Chosen Soldier

by Dick Couch

  I did speak with two recent graduates of SERE training—and by recent, I mean they had just finished the course when I interviewed them. Earlier that morning, they had been POWs. One was a staff sergeant with eight years in the Army, and the other was an 18 X-Ray specialist with just over a year in uniform. Both had that calm, satisfied, far-off look in their eyes that said they’d just put a very difficult and moving experience behind them. They had, after all, spent five days in a POW compound.

  “We learned a great deal about fieldcraft and living off the land during the survival and evasion training,” the sergeant said. “The cadre sergeants were a wealth of knowledge. Real world—or at least real-world North Carolina—I could survive out there and evade capture.”

  “And the training in the compound?”

  “That was a learning experience as well, in a different sort of way.” The staff sergeant looked from me to the SERE phase company commander, who was also present, and then back to me. “Well, sir, let’s just say I have some idea of what it’s like if, God forbid, I’m taken prisoner, and how to conduct myself when that happens. It’s another component of the skill set—another tool in the toolbox.”

  “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” the young specialist said. “The regular phase training of the Q-Course is hard, but not hard like this. I lost twenty pounds, and I didn’t exactly go into this training chubby.”

  Assuming the weight loss was from the field-survival training, I asked, “But didn’t they feed you in the camp—the POW compound?”

  “Yes, sir. We got a bowl of rice.”

  “Daily, right?”

  “No, sir. The whole time.”

  I sensed they were still digesting this experience and didn’t yet want to talk about it. I also figured they probably wanted to get to the nearest Burger King. “One last question. Did you cry?”

  For the first time, they smiled and both nodded. “Oh yes, sir, we cried,” the sergeant replied.

  I’ve yet to speak with a SERE student who didn’t cry when they hoisted up the Stars and Stripes, which signaled the end of the POW-compound phase of SERE training. I did, but of course, that was a very long time ago.

  Special Operations Language Training addresses the conversational, tactical, and cultural aspects of a foreign language. The instructors are native speakers, and one often sees them roaming the corridors of Aaron Bank Hall in native dress. In addition to native-speaking instructors and state-of-the-art language laboratories, there are computer-driven personal programs available, like the highly regarded Rosetta Stone series. The instructor-student ratio averages about eight to one.

  Special Operations Language Training at Fort Bragg is taught in eight-week or fourteen-week iterations. Spanish, French, German, and Indonesian are eight-week curriculums; Russian, Farsi, Korean, Arabic, Tagalog, and Chinese are fourteen. Special Forces soldiers are sent to civilian language facilities for specialty languages, like Pashto, Thai, and Vietnamese. Once a soldier demonstrates a tested proficiency in a language, he becomes eligible for professional pay.

  “In some ways, this is harder than being out in the swamps at Camp Mackall,” Captain Matt Anderson told me. He was studying Arabic. “You get to go home every night, but you have to discipline yourself to turn off the TV, put on the headphones, and listen to your language.”

  The new Green Berets, with their tab, head out for their groups and duty in a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha—a real go-overseas, go-in-harm’s-way ODA. For a few, there will be time for stateside training with their detachments prior to deployment. For others, when they check into their group headquarters, they will learn that their detachments are on deployment.

  “We’ve had young X-Ray soldiers get on a plane for Afghanistan within days of leaving the Q-Course,” a battalion command sergeant major from 3rd Group told me. “When he gets to the forward operating base, we send them right out to a team in the field.”

  “The new kids do just fine,” said a team sergeant with 3rd Group. “We have a lot of confidence in the current training at the Q-Course and the new guys they’re sending us. We get them right in the operational flow. They’re green, but as long as they listen, they can help the team. Some are better than others, but we use them to the limits of their experience. We have a lot of work to do.”

  Training for the new men depends on the time available when they reach their detachment and the detachment’s next deployment rotation. The twelve-man detachments specialize in various military disciplines: scuba, high-altitude low-opening (HALO) parachuting, mountain operations, maritime operations, and urban combat. If there’s time, they will attend schools or courses that train them in these specialties. Given the current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new guys almost always need time behind the gun. During whatever time is available to them in the form of predeployment, mission-readiness training, they do a lot of shooting. Time and school quotas permitting, the groups try to get their new men to formal tactical and shooting schools. There are two schools that top the list. First is the Special Operations Target Inderdiction Course, which is an advanced sniper course. The second is the Special Forces Advanced Reconnaissance, Target Analysis, and Exploitation Course. This course is all about tactical battle-space management for small units in urban terrain. Both are high-speed courses that prepare the new SF soldiers for the realities of modern combat. But when the detachment is due for rotation overseas, the new Q-Course grads will deploy with their teams. There is no leaving a man back to attend a school.

  I found the notion of new Special Forces soldiers making a combat rotation within weeks of their Q-Course graduation intriguing. Newly minted Navy SEALs will have up to eighteen months of individual, team-centric, and predeployment training before they go into harm’s way. I really wanted to see these new Green Berets in action. So I started back up my chain of command—JFK Special Warfare Center and School to the U.S. Army Special Operations Command to the U.S. Special Operations Command—and asked, “Any chance I can go over and visit some of my guys?” Long ago, I began to think of these new men collectively as “my guys.”

  “You want to go downrange?” I said I did. “Sure,” they told me, “we’ll get you there,” and they were true to their word.

  In May 2006, for the first time in close to thirty-five years, I found myself en route to an active theater. The last time I went to war—my war—it was on a C-54 transport plane, a version of the old DC-4. It was the same unpressurized, piston-engine museum piece that ferried soldiers to Korea. It took us forty-six air hours to lumber from San Diego to Saigon. On this trip, I began my journey on Delta Air Lines, connecting through Amsterdam on KLM into Qatar. I left Qatar on a C-130 transport from Al Udeid Air Base to Balad Air Base in Iraq. From there we attempted to reach Al Asad Air Base by UH-60 helo, but were forced to turn back due to a sandstorm. I finally arrived at Al Asad by way of a C-17 transport—a long way from my home in Idaho.

  Al Asad is a hundred miles west of Baghdad. It was once used as an Iraqi air base during Saddam’s regime, and there are several carcasses of Russian-built fighter jets scattered around the base. One of the protective revetments at Al Asad was given over to an Army Special Forces company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group. The company’s headquarters constituted a Special Forces advanced operating base, or AOB. The function of this AOB is to provide logistics, intelligence, and operational support for their five operational ODAs.

  My first team visit was to an ODA located at a U.S. Army outpost well northwest of Baghdad. They share the facility with a battalion of mechanized infantry from the 1st Armored Division. The bases at Balad and Al Asad are large, secure installations with lots of creature comforts—chow halls, modern toilets, modular living quarters, and clean office spaces. The operational ODAs, however, live quite differently. The team house is an abandoned concrete Iraqi army barracks served by outdoor Porta-Pottis and a single crude shower. They cook in a makeshift kitchen, which means a lot of sto
ve-top and microwave eating. They have their own generator, which affords them air-conditioning for their communal berthing and team spaces, but the generator noise is a constant companion. The single-room tactical center where the team does their operational planning is a crude concrete cubicle and has the look of a team planning bay at Camp Mackall—work tables, wall maps, and lots of laptop computers. Temporary wiring is strung everywhere. Those in the detachment live a lot like Phase II and IV students in the Q-Course. It was much hotter in western Iraq than in central North Carolina, but a dry heat with little humidity.

  Getting to their location was a forty-five-minute high-speed run from Al Asad by armored Humvee. “It’s game on when you leave the gate,” the Special Forces major who commanded the company told me. There were five vehicles in our little convoy—two AOB Humvees and the three Humvees belonging to the Iraqi army. The latter were manned by Special Forces–trained Iraqi army scouts. The movement was briefed by our convoy NCO, a former 18 X-Ray and staff sergeant assigned to the AOB. He reviewed convoy standard procedures, including vehicle intervals, hand and arm signals, and various courses of action—actions on enemy contact, actions if we were hit by an IED, actions if one of the Humvees were to become disabled, and so on. On the roads in western Iraq, speed is life, and we drove at the top speed of the slowest vehicle. Most American casualties in Iraq today are from IEDs. Improvised explosive devices in the form of buried explosives or vehicular suicide bombers are on everyone’s mind. They were certainly on mine as we left the gate at Al Asad. Our convoy NCO, riding in front of me in the passenger’s seat, passed over the radio, “We’re now in Indian country—everyone go hot!” The .50-cal gunners in the turrets cycled their weapons to chamber a round and everyone inside my Humvee with an M4 rifle did the same. That is, everyone but me. Eighteen months ago, this staff sergeant was an 18 X-Ray in Phase IV; now he was in charge of twenty-five Americans and Iraqis going into harm’s way. On most of my Humvee runs, a junior team sergeant took charge of the convoy. Driving our Humvee in the lead vehicle on his run was the company command sergeant major. It’s the way of Special Forces; when possible, senior sergeants put the junior sergeants in positions to learn and lead. We drove fast and occasionally swerved to miss a crater in the road from a previously detonated IED. Game on.

  When we arrived at the ODA’s outpost, the team was gearing up for a mission. The mission was a multiunit operation into a nearby village that was a hub of insurgent activity, for both local insurgents and transients coming in from the Syrian border. IED activity in the area was on the rise, and this operation was designed to do a bit of housecleaning. There were two other forces involved in addition to the elements with my ODA. There would be two platoons of mechanized infantry from the 1st Armored Division in Bradley Fighting Vehicles and two platoons of Marine Force Recon from a regional combat team with the 7th Marines. The Special Forces and mech infantry would drive to their objectives, while the Marines would be landed by helo some four miles from the town and patrol in on foot. An AC-130 gunship would be on call and orbiting overhead, and a section of Marine F/A-18 fighters would be circling as well. Each force had specific targeting in their assigned section of the village. It was to be a predawn coordinated attack.

  My ODA was a “heavy” detachment with fifteen Green Berets. There were also two Marine Corps intelligence analysts, a four-man Civil Affairs team, and a single Navy corpsman assigned to the team. The detachment members looked very similar to my SEAL platoon decades ago: Their hair was longish, but not too long, and about a third of them had beards. They went about the team compound in shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers. The detachment commander was a short, lean Korean-American with a degree in literature from UCLA. He had the look of an undergraduate student. His quiet, capable leadership was well complemented by the veteran sergeant who ran the team. The team sergeant was a slim, outgoing master sergeant from San Antonio with full, neatly combed hair and a push-broom mustache. He was on his fourth rotation to Iraq. I asked him how many deployments he had made in his SF career. “I keep track of countries, not rotations, and I’ve been to sixty-three countries in my twenty-four years with Special Forces—so far.” This team was a relatively young detachment with several team members on only their second and third rotation. Only one was on his first, and he was a former 18 X-Ray. And, of course, there was a story there. He was from Petaluma, California, and has a degree in engineering from Princeton. He worked as an analyst for a venture capital firm in San Francisco for five years before leaving it for the X-Ray Program. My favorite X-Ray question had become “How do you like this duty?”

  “It’s good work—something of what I expected and much of it is what you could never expect, or could even imagine. And it’s challenging, always a challenge.”

  “And your MOS?”

  “I’m an engineer—an 18 Charlie. As a trained civil engineer, it was a chance to do some hands-on construction work and, I admit, a chance to work with military demolitions. I do like to blow things up. Of course, as the junior detachment Charlie, I get more than my share of the paperwork, but that goes with the territory.”

  “Any chance of reenlisting when your contract service is up?” This had become my second-favorite X-Ray question.

  “I’m not sure, and I’ll have two years to think about it. Right now I’m leaning toward getting out and getting a graduate business degree. We’ll see. Right now, I’m having fun; I like what I’m doing.”

  At 1300 on the day of our arrival, the team sergeant briefed his ODA and the AOB support team on the following morning’s mission. This was more of a patrol order than a full-on mission briefback for a senior commander, but the key elements were the same. It had the feel and format of a briefing by Sergeant Stan Hall with student ODA 811 during Phase II, or Captain Miguel Santos with 915 in Phase IV. The briefing was for the ODA and addressed its role in the operation, one that would focus on security, movement, and intelligence collection. The assaulters for this mission, the actual door kickers, would be Iraqis.

  The assault phase of the operation would be carried out by members of the Albu Nimr tribe. The team had been working closely with the Albu Nimr for some time. The Albu Nimr are a Sunni tribe spread across the border regions of western Iraq and into Syria. They number about three hundred thousand and are known for their extensive cross-border enterprise: They’re smugglers. The head of the tribe is a thirty-year-old university-educated Iraqi who recently assumed leadership of the tribe on the death of his father. The young sheik and his family had their issues with Saddam, and they have their issues with the new government and the Americans as well.

  “The sheik is always polite and mannerly during our meetings,” the team sergeant told me. “He speaks English, but we converse through interpreters. He wants us out of Iraq, but he knows he’s not yet strong enough to resist the insurgents. Our insurgents in this area are locals, but there are many Saudis, Egyptians, and Syrians—mostly Syrians. He understands that we’re here to train his soldiers, and that as soon as we’ve trained his guys to handle the insurgents and the security issues, then we can leave. That’s what he wants; that’s what we want. The Albu Nimr we train are a part of the Iraqi army in name only. They’re in uniform, and they’re paid as Iraqi soldiers, but their loyalty is to their tribe. They allow us to train them because their sheik has told them to cooperate with us. They learn quickly, and they’re pretty damn good in the field. We like working with them.”

  The Special Forces portion of the operation would have four assault groups. Each assault group would have five Albu Nimr tribesmen—they would be the tip of the spear, the assault element. Backing them up would be a security element of four to five Iraqi army scouts. “We’re there to back up both of them,” one of the SF gunners told me. “We’ll drive the lead vehicles and man the heavy machine guns in the Humvees. We’ll also supervise the handling of detainees and searching the target houses for intelligence. Otherwise, it’s their show.”

  Following the team ser
geant’s briefing of the Americans in the operation, each assault and security element was then briefed by the two detachment sergeants assigned to that assault group. There was a daylight rehearsal that amounted to room-clearing drills at an abandoned two-room house at the nearby firing range. The assault-group vehicles, two Humvees and an up-armored Chevy Luv pickup truck, rolled up to the practice structure and positioned themselves as they would on the real target. The Albu Nimr assaulters quickly ran to the building and set up in a stack at the main entrance. On the signal of their team leader, they kicked the door and cleared the rooms—by the numbers, just like a Phase II squad during Special Forces tactics training. The Iraqi army scouts set up security, and the Special Forces sergeants observed their team’s action on the target. After a quick critique, they moved on to an adjacent range to test-fire weapons. The same drill was repeated at the night rehearsal, but for the test firing of weapons. After the night rehearsal, the assistant detachment leader, the team warrant officer, came up to me.

  “Hey, sir, I’ll be with the second assault group, and we have an empty seat in the lead vehicle. You want to go along?”

  I considered this—and the assurances I’d given my wife about not going on combat operations—for about a nanosecond. “You bet I would.”

  In the early morning hours, we rolled into the outskirts of the town, multiple assault groups, several vehicles to each group. Close to the center of town, my assault group broke from the main body and headed for our assigned targets. A few high-speed turns, a short sprint down some very narrow streets, and we skidded to a halt. Our Albu Nimr assault element was quick and professional. The Iraqi army scouts, Shia recruits from Baghdad, also performed well. And the Special Forces sergeants whose men were making the assault were like proud soccer parents watching their kids take the field. The SF gunners in the Humvee ring turrets and the other ODA members on security were like birds of prey, watching the walls, rooftops, and alleyways for any sign of counterforce activity. There was no shooting in or around my assault group, but I could hear explosions from the marines operating a few blocks away. They were using explosive breaching charges, and we could hear muffled booms as they took down doors. There were follow-on assaults from information learned on the initial targets, but we were clear of the town before dawn.