personnel guys and said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

  They said, “You deserve a company, but there’s a lot of competition for a company right now; and Fort Jackson is the best place where you can get one.” So there I was, and I screamed and shouted at them, but they said, “You’re going.”

  As it turned out, it was an absolutely great assignment. I ended up with the 3rd AIT [Advanced Infantry Training] Brigade training guys, every one of whom graduated and was sent to Vietnam. I was able to capitalize on my experience and taught them how to deal with the whole “Vietnam Experience”—from booby traps to the rest.

  I mentioned role models a while ago. The other important thing at that point was that my love was first and foremost with the special operations/light side of the force. The Special Forces, however, were not then a formal branch within the Army. So like [Army] Aviation at the time, you had to walk a fine line. If you served in one of the nonbranch communities, you had better not do it for too long, or the Army would “grind you off.” I mean, your career could come to a screeching halt, and you would not go any further; you’d be one of those “guys over there” or “Snakeaters,” as they used to refer to us.