Chosen Soldier

by Dick Couch

  In Chosen Soldier, you will meet and come to know the officers and enlisted soldiers who want to become Green Berets as we follow them through SFAS in chapter 4. But first, we need to talk about the third input or component to current Special Forces training. I’m talking about those men who have been recruited “off the street” for Special Forces training. These are the ones I often call the civilians and some in the Army refer to as the SF Babies. Neither term is accurate. First of all, when they arrive at Fort Bragg to begin their journey to selection, they’re already soldiers—airborne-qualified infantrymen, albeit fresh out of basic training. Many of them will go on to become Special Forces soldiers—outstanding Green Berets. The majority will, for one reason or another, find themselves in the 82nd Airborne or the 4th Infantry Division or the 75th Ranger Regiment, where they will serve out their enlistments. Some of those who don’t make it on their first try in SFAS will be back to try again. They will join the legion of combat veterans from conventional Army units who want to serve in Special Forces.

  This program, which began in 2002, takes men off the street—from high school, college, or civilian jobs—and brings them into the Army for the sole purpose of turning them into Special Forces soldiers. In many ways, these young men are like their counterparts who enlist in the Navy to become Navy SEALs. Big Army and blue-water Navy love these programs. Those who do not become Green Berets or SEALs make superb soldiers and sailors, and go on to serve with distinction in their assigned service components. The program that turns civilians into Special Forces soldiers is called the 18 X-Ray Program, and these men who join the Army for Special Forces training are universally referred to as the X-Rays. Even when these new soldiers are qualified Green Berets, they’re often still called X-Rays. When one of them is killed in combat, someone will invariably say, “He was an X-Ray.”

  There’s precedence for the X-Ray Program. On more than one occasion, Special Forces has looked to younger, less-experienced soldiers to fill its ranks. As recently as the early 1990s, the Special Forces began to accept soldiers directly from basic training and assign them to the Special Forces groups. After they had served in the groups in an administrative or support role for six months, they could be recommended by their group to attended Army airborne training and go on to selection. This was done in an attempt to bring up the manpower strength of the groups. This earlier program was only in place for two years, but it did modestly add to the Special Forces manning levels.

  In chapter 3, we’ll take a close look at these soldiers and the formal training that prepares these men for the selection process at Camp Mackall, but for now, let’s focus on who they are and what happens before they arrive at Fort Bragg to begin their initial Special Forces training. There’s no such thing in my mind as a typical X-Ray, but taken as a composite they look something like this:

  Average age: twenty-three years old, with the youngest twenty and the oldest twenty-nine.

  Rank: Private first class or specialist. Some in the National Guard are more senior.

  Army general test score: 120+, high enough to qualify for officer candidate school.

  Average physical training score: 265 out of 300, well above average for the Army.

  Other: 15 percent are married, most have some college, just under half have college degrees.

  The reasons these men join the Army for Special Forces training range from the patriotic to the adventurous. Not a few are bored by their civilian jobs. Many come from military families. Most were deeply moved by the attacks of 9/11, and that event had some bearing on their desire to serve. A few have had prior service, mostly in the Army, and those few choose the X-Ray Program as a way to get back in uniform. The Special Forces National Guard groups send a few of their non-SF-qualified soldiers to join up with the X-Ray Program; these are men who need some physical training before they go to selection. The reserve groups also send some of their new recruits to the program. All of them have their minds and their focus on a single event that will change their lives: Special Forces Assessment and Selection.

  Men who join the Army for the X-Ray Program will sign a five- or six-year enlistment contract. They’re inducted into the Army as privates and report for basic training. Army basic training has morphed into One Station Unit Training (OSUT), which includes seven weeks of Basic Combat Training immediately followed by seven weeks of Advanced Individual Training. The basic training course makes a man a soldier. The successful completion of the latter qualifies a soldier and an infantryman. In basic training, the new X-Rays and every other new recruit in the Army learn about Army regulations, physical training, first aid, close-order drill, marksmanship, obstacle courses (now called confidence courses), hand grenades, and marching under a rucksack. The new recruits put these new military skills to work in a three-day field exercise. On graduation, they are soldiers. Following the Basic Combat Training phase of OSUT, the X-Rays and the other infantry candidates move on to Advanced Individual Training. Here they learn soldiering skills that are useful whether they are assigned to an infantry platoon or a Special Forces detachment. These include weapons operation and maintenance, vehicle operation and maintenance, land reconnaissance, land navigation, minefield safety, communications, static firing positions, and teamwork. On completion, they’re now soldiers and infantrymen.

  During this fourteen-week OSUT process, some recruits, and those include a few X-Rays, decide that this life is not for them—that they don’t want to be soldiers under any circumstances. Army life comes with a decided lack of privacy and loss of freedom. For the X-Ray soldiers, the image of donning that Green Beret meets the growing reality that the road to becoming a Green Beret is very hard and very long. So they volunteer out; they quit. Even for the most capable and motivated, the transition from college student or computer technician or management trainee to soldier isn’t an easy one. And along with all this new regimentation, barracks life, and the shouting of drill instructors is the sure knowledge that if Basic Combat Training and Advanced Individual Training is hard, what’s it going to be like when they get to Fort Bragg and Special Forces training?

  After OSUT, the new X-Rays are off to three weeks of Army Airborne School, more commonly referred to as jump school. At this point, a few of the X-Rays decide that while they want to learn to parachute, the long journey of Special Forces training is not for them. At this point, they may or may not be allowed into jump school, but they have earned themselves a set of orders to the 3rd or 4th Infantry Division, or some other duty station that serves the needs of the Army. After three weeks of Airborne School and five parachute jumps, the same as when I went to jump school almost forty years ago, they are now airborne-qualified infantry soldiers. Friday afternoon after their jump-school graduation, they blouse their trousers into their jump boots, pin on their silver parachute wings, and board the buses for the trip from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  On the twelve-hour trip from Benning to Bragg, the X-Rays have some time to think about their sixteen or seventeen weeks in the United States Army. They have three Army schools behind them. They’ve struggled and sweated, and they’ve succeeded. With each school, there was a graduation ceremony of sorts and they were congratulated for their achievement—something the Army does very well. The new soldiers were allowed a day or a weekend to savor their achievement, then it was on to the next school. For the most part, few of them have been seriously challenged, although jumping out of a perfectly good airplane is not for sissies, and something that may have never entered their mind six months ago. Now they’re about to begin their Special Forces training. They know something of what is ahead. The rumor mill easily reaches from Fort Bragg to Fort Benning—some fact and a lot of fiction. The Special Forces cadres visit them at Fort Benning and candidly tell them something of what’s in store when they do get to Fort Bragg. But all they really know is that it’ll be hard—harder than anything they have faced in their short Army careers.

  WATER AEROBICS. Pre-SFAS students p
ause midstream on a run for some jumping jacks—not unwelcome in the North Carolina summer heat.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE PREPARATION

  It is well after midnight by the time the three buses finally crawl off I-95 and turn west. Leaving the interstate, they thread their way through the outskirts of Fayetteville and onto the All American Freeway, a short, four-lane superhighway that leads into the bowels of Fort Bragg. At the gate, a guard steps aboard the lead bus and looks down the aisle of sleepy soldiers. They’re awake, but just barely. The buses aren’t civilian charter buses, but school-type military buses.

  “More Special Forces trainees?” the guard asks the driver as he checks the trip pass.

  “I reckon,” the driver replies. He’s as tired as the soldiers he’s driving. The guard’s an MP, but the driver is a civilian contract employee.

  After the buses are checked through, they continue down All American, turn left on Longstreet Road, and continue for nearly a mile, then right on Gruber Road, and right again onto Pratt Street. The sprawling base is quiet but not quite asleep. Fort Bragg is never fully asleep, just busier during the day. The file of buses stops at a gravel parking area between Pike Athletic Field and a row of two-story World War II–style wooden barracks. It’s nearly two o’clock on Monday morning. They were supposed to have left Fort Benning Sunday morning to arrive Sunday evening, but due to a scheduling error, they had not left until two that afternoon. A single figure waits for them, clipboard in hand. He’s dressed in utility trousers, black sweatshirt, and black baseball cap. He makes his way down the file of buses, shouting into each one.

  “Fall in, on the double! Move, people, move!” The soldiers struggle off the buses with their gear—all their worldly Army possessions in a kit bag and a duffel, perhaps a hundred pounds per man. “Fall in beside your gear. I want four ranks, dress and cover down.” The mass of troops scramble into a loose formation. “Too slow, people—everyone drop and start pushing them out.” The last of them tumble from the door of the buses, struggling under the weight of their gear. They find a piece of gravel, drop their bags, and begin doing push-ups. Finally, the buses are empty. They pull away in a cloud of blue haze, leaving an eerie quiet in their wake, broken only by the grunting of men doing push-ups. The soldiers melt into an undulating field of dark forms—rising and falling. There’s no moon, and the area’s sparsely lit by a picket of halogen streetlights along the edge of the athletic field. It’s August, and the overnight temperature has dropped to a moist seventy-five degrees.

  “Recover!” shouts the man in the ball cap. “Fall in and do it smartly this time.” After several minutes, they manage a loose assembly of four ranks. There are about a hundred of them. “All right, men, listen up. When I call out your name, I want you to sound off and fall out into a group off to my right, understood?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” comes the weak chorus.

  “Not loud enough, ladies. Drop!” After another short round of push-ups, he shouts, “Recover. Is that understood?”

  “YES, SERGEANT!”

  “Now you’re getting the idea. OK, Adams.”

  “Here, Sergeant!”

  “Adkins.”

  “Here, Sergeant!”

  The formation is cut to groups of twelve- to fourteen-man groups and sent off to their barracks. After dismissing the last group, the soldier in the black sweatshirt and ball cap, Sergeant First Class Ross Jennings, flips through his roster and again counts the new arrivals. These soldiers are the X-Rays, men who joined the Army specifically to become Green Berets. They’ll begin this journey with 18X Pre-SFAS Training—training to prepare them for Special Forces Assessment and Selection. This class is 18X Pre-SFAS Class 8-04. Jennings had 101 names and could only account for 99 soldiers—2 short. How the hell, he says to himself, could they muster 101 airborne-qualified 18 X-Rays at Benning, put them on the bus, and I get only 99 here to begin training?

  Sergeant First Class Jennings is the senior TAC NCO for the Pre-SFAS course. TAC is yet another acronym and stands for teach, advise, and counsel. The X-Ray soldiers saw plenty of these TAC noncommissioned officers in their basic training, but Sergeant Jennings is the first TAC NCO they have met who is a Green Beret. He’s thirty-six years old and has been at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School for almost three years. Had the buses arrived as scheduled that afternoon, there would have been eighteen TAC NCOs waiting for them, and the class would have been welcomed to Fort Bragg at that time. Now that reception will have to wait until morning formation. Jennings sent his cadre of TAC sergeants home and remained in the area for the arrival of the new class. He’s five-nine with soft, regular features, light-brown wavy hair, and an easy smile that creases the corners of his eyes. Ross Jennings grew up in Tacoma and has a degree in history from the University of Washington. He’s one of the few TACs who is single. He came to the school from the 10th Special Forces Group. He speaks German and had two rotations in Bosnia before coming to the training command. Jennings arrived at Fort Bragg just as the X-Ray Program was getting off the ground. Much of the training, testing, and course work for the program has been developed by Sergeant Jennings. Since he is the corporate knowledge for this relatively new block of training, he’s just been extended in the billet for an additional six months, which doesn’t please him. He wants to get back to his group and back into deployment rotation.

  “I’ve been here too long,” he told me. “I should have been back with 10th Group a year ago, but they held me over again. We have a big job here. We’ve got to sort these soldiers out and get them ready for Special Forces selection. We get a new group in here every month or so. I work my TACs like dogs. Hell, I work like a dog. I need to get back to my group.”

  Jennings glances at his watch: 0230, or 2:30 a.m. He shrugs, knowing it will take the better part of the day to track down his two missing troopers. He thinks about going back to his office, where he might get a few hours sleep in the cot he keeps by his desk. But the class formation is at 0500, so he decides against it. Instead, he heads for the chow hall. There’s always a coffee pot on, and maybe he can talk one of the mess cooks into frying him up some eggs.

  Meanwhile, the new Special Forces trainees make their way to the barracks. They’re wooden frame structures that were built in 1937—open-bay sleeping area in one end with toilets, showers, and laundry facilities at the other. At one time the structures had been modernized to provide sleeping and locker cubicles for four men. Those partitions were taken out when Special Forces Pre-SFAS Training took over the barracks. Overseas, deployed ODAs often don’t have the luxury of privacy. In Special Forces, men train like they fight, even men who have only been in the Army for a few months. In Vietnam, Captain Vernon Gillespie’s Special Forces detachment slept in open bays, just like Class 8-04. The new X-Rays shuffle through the dim light of their new home, trying to find an empty rack. In every other two or three bunks there’s a sleeping soldier. These are rollbacks—soldiers held over from the previous class. One of the new arrivals finds an empty bunk between two sleeping forms. He unceremoniously drops his load to the linoleum floor. One man grunts and rolls over. The other sits up and offers his hand.

  “Hey, man, welcome to Fort Bragg. I’m Hal Eshman, a refugee from Class 7-04.”

  “Um, I’m Tim Baker. Just checking in from Benning.”

  Eshman glances at his watch and gives him a knowing smile. “Try to get some rest; you’re going to need it.”

  Private First Class Tim Baker is six-one and a well-set, handsome twenty-two-year-old. He was a sophomore at Texas A&M and an Army ROTC student when he decided to quit collage and put in for the X-Ray program. “I always wanted to be in the Army,” he told me. “By leaving school, I just pushed up the timetable a little.” While waiting for his induction date, he worked on a horse ranch and at Circuit City. He worked hard to get in shape prior to joining the Army, and neither One Station Unit Training nor Airborne School had seriously taxed him. He’s looking forward to the challenge of Sp
ecial Forces training. But now, he’s pretty well done in from the long bus ride. Baker quickly stows his gear, lays out a clean uniform for formation, and is asleep in a matter of minutes.

  In a dozen other barracks, the newly arrived X-Ray soldiers are wearily making up their bunks, stowing their gear, and trying for a little sleep. In addition to the new arrivals, there are perhaps half again as many men from the previous class who have been rolled into Class 8-04. The 8-04 designator is given to this group of X-Rays as they will form the eighth Pre-SFAS class conducted in fiscal year 2004. Technically, these men are in Special Forces training, but this course, the Pre-SFAS Training, is designed to prepare them for their formal selection to the Special Forces Qualification Course. The mission of Pre-SFAS Training is to prepare X-Ray soldiers for the rigorous selection process. The mission of SFAS, or Phase I of the Q-Course, is to select soldiers for Special Forces training. The young men who just arrived from Fort Benning understand this, but their horizons are much shorter. For them, the days will begin early and their evening meal is a long way off. Their focus is on the next formation and the next training evolution.