Chosen Soldier

by Dick Couch

  The logistics, coordination, command, and control of this exercise, as you may imagine, are formidable. And the exercise play, while highly formatted and supervised, is free flowing. The direction and development of the exercise scenario is, within bounds, driven by the capability, performance, and decisions made by the student ODAs. Each ODA is tasked with a mission to infiltrate the fictitious nation of Pineland, link up with their assigned guerrilla band, and conduct an unconventional-warfare campaign. Their mission is to orchestrate guerrilla operations in advance of a planned invasion by conventional coalition forces. Robin Sage is a complex, freewheeling, wide-ranging military/paramilitary exercise on a scale that I’ve never before experienced. It’s worthy of a book, not just the chapter I’m able to devote to it here.

  In the 915 team room, the student ODA gathers to meet their assigned cadre team sergeant and cadre team officer.

  “Captain Santos, you up?”

  Santos looks around the team room and finds his student team sergeant. “Sergeant Olin?”

  “We’re up, sir,” Staff Sergeant Olin replies.

  “We’re up, Sergeant,” Santos tells the 915 cadre team sergeant.

  “OK, bring it in. I’ve got some word to put out.” Sergeant First Class Troy Blackman is from southern Ohio and joined up right after high school. He has been in the Army for twenty years and the Special Forces for fifteen. All of his time has been with the 5th Group. Blackman deployed as a young sergeant for the first Gulf War and most recently to Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom. During the intervening decade, he has made more than a few deployments to the Middle East and Southwest Asia. He can converse with the locals in Arabic. Blackman hopes to be on the next promotion list for master sergeant and return to the 5th Group for an assignment as an ODA team sergeant. Sergeant Blackman flips through his notebook, then looks up to survey his student team.

  “I have a few things for you before we get started. First of all, I want you to understand that this is serious training. I’m serious, the captain’s serious, and I expect you to be serious. Stay focused, be a team, help each other, and work for the common good. You’ve all come too far to screw up now. At the top of my list is integrity. Don’t lie, cheat, or steal. Violate our standards of integrity and you are gone. Violate UCMJ [the Uniform Code of Military Justice] and you may do time. UCMJ is an acronym for jail. In addition, you’ll really piss me off. I care about this training and about Special Forces. You’re all needed in the groups and in this war. Don’t demean me or this training.

  “A few no-nos. We use blank ammo, but even so, accidental discharges and negligent discharges will get you out of here. Lie about it, and you’re gone forever. ’Fess up, and you’re gone from this class, but we might be able to get you back for the next class. All training materials are classified DTNB—don’t tell no body. Play the game. No interaction with anyone that’s not in the course. Once you go into isolation for the final problem, you will not talk to anyone in another ODA.”

  Sergeant Blackman covers team room protocol; he wants 915 to keep their spaces clean and orderly. Inside, they can be informal; but outside, they have to be in a full and correct uniform, and observe the buddy system. Blackman then asks for each man to introduce himself and to state why he chose Special Forces. The reasons range from the patriotic to the boring civilian job to the inactivity of their conventional unit.

  “I came into Special Forces because I was looking for a challenge,” Blackman tells 915, “and I stayed in Special Forces because I get to serve with the greatest guys in the world. I have two families—my wife and two boys at home, and I have my brothers in SF.”

  A tall man standing off to one side speaks for the first time. “I joined Special Forces because I wanted to work with other cultures and to operate with the freedom and independence that you can only find in Special Forces,” Captain Garrett Childers tells the student ODA. He’s 915’s cadre officer. “As many of you know, that kind of freedom is seldom given to a junior leader in a conventional unit.” Captain Garrett Childers is six-two and lean, with something of an academic bearing and a perpetually mild expression. He’s a West Point graduate with ten years in the Army, half of that in Special Forces. His father was with the World Health Organization, so Childers grew up in South America and Europe. He’s fluent in Spanish and French. His operational time has been with the 7th Special Forces Group. Captain Childers has made several deployments to South America, a rotation in Afghanistan, and a rotation in Iraq.

  “I want to see good leadership,” Captain Childers continues, “from top to bottom. I’ll look for strong leadership from the senior members of the team and from the junior members as appropriate. Use your time well to front-load your standard patrolling procedures and to get back into tactical form. It’s been a while since you were out there working as a team. Planning will be important. You senior guys should be familiar with MDMP. I’ll count on you to help the junior men to understand the military decision-making process and how to prepare and deliver briefing materials. You’ll be challenged tactically and intellectually. The game here is to make good decisions with some thought to the second and third effects of that decision. You’ll have to game out every situation and every decision. Work hard, pay attention to detail, and take care of each other.”

  The phase begins with the classroom work, learning about air operations and clandestine airborne infiltration into a denied area. During Robin Sage and often on deployment, ODA teams are resupplied from the air. The information comes to them by PowerPoint and a stack of Army and Air Force publications and field manuals. They learn about the rigging and preparation that go into preparing pallets and personnel for a tactical airdrop. There are protocols for marking a drop zone, signaling, authentication, surveillance, and bundle recovery. Communications with the aircraft are very important. The engineering sergeants are responsible for preparing and rigging bundles for aerial resupply and for parceling out the dropped supplies and packing these supplies off the drop zone. Class 2-05 learns about the management of airborne resupply using U.S. and allied aircraft. They also learn to deal with Third World situations in which pilots may not have GPS, nav aids, night-vision goggles, or reliable aircraft. Every airborne drop has to be planned, and there are the mathematical calculations that go with determining the release point and the impact point. Bottom line, a Special Forces soldier has to know how to set up and manage aerial resupply from any type of aircraft, under any weather conditions, in any terrain, anytime, anywhere. Considerations can range from the location of nearby power lines to the pilot’s skill and ego.

  After two days of classes, 915 builds two pallets with twelve cases of MREs each. That afternoon the team parachutes, with full equipment, into the Luzon Drop Zone at Camp Mackall. Later that evening, they prepare the DZ for aerial resupply and guide in the aircraft, a twin-engined Casa, that drops their bundle. Staff Sergeant Olin directs the preparation of the DZ for a daylight drop. Five other members of 915 form the recovery team. They break down the bundle and pack the boxes of MREs and the parachute off the drop zone. The chow, parachute, and pallet are loaded on a truck that will take the gear back to the Rowe Training Facility. That night, Sergeant Dan Barstow is in charge of the aerial resupply. He directs 915 as they rig the drop zone for a night drop.

  After the air-operations block of training, 915 and the other Phase IV ODAs return to the compound to begin three days and evenings of classes on unconventional warfare. This classroom work is tailored to helping them to support and manage the Pineland resistance forces in the Robin Sage exercise. For the officers, much of this is familiar from Phase III. For the enlisted soldiers, it’s a cram course in guerrilla warfare. These three days of Insurgency 101 in a crowded classroom could have been terribly dull and laborious had it not been for the talented delivery of the cadre sergeant instructors and civilian contractors who make these presentations. Most are well punctuated by historical and anecdotal examples. Much of the material focuses on the three key co
mponents of an insurgency. The first are the guerrillas, or freedom fighters, the action arm of the insurgency and the overt irregular/ paramilitary forces the student ODA will be most concerned with. Interestingly, when they are on our side, we usually refer to them as guerrillas or partisans or freedom fighters. When they, the men in the hills, oppose a government we support, we call them insurgents. The second is the underground. The underground is the clandestine, cellular organization that conducts subversion, sabotage, and intelligence collection activities. The future political leadership that arises from a successful insurgency comes from members of the underground. And then there’s the auxiliary, the volunteers who support the insurgency with logistics, transportation, and security. The future Green Berets are told that in an unconventional-warfare scenario, it’s critical that they understand these three components of an insurgency and that they establish good rapport with each of them. Again and again, the trainers hammer on the necessity of understanding their freedom fighters or guerrillas from the perspective of their wants, desires, goals, problems, values, and culture.

  A lot is crammed into these three days of instruction; it exhausts the candidates and the writer—logistics, security, intelligence, caching equipment, linkup procedures, guerrilla bases, guerrilla training areas, mission support sites, emergency procedures, communications, demobilizations…the list goes on. There were two blocks of instruction I find particularly compelling. One is on negotiations and the other on cross-cultural communication. The material and the delivery are first rate. In the crowded, stuffy classroom, I can feel the weary candidates perk up during these presentations.

  The class on negotiation is presented by a retired Special Forces sergeant major who had trained at the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, the U.S. Army Peacekeeping Institute, and the State Department’s National Foreign Affairs Training Center. “Understand that there’s always a basis for negotiation,” he tells Phase IV Class 2-05, “and each side has a range of options. You have the tactical-force option: small-arms fire, close air support, and smart bombs—that sort of thing. And there’s the nontactical option, or trying to influence someone else to see things your way. We negotiate all the time—when we buy a new car, when we want to watch the ball game and our wives want to watch a movie. The regular Army usually negotiates with tanks, armored personnel carriers, and attack helicopters. In Special Forces, we often have to be persuasive in our work—it’s the nature of working by, with, and through others. In Afghanistan, our first order of business was to get the tribes of the Northern Alliance to quit fighting each other and to fight the Taliban. It took a lot of negotiating to do this. The guys who accomplished that had to understand where those tribal leaders were coming from. I mean, really understand them—their reservations, their history, their customs, and their ambitions. In your negotiations during Robin Sage and deployed downrange with an operational ODA, you’ll have your frame of reference—what you want to accomplish, your best-outcome position, and your bottom-line position. But you better understand the issue from their perspective as well. You may need help or information from some nongovernmental organization, and the local person heading that NGO may be some West Coast, liberal-educated, no-leg-shaving, Birkenstock-wearing female uniform-hater. And you gotta deal with her. The terrain can change swiftly. You may be dealing with a tribal elder in the morning, with the embassy security officer at noon, and that scratchy lady at the NGO later in the afternoon. You need to use your maturity, professionalism, and common sense. If you’re a head butter and not a people person, you may have some problems. Negotiation and mediation are tools, just like small-unit tactics, weapons, and close air support.”

  The program is followed by a scenario-based persuasion exercise. This four-hour presentation is a cooked-down version of a graduate-level semester on negotiations. Following the negotiations block of instruction, Class 2-05 plunges into cross-cultural communications. This block is presented by a very capable, veteran cadre sergeant.

  “The more you know about another culture and can communicate with them, the better you can do your job. Understanding them, gaining their trust, avoiding their taboos, and presenting yourself in a favorable light from their perspective is critical. Language is the essence of their culture. If you haven’t the time to learn the language, study common phrases—hello, thank you, excuse me—that kind of thing. Also, be aware of important nonverbal communication. To Arabs and Africans, showing the sole of the foot is a great insult. The OK sign means screw you in Latin America. In some cultures, eye contact can be insulting.

  “Religion is the overriding cultural value in some societies. Understand their beliefs and mythology and learn to avoid things that offend. Customs in many places have the force of law. In a Muslim country, T and A is toes and ankles. In Nigeria, I once had to eat the heart, eyes, and brains of a goat. It was their delicacy and presented to me as a point of honor. I not only ate it, I relished it.” He gives the class a helpless shrug. “Tastes just like chicken. In northern Iraq, they dropped us a pallet of corn for our Kurdish fighters. Kurds don’t eat corn—it’s pig food. They used the corn as a helo landing-zone marker. In southern Turkey, there is no toilet paper in rural areas—just a bottle of water in what passes for a toilet. That’s why in some cultures, they only eat with one hand. After an experience like that, you never go anywhere without a personal stash of TP.

  “Don’t overlook the interaction of culture in their family structure. Study their family customs. Know the role of women, children, and old people in their culture. Age is a virtue and measure of respect in some cultures. We value individualism and privacy. Not all cultures do; Asian cultures value the group over the individual. In some cultures, face is important—we Americans are direct, no matter what. And freedom underlies all our values. In some societies and families, freedom is way down on the list. But make no mistake about it, honoring their family traditions and cultural norms is one of the best ways to gain their goodwill and trust.

  “Be very careful if the conversation is about religion, politics, personal questions, and geography. You can get into trouble really fast because it’s often not what you say or mean, it’s what they hear and understand. And be careful not to take offense when they mean no offense. For us, time is a biggie. We are punctual and value time; not so elsewhere. You leave the United States, and time takes on a whole new perspective. Most of the people you will work with will not own a wristwatch.

  “We have to work extra hard, because we in America are very ethnocentric—we think our culture is superior. Why’s that? It’s because we’ve got moon rocks, and nobody else has moon rocks. This ethnocentricity breeds discrimination and disrespect; it can get in the way if your mission is by, with, and through another culture. And in SF, we have to work extra hard because our business usually involves guns. Are there any genuine U.S. Army squad leaders out there?” A few hands go up. “When you get a bunch of newly trained trivets from Fort Benning assigned to your squad, do you watch them pretty closely during their first time on the range? You bet you do. How about when you and another SF sergeant take one hundred of your non-English-speaking, new best friends out for a few hours of rifle training before you go trade real bullets with the enemy? Get your heart going? Maybe a little. Think it might help if you understand something of their culture and where they’re coming from? You’re going to see it all over there. Afghan militiamen often take their young sons with them on operations—six-year-olds with automatic weapons. I was four days in country on my first operation. A five-year-old gets off the truck with a bandoleer of ammo and a Makarov pistol—and he could handle it.

  “Now, many of you are just wanting to know what you need to get by for Robin Sage. Never forget, Robin Sage is training wheels for the real thing. And for some of you guys from New York and California, Pineland really is a foreign culture. Robin Sage, and what you will see overseas, is all about rapport. It’s about negotiation; it’s about listening; it’s about putting yourself in the
other guy’s position—seeing it from his side of the table. It’s about balancing your priorities with his priorities. Rapport is very important in other cultures; it’s important in Pineland. For you officers, much of what you’ll be trying to do is understand your guerrilla chief. After you get close to him and you have some trust, you will want to know why he came to a position of power. Is it because he has money? Is it by force of will, religion, patriotism, or a place he held in the old order? And what does he want for the future? How does he see himself in the new order?

  “For all of you, everyone in Robin Sage—the G chief, the auxiliary truck driver, the local guy from the underground, and especially the guerrillas—are there for you to work with, get to know, learn from, and understand. Today, it’s role-play. A year from now, maybe less for some of you, it will be downrange and deadly serious. Good luck guys, here in training and in the real world.”

  Following the unconventional-warfare classes, 915 and the other student ODAs enter a four-day block of mission planning, mission-planning training, and preparing for their mission-readiness exercise. During this time, the team members spend time with their phone-book-sized background materials on the customs, history, politics, culture, economics, current events, and geography of the nation of Pineland. Regarding geography, the nation of Pineland is physically the south-central portion of the state of North Carolina. Pineland is bordered by the equally mythical nations of the Republic of Columbus to the south, the Republic of Appalachia to the west, and the United Province of Atlantica to the north. Each member of 915 has to know all about these nations as well as the country they are about to invade—Pineland.

  Captain Santos and First Lieutenant Kwele hold classes in the team room to bring the others up to speed on MDMP—the military decision-making process—and, more specifically, their roles in helping to plan the mission. All of them have some familiarization with mission planning, but most of this is tactically orientated planning as outlined in the Ranger Handbook. This is in-depth planning that carries into the mechanics of linking up with and training a guerrilla army. On the third day of this reading and planning work, Major Kennedy, in the role of their forward operating base commander, holds a staff mission briefing for all the ODA detachment leaders and their assistants.