Chosen Soldier

by Dick Couch

  There are two predictors of success in Special Forces training. The first is the Ranger tab. Men who have completed Ranger training have two advantages. One is that they have successfully completed a very difficult school. They’ve been cold, wet, and hungry, and they understand what it is to go days without sleep. They know pain and discomfort, and they know how to cope with it. Second, Ranger school also teaches small-unit tactics, a key skill in the world of Special Forces and SOF ground operations. Perhaps the most valuable carryover skills from Ranger training are confidence and leadership. Physically, nothing in Special Forces training is more difficult than Ranger training. I’ve heard Rangers in Special Forces training often say, “This is some nasty shit, but it’s not Ranger School.” Ranger training simply gives them a confidence that many non-Rangers lack. During Phase II of Special Forces training, which focuses on small-unit tactics in an SF environment, the Rangers usually do very well. Phase II cadre often look on their Ranger candidates as teaching assistants. The second predictor is a foreign language. A second language does not guarantee success, but those who speak more than one language seem to have the interpersonal skills that are essential to the mission of Special Forces, or the ability to acquire them. Having a language usually means that a man will have the ability to navigate in another culture more easily.

  Finally, there’s the issue of diversity. There’s the inherent diversity found in a Special Forces detachment that comes from men with different cultural, economic, and educational backgrounds, all of which make the team stronger than the sum of the individual parts. And there’s racial diversity. Too often, the perceived need for diversity has to do with a racial or ethnic balance that mirrors our national demographic. Those charged with hiring practices in the corporate or government arenas pay attention to this because, for want of a more politically correct term, it’s the right thing to do. Racial balance in the corporate world may even be an evaluation criterion or a competitive advantage in a contractual situation. But in the military, especially in SOF, and most certainly in Army Special Forces, diversity itself is an operational advantage. Deployed Special Forces detachments often have the duties and staff responsibility of a large military force or even a community government. In these situations, diversity becomes a force multiplier. Diverse skills and ethnic backgrounds bring a more multidimensional approach to cross-cultural issues that Special Forces teams have to deal with on a routine basis. The more diverse the members of an SF detachment, the better the thinking that may go into problem solving in cross-cultural environment. Another consideration is the image that a multiethnic team projects. Stephen Ambrose, who has written so eloquently of our troops in World War II, relates that one of the most comforting sights for the war-weary citizens of France or Belgium was a patrol of American GIs coming into their village. They had chocolate for the kids and were restrained and respectful in dealing with the local population. But that was an all-white patrol of GIs in a western European village. Afghanistan and Iraq offer none of the homogeneity found in western Europe during the last world war. In these troubled nations and in much of the Middle East and Southwest Asia, there are competing religious and tribal interests. There are deep-seated animosities in the same nation—in the same community. Imagine the impact in these tribal and ethnically charged areas when a Special Forces detachment with blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics enters a village. Not only do they have the skills to fight and to provide material assistance, they also speak the language and understand and respect the customs. They demonstrate that people who are different can live and work together. They are the new band of brothers.

  There are three types of individuals entering Special Forces training: officer candidates, enlisted soldiers currently serving in units of the Army, and men who have been recruited “off the street”—men who joined the Army to become Special Forces soldiers. All three will come together in the first major phase of the Special Forces training pipeline, the Special Forces Assessment and Selection phase. SFAS is conducted at Camp Mackall, the primary Special Forces training base, and operates under the umbrella of Fort Bragg and the JFK Special Warfare Center and School. The officers and enlisted soldiers who are currently serving in the Army will come to SFAS from their current duty station on temporary-duty orders. If they succeed at SFAS, they will be “selected” to continue Special Forces training. As selectees, they will return to their units and at a future time, usually two to four months, be assigned to Fort Bragg on permanent orders. This is a matter of economics. It costs money to move a man and his family from one duty station to another. Since two-thirds of those attending the selection phase will not qualify, they return to their current assignment at their current post and carry on with their duties. Those selected will leave their current units and return to Fort Bragg (unless they’re already stationed there) to begin the next phase of Special Forces training.

  Officers entering Special Forces training are special before they arrive at Camp Mackall for the assessment and selection process. They are captains and a few first lieutenants who have made the promotion list for captain. In most cases, they’ve had four or five years or more in the Army and have distinguished themselves as superior leaders in their branch of the Army. Today, these numbers are up from my time at Fort Bragg; something on the order of five hundred or more of these officers apply for Special Forces training each year. Close to three hundred are now chosen to attend SFAS. Most have been to Ranger School, and many of those are veterans of the 75th Ranger Regiment. Most are infantry officers, although there’s always a smattering from other branches of the Army—armor, engineering, artillery, and signal corps officers. It might seem that the Special Forces mission is more suited to infantry officers, but a Special Forces battalion commander likes having a mix of talent he can draw upon. The key components an officer brings to the Special Forces table are troop leadership skills and branch experience. Language ability and cross-cultural skills/experience are also very helpful. And today, more than ever, most of these officers are combat veterans. With regard to other SOF units, including SEALs and Rangers, the officer candidates for Special Forces are older, and have more time in service and more leadership experience.

  The enlisted Special Forces candidates are also a breed apart in terms of maturity and qualification. While these soldiers are predominately infantryman, they come from all branches of the Army and from all technical specialties. A great many come from the 82nd Airborne Division, which also calls Fort Bragg home, but there are aviation, administrative, and medical specialists, as well as those from the infantry and armored divisions. As a group, they’re more senior, with the junior men having reached the rank of specialist, but most are buck sergeants or higher. It’s not uncommon to have a number of staff sergeants and a few sergeants first class in a selection class. They are older than most soldiers in conventional units, they have superior performance ratings, and, like the officer candidates, most are combat veterans. We often hear about the Army failing to make its recruitment goals, but the Special Forces recruiters are finding that there’s an increasing number of veteran soldiers who want to become Special Forces soldiers. Applications are up and the SF recruiters are able to select the most qualified candidates from a larger pool of qualified applicants.

  “These are good times for Special Forces, as far as recruiting goes,” a Special Forces recruiter told me. “And I should know. I’m the guy who has to tell a veteran sergeant in the 82nd that we can’t take him this time around. I tell him to go back to his unit, try to improve his physical qualifications and test scores, and perhaps we can place him in a future class. Who would’ve thought that four years into a war, we’d have plenty of high-quality soldiers willing to extend their enlistments to become Special Forces soldiers.”

  The recruiter’s job has been made a lot easier because of 9/11 and the global war on terror. Many good men self-select for Special Forces. These are soldiers who have served with or near Special Forces detachments in Afghanistan or Iraq
, and they now know how they want to go back to the fight. They’ve seen what Special Forces do and how they do it, and they want to be a part of that world. By far, the most potent recruiting tool for Special Forces among regular soldiers is a deployed Special Forces detachment.

  “I was in Kandahar with a rifle company providing perimeter security for the airport there,” a sergeant candidate in SFAS told me. “This C-17 lands and taxis to the end of the runway and lowers the tail ramp, engines still running. I thought it might be some black operation or something like that. Then this Humvee pulls up with four guys in it. They all had beards and shaggy hair, and they were dressed in blue jeans and old field jackets. I knew they were Americans because they all had M4 rifles with scopes and laser sights on them. The C-17 crew chief walks down the tail ramp with a big stack of flat boxes. He hands ’em to one of these guys, reboards the C-17, and the big transport takes off. We’re in a revetment about fifty meters away. The Humvee pulls over to our position and one of them gets out. ‘You guys look like you could use some chow,’ he says, and hands us one of the boxes. It was a pepperoni and sausage pizza—and it was still warm! Right then and there I said, ‘That’s the kind of outfit I want to belong to,’ and here I am.”

  “I want to be in the Army for a career,” another candidate told me, “and I want to serve with the best. A lot of people think the Green Berets have it easy because they get special pay and they don’t have to observe grooming standards when they are deployed in Afghanistan and places like that. But they work hard. They’re out there in the bad areas a lot of the time, and when they’re back in, they’re often not in a secure area. They’re real pros, and the locals respect them—you can tell. They look at them a lot different than they do the rest of us.”

  “I’ve wanted to be in Special Forces since I was a plebe at West Point,” an officer candidate told me. “That was nine years ago. I enjoyed my tour with the 101st, and I was proud of my service in Bosnia and Iraq, but now I finally have a chance to live my dream and be in Special Forces. This is where I want to serve.”

  The current climate in Special Forces and Special Forces training can be compared to The Perfect Storm—much like the movie and the rare storm-pattern phenomenon on which that film was based. This is due to a number of reasons, but three stand out. First of all, the caliber and content of Special Forces training has never been better. I say this not only from my observations, but from the comments of retired Special Forces master sergeants and sergeant majors—men whose experience stretches back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. They say it is better now than they’ve ever seen it. Better, again, for a number of reasons, but primarily due to the quality of the training cadre—warriors back from war, training new men for war. Something special goes on when trainers and trainees may soon fight side by side. Those few men who were not combat veterans were experienced SF operators chosen for their teaching and leadership skills. Nearly all of the noncombat vets were approaching the end of their three-year tour as Special Forces instructors. They were like grade-schoolers waiting for recess in their eagerness to return to their groups and get into deployment rotation.

  The second reason, as we have talked about, is the quality of the soldiers who show up for assessment and selection. These are, for the most part, men who volunteered for the Army when joining the Army meant going into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Except for certain specialties, joining the Army now means going to war. And now these soldiers are volunteering again, with the prospect of future combat a certainty. They’re not here for college credit or for civilian job skills or because they’ve no options on the outside. They’re here for the fight, to become professional warriors in the service of their nation. Not all of them will make the cut, but that’s why they show up at SFAS. And there’s the brotherhood thing. Special Forces is a brotherhood like no other. I’ve been privileged to know the close company of good men and to bond with them in difficult or formative times—my classmates at the Naval Academy, my generation of Navy SEALs, my CIA training class, and my lifelong friends, who will follow me into old age. Yet I sensed something a little deeper and more special at work as I watched the Special Forces cadre mentor the new men into their ranks. They’re training their new brothers.

  The third component of this perfect storm is the need. Insurgency warfare appears to be the weapon of choice for al-Qaeda and its terrorist allies. The lead SOF component for counterinsurgency warfare is Army Special Forces. We’ll succeed or fail in Iraq and Afghanistan on our ability to control the insurgents, period. Any form of democracy that breaks out in Beirut or Damascus will attract Islamic insurgents like bees to honey. The Special Forces detachments will be on the front lines of the war on terror far into the foreseeable future. They’ll not only have to fight and train their local counterparts to fight, but they’re going to have to teach our other SOF components and conventional units to conduct counterinsurgency warfare as well.

  This perfect storm of quality training, quality input, and urgent need does not exist with the other major SOF ground components. Navy SEALs, who have come ashore to become ground SOF players in this fight, are still made the old-fashioned way—the training cadre takes sailors from boot camp and fresh Naval Academy ensigns and makes them into SEALs. There’s no Navy boot camp or shipboard experience that compares with Army infantry training, nor is there any fleet deployment that prepares a man for special operations that’s comparable with a tour in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne or the 3rd Infantry Division. SEAL training is difficult, perhaps more difficult on the pure pain-o-meter scale than Special Forces training. But the skill set of a Navy SEAL—in addition to his behind-the-gun proficiency, which is comparable to an SF soldier’s—requires maritime training. Over one-third of basic SEAL training is in-water training; ongoing maritime/ underwater certification and proficiency training also take a great deal of time. And the counterinsurgency skills, while being given more attention, are still not the focus of SEAL training nor a primary mission in their deployment rotations. Even the Rangers don’t enjoy this “storm” in the manner of Special Forces. Rangers are younger and don’t have to be trained to the same rigorous standard of Special Forces. Good as they are and as tough as they are, it’s still light-infantry work, and their duties don’t carry the language and cross-cultural requirements of their SF brothers. For all of these reasons, Special Forces have found themselves in a special place and circumstance, one that is unprecedented and one that may never happen again.

  A final word about these soldiers who abandon their conventional units to try out for Special Forces. When they leave the 101st Airborne or the 3rd Infantry Division, they are, to some extent, breaking faith with that band of brothers. They’re saying, “I want to leave you and join them.” Put yourself in the shoes of a company first sergeant in the 82nd Airborne. His battalion’s just returned from deployment, and like any good first sergeant, he’s thinking about the next deployment—the veterans he’ll have with him and the new men he has to whip into shape to go back to the fight. Suddenly, three of his best sergeants inform him that they’re putting in for Special Forces training. Never mind that two of the three will return to his company after an unsuccessful try at SF selection, perhaps better for their experience. They want to leave. In his heart, the first sergeant knows these soldiers are following their dream and are motivated to better serve their country. Still, he can’t help but feel betrayed and a little resentful. For the officers, this resentment is deeper. For officers leaving the conventional fold, it borders on infidelity in marriage. In many cases, the officer who leaves for SFAS may well be the best company commander or the most capable staff officer in his battalion or regiment. The senior commanders who rely on these outstanding junior officers can’t help but feel a little betrayed. It’s my sense, given the deployed working relationships and intelligence-production value of the Special Forces detachments in Afghanistan and Iraq, the wall between SOF elements and the conventional military may not be as formidable as it once
was. Still, the U.S. Army, like most standing armies, has its problems and resentments with elite units, even though Army SOF elements are funded differently and often have a separate chain of command. And these fine young captains and first lieutenants who put in for Special Forces, no matter what their accomplishments, may be moving down a path of no return. Burning their bridges is perhaps putting it too strongly, but this breach of faith with their conventional branch may not be soon forgiven if they are unsuccessful at SFAS and have to return to their old unit. In some ways, the defection on the part of these officers represents a bold move on their part—trading a secure place for the uncertain. And in the final analysis, is this not one of the qualities the Special Forces are looking for in their leaders?

  This rivalry and resentment doesn’t exist in the Navy and Air Force SOF components. The Navy SEAL teams and Special Boat Teams don’t threaten the blue-water Navy. Most officers come from the Naval Academy or college ROTC, and most of the enlisted men come from boot camp. Those officers and petty officers who apply for SEAL training from the fleet don’t do so in the numbers or at the experience levels as their Army counterparts who request to go to Special Forces Assessment and Selection. It is much the same with the Air Force Special Tactics Teams and the 1st Special Operations Wing. Neither of these service-related SOF components threaten their parent service, nor do they drain off talent and experience like Army Special Forces. Not even the Rangers pose this issue with “big Army”; indeed, most senior infantry and armor commanders wear Ranger tabs. There’s also the question of job description. Neither the blue-water Navy nor the regular Air Force have an interest in doing the work of SEALs or the Special Tactics Teams. Big Army is often colocated with Special Forces, both here at home and on deployment. Some Army and Marine Corps senior officers believe that with a little training, experience, and funding, they can cover the Special Forces mission. I couldn’t disagree more strongly. I personally had no idea of just how difficult the SF mission was, nor the intensive skill set required to do the job. It took me ten months at Fort Bragg and Camp Mackall to appreciate what it takes to be really proficient at foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare. Hopefully, the needs of our nation in the global war on terror will bring these inter- and intra-service rivalries into perspective.