Chosen Soldier

by Dick Couch

  Captain Santos and his senior guerrilla pull back into the woods and set up a patrol base, well hidden in the woods. Then two recon and surveillance teams are set out on opposite sides of the target. They are in place with eyes-on when the sun comes up. Both teams have MBITR radios and are in contact with Santos in the patrol base. The resourceful Brian Short has put up his antenna high in a tree. He has his PSC-5 set at full power, and is able to reach 912’s G base some thirty klicks away. That’s an HF, line-of-sight transmission of some eighteen miles—quite a communications feat. Every four hours, Santos and his recon element send back reports of guard-force activity and suggested attack routes for the assault on the prison. They’ll also serve as a reception element for the main force when they arrive and guide them to their jump-off locations for the attack. But it’s a miserable night and day for the recon element. It’s turned warm and muggy, and the mosquitoes are a dense swarm in the moist air. I surrender my remaining stock of bug repellent to the recon element before heading off to the disused prison to await the final event.

  The evening brings no relief from a hot sultry day, with thunderheads building in the fading light. Soon there’s lightning on the horizon and the rumble of thunder. The abandoned prison is a brick-and-stone structure with three-story guard towers on opposite corners of the square-shaped, cinder-block walls. The buildings are a cluster of single-story brick structures with iron lattice-work windows. A twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with concertina surrounds everything. The facility is deserted but for roving sentries and a single guard in each tower. Another guard stands by the main gate, which is closed but not bolted. In a white-brick holding area with a stout metal door, a handcuffed Northrop Grumman employee, a former Green Beret in the role of a Pineland resistance leader, awaits his redemption. It’s an Alcatraz-like movie set.

  “The prison was closed down about ten years ago,” Captain Childers tells me as we wait for events to unfold. “This is the first time we’ve used this facility in this lane. We’ll have to see how it works out.” We’re in the tower closest to the woods. There’s about 150 yards of open area between the woods and the prison. Midway from the walls to the woods in one quadrant there is a large equipment shed, and in an adjacent quadrant there is the warden’s cottage. Both are suitable as cover to marshal an assault force. A few minutes after dark, I watch as a string of dark forms peel out from behind the shed and drop on line to take up a fire-support position. That would be 915 and a complement of their Gs. Then two files of similar dark forms spill from the other side of the shed and make for the main gate of the prison. Suddenly, there’s a commotion from the far side of the complex, and shots are fired. After a brief silence, a lively firefight breaks out as one of the assault elements pours through the unlocked back gate. From then on, all is yelling, running, and gunfire. There’s the pop-pop-pop fire from the lighter-caliber weapons punctuated by the deeper automatic bark from the M240s.

  The assaulters pour into the prison, some of them engaging the guard force while others race for the holding area that houses their objective. Meanwhile, there’s the whoosh of rising pop flares and the whistle and bang of artillery simulators. And smoke—lots and lots of smoke. The prison compound is soon awash in the harsh yellow light of parachute flares. And to add to the surreal drama below me, the skies have opened up to a solid, steady downpour. Then I hear the assault force yelling, “Turnkey! Turnkey!” which I assume to mean that they have their Pineland resistance leader in tow. The attackers fall back under the cover of their fire-support element. A few of them have wounded comrades in fireman’s carries, and I see four men running with a fallen soldier in a soft litter. There’s another round of smoke grenades as the assault force and their support element retreats to the cover of the shed and into the woods. The last of the parachute flares winks out, leaving a darkened prison complex, the stench of sulfur and cordite, and a steady rain.

  “That was amazing,” I tell Garrett Childers, “simply amazing.”

  He grins. “It was a show, all right. And I guess it’ll have to do until they get to the real thing, which, for some of them, is not all that far off.”

  The OCEs follow the candidates back through the woods to their exfil points. The cadre gather in the parking area near a gaggle of government pickup trucks to talk about the assault and to exchange notes on who did what, and what should be covered and emphasized in the after-action review. Nine-one-five returns to its G base tired, wet, and excited. Two of the Gs and one American were left behind to guard the camp, and they have a roaring fire going for the returnees. Soon they’re joined by Garrett Childers and Troy Blackman. Sergeant Blackman gives them a quick after-action review, but there’s little he can address specifically, given the confusion of that many soldiers moving about in the rain and the smoke.

  “You guys did a good job on the recon. The guard force thought they heard you moving in the woods last night, but they weren’t sure. As for the assault, it went as well as could be expected, given the numbers involved and the command-and-control issues that go with a force of that size. What I want you to take from this is that when the shooting starts, you can only rely on how well you planned the action, how grounded you are on your unit tactics, and how much you can count on that guy beside you. If he’s a brother Green Beret, all well and good. If he’s one of your Afghan or Iraqi militiamen, then you’d better have trained him well and know what he can and cannot do.”

  The next morning, it’s camp chores, cleanup, and demobilization of the guerrilla force. The former guerrillas are given a bonus of 3,000 don for their service and an honorable discharge from the Pineland resistance force. Captain Santos thanks and praises them in a short ceremony. Each former G is also given a commendation for his patriotic contribution to the future of Pineland. Real world, Captain Childers will write an official letter of commendation for Sergeant Major Johnson, now once again a sergeant first class. Doc Kohl gives them a quick mustering-out physical, and that afternoon, two big four-by-four trucks collect them for the trip back to Fort Bragg. It’s like the last day of scout camp, and there are some bittersweet farewells between the Americans and their Gs. Several of the former Pineland guerrillas told me that when they get back to their units, they’ll start the process that will get them to SFAS. For the Americans left at the G base, there are civil-affairs projects that amount to trucking around to the various target locations and safe houses to clean up any debris or trash left from the training. Phase IV and Robin Sage are essentially over, and while they get a full night’s sleep, two men on rotation are awake at all times and on watch. Colonel Chissom turns in early. The following day, he is up early, supervising the final cleanup and breakdown of the base.

  “Good luck and God Bless,” he says to 915 as he shakes each man’s hand. “When you get to the fight, remember what you learned here and make us proud.”

  Nine-one-five rucks up for the final time. The men are loaded, but not quite as heavy as they were when they parachuted into Pineland two weeks ago. Captain Santos leads them up to a clearing above their G base, where a truck will soon collect them and take them back to Camp Mackall. They’re a tired bunch of soldiers, but there is a look of achievement in their eyes. “By God, it’s over, and we did it,” I hear more than once. They dump their rucks and wait for the truck. I find Miguel Santos, who is speaking quietly with First Lieutenant Patrick Kwele.

  “So what’s next?” I ask them.

  “I will attend an advanced school here at Fort Bragg,” Kwele says with his precise diction, “and then I will return to Botswana and take up my duties. When I return, I will become commander of one of our scout companies.”

  “I’ll go directly to 7th Group,” Miguel Santos says. “I attended SERE school before my last deployment, and I think that’ll allow me to validate the Special Forces SERE requirement.” As a Spanish speaker, he has already validated his Special Forces language requirement. “But first, I’ve a couple weeks of leave on the books. That’ll give me a chance
to get to know my new daughter.”

  “From Robin Sage to two a.m. feedings and changing diapers?”

  “You got that right, sir,” he says with a big grin, “and I can’t wait.”

  Phase IV Class 2-05 is all but done. Back at the Rowe Training Facility, there’s the now-familiar equipment inventory, equipment overhaul, and equipment turn-in. The radios, night-vision goggles, GPSs, and other sensitive items have to be accounted for and made ready for Class 3-05. Throughout the phase and after every major evolution, these items were inventoried. Now, 915 makes this accounting for the last time. There are course critiques and a final round of peer evaluations. There are general counseling sessions and lengthy individual counseling sessions. Captain Childers and Sergeant Blackman sit with each man for a candid assessment of his strengths and weaknesses; those areas in which he performed well and those areas in which he can improve.

  “How’d it go?” I ask Miguel Santos after his meeting with his cadre mentors.

  “All right,” he says with a tired smile. “They were more generous then than I thought they might be, but they certainly didn’t hesitate to talk about my shortcomings. And to be honest, their criticisms were totally in line and fair. There are some things I still need to work on—probably will always need to work on. But y’know something, sir. I think that if God himself were to come through the Q-Course, in every phase there would be a cadre team sergeant to point out his deficiencies and tell him what he needed to do to correct them.”

  There is also the Phase IV Commander’s Review Board. The board composition is much the same as those in Phases I and II: company and battalion commanders, company and battalion sergeant majors, and selected cadre sergeants. Before a candidate appears before the board, his performance is addressed by his cadre team officer and cadre team sergeant. Nine-one-five had no candidates for board consideration.

  “This is a tough business,” Sergeant Major Rick Martin says of the Phase IV review board’s work, but it was my sense that he was talking about the Q-Course and Special Forces work in general. We talk during a break in the board deliberations, and are joined by Group Command Sergeant Major Van Atkins. He didn’t sit on the board, but was there to observe.

  “To get to our level—the Special Forces detachment level—you have to get to the Robin Sage level,” Atkins says. “If our students don’t get in character and play this game, it’s hard to play the game for real on deployment. If these students can’t drop into character with their G chiefs and the other role players, or even with the G soldiers, what’re they going to do with their platoon of Afghan militia? We can’t leave Afghanistan or Iraq until the Afghans and the Iraqis can do the job, and they can’t do the job until we train them to a point where they can take over. A lot of people think the tip of the spear for Special Forces is the business end of an M4 or kicking in a door. That’s the easy part. For us, the tip of the spear is squatting by a fire with your Afghan company commander, sharing a little tobacco, and planning the next day’s training. Or out there on the range with a group of Iraqi policemen who just drove down IED alley to get to the range to train with you. Some guys like to kick doors; hell, I like to kick doors—who doesn’t? But for us, breaking bread around the fire with the locals is more important. And it serves two purposes. One, you may learn which door to kick—where the really bad guys are. And two, maybe in time we can train them to kick the door so we don’t have to even do that. Being a good Special Forces soldier is all about training them to do our job. And, as soon as we train them to do the job, we can get the conventional guys off the checkpoints and Humvee patrols, and out of harm’s way so they can go home as well.

  “Most of us in the senior cadre, like the sergeant major here, have been doing this for a long time,” the group command sergeant major adds. As I stand and talk with these two veterans, I remind myself that between them there’s almost sixty years of experience. “We worked in the shadows before 9/11 and now, perhaps, not so much in the shadows. We’ve fought more than a few wars, and been immersed in foreign civilian and military cultures around the world. Now our job is to prepare the next generation to carry on. Their fight will probably be more difficult than ours and certainly more important. But as we assess and train these young soldiers, we must never forget how young and stupid we once were. That light Sergeant Major Martin speaks about so often didn’t go on for some of us until we reached our Special Forces groups.”

  “We have to go back to work,” Sergeant Major Martin says. “Good luck with your book, Mister Couch.” He and Atkins return to the classroom where the phase review board is being held. As I watch them go, I’m reminded of Fredric March’s line in The Bridges at Toko-Ri. March’s character, a Navy admiral, in referring to the heroic performance of his carrier pilots, wondered admiringly, “Where do we find such men?” Indeed, where.

  Phase IV Class 2-05 began with 308 candidates. Two hundred and eighty-four graduated from the phase. Fourteen were recycled to a future class, and ten were relieved and released to the Army for future assignment.

  Author’s Note: Like all phases of Special Forces training, Phase IV and Robin Sage are continuously being evaluated, refined, and upgraded. There was a recent pilot Phase IV in which Phase III graduates were first sent to language school, then to Phase IV. The language was Arabic, and the Robin Sage–like exercise was shifted to the Army’s National Training Center in California. There, the students worked with Arabic-speaking role players during their unconventional-warfare field exercise. The results of this pilot program will be the basis for language-centric Robin Sage training.

  COMBAT REHEARSAL. Iraqi soldiers from the Albu Nimr tribe, working with an SF ODA in western Iraq, practice room-clearing drills in preparation for a combat mission.

  EPILOGUE:

  AFTER-ACTION REVIEW

  With the completion of Phase IV Class 2-05, most of the successful candidates will begin their final journey toward the Green Beret. A very few, like Captain Miguel Santos, will take a few days off and head for their assigned Special Forces group. In the case of Captain Santos, it’s the 7th Group based at Fort Bragg. Because he’s met the requirements of the Q-Course for survival and language training, he’ll don his beret ahead of his former Phase IV classmates. For the others, there’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) School and Special Operations Language Training. Before my time at Fort Bragg and Camp Mackall, there were two graduation ceremonies for Special Forces students, one that awarded the Green Beret and another that awarded the “tab.” Most of us are familiar with the beret, but what’s perhaps most coveted by these chosen soldiers is the tab—a small arc of cloth that rides just under, and conforms to, the left shoulder seam of the soldier’s uniform. It simply says, “Special Forces.” That tab will snuggle concentrically above their airborne tab, or, for soldiers like Miguel Santos, above their Ranger and airborne tabs.

  Prior to the beginning of 2005, Phase IV graduates were awarded their Green Beret at a formal dinner ceremony and their tab at a more modest celebration when they completed SERE and language training. That’s all changed. As mentioned in my note at the end of chapter 5, SERE training is now a part of Phase II and the Special Forces tactics portion of the Q-Course. More recently, language training is now being taught throughout all phases of the course, with special emphasis in Phase IV. There are some distinct advantages to these changes in that both survival skills and language skills are now part of the new Phase V and Robin Sage. The Pinelanders and the guerrilla chiefs can now, when practical, interact with the students in a foreign language. Language becomes a learn-it, use-it skill, just like communications for the 18 Echos and trauma care for the 18 Deltas. Moreover, it allows for a soldier to formally complete the Special Forces Qualification Course with the completion of Robin Sage. He can then be recognized in an appropriate combined ceremony that awards his beret and tab before sending him on to his group for duty. Those like Captain Santos, because they completed the Q-Course at odd times and in small
numbers, often missed proper recognition of this milestone in their career.

  “It’d have been nice,” he told me, “but I have no complaints. I got to spend a little extra time with my family, and I got to a group sooner than most of the others. I have two new roles now; I’m a father and a Special Forces detachment leader. Life can’t get much better.”

  I have elected not to deal at length with SERE or language training. SERE training is a nineteen-day Level C Code of Conduct course followed by a five-day Peacetime Governmental Detention/Hostage Detention course. Level C is a course for warriors “whose military role entails a relatively high risk of capture or makes them vulnerable to greater-than-average exploitation by a captor.” In addition to survival and evasion training by some of the finest live-off-the-land experts in the world, the students are subjected to a detention phase that involves resistance to tactical interrogation in a realistic POW setting. Few courses in the military are as physically and emotionally challenging as the captive phase of SERE training at Camp Mackall. And few military training venues are as well monitored and supervised; the medical and psychological oversight is both comprehensive and redundant. This five-day detention training is all about how to resist all forms of exploitation and about the conduct expected when a soldier becomes a captive warrior.

  One of the reasons I chose not to expand on SERE training is that much of the training is classified, as well it should be. It is how we train our warriors to deal with capture, to return with honor if they can and to die with honor if they must. It’s serious business. In past wars, including my war, to be taken by the enemy was an ordeal—one that was painful and life-threatening, but one that you had a better-than-even chance of surviving. Your being taken captive was a collateral consequence of the conflict. Those were the good old days. In the current fight, quite often the objective of the enemy is the taking of captives—not for information or political advantage, but for ritual execution. To be taken captive can be a death sentence. And for that reason, content associated with the SERE portion of the Q-Course will not be addressed in detail.