Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces sic-3 Read online

  Third — and this is the primary reason why that October day was Special Forces' defining moment — now that he had been empowered by his commander-in-chief, Bill Yarborough began to transform Special Forces, making it over in his own image. Yarborough was a creature of many dimensions. And that was what Special Forces became.

  In leaving that legacy, he proved through his genius, his vision, and his actions that the Clifton-Kennedy laying-on-of-hands that had brought him to Fort Bragg was the correct choice. Before Yarborough, U.S. Special Forces had been a career backwater. The Special Forces that exist today, with the help of hundreds of other great men, are largely his creation.

  In the beginning, Yarborough had been far from pleased to take on the Special Forces job. When he was told to report to Fort Bragg, he was a high-level counterintelligence operative in Europe — commander of the 66th Counterintelligence Corps Group, headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, where he was charged with providing security for all of the U.S. Army in Europe. His counterintelligence teams worked through field stations throughout Germany, as well as in Italy, Switzerland, and Paris, and they also worked closely with German, British, and French security agencies. It was a job that he adored and hated to leave. He loved its international character, its record of successes — they identified, captured, or "neutralized" an amazing number of enemy agents — and its dynamic of intrigue and labyrinthine complexity. It was a terrific job for a highly intelligent man.

  Trading all that in for command of what seemed to be a static operation didn't look like fun, nor did it seem to offer much scope or excitement for a man like Yarborough.

  "I couldn't have been more wrong," he says now.

  Where he was wrong, in fact, was not in his early characterization of his new command, but in not yet seeing what John Kennedy already knew, that a new kind of force was needed to fight a new kind of war. Aaron Bank's Special Forces had preserved in amber his vision of the OSS and Jedburgh World War II glory days. What was needed now was to transform the soldiers that Bank and Volckmann had trained to rampage behind the lines into fighting men who were far more highly skilled, imaginative, flexible, culturally sensitive, and resourceful.Yarborough produced men capable of handling missions that were far more complex than those he had encountered as an intelligence officer in Europe — and did so with style, finesse, and precisely focused force (when necessary).

  It wasn't what Special Forces had been that was important; it was what they would become — that was the creation of Bill Yarborough.

  SHOWBIZ

  An army career is not exactly the expected choice of profession for a self-described oddball with an affinity for new ideas. Even stranger, Bill Yarborough was an army brat; his father, a decorated veteran of World War I combat in Siberia and a Russian linguist, retired as a colonel. He had no illusions about army life. Worse, he was a sensitive and highly intelligent young man with artistic tendencies. He loved to draw and paint. Such people tend to have trouble with the Army's sometimes numbing regulations, thickheaded bureaucracy, and paucity of vision.

  On the other hand, young Bill Yarborough recognized that, despite the occasional institutional silliness, his father's calling was a noble one, that the life could be both fulfilling and fun, and that, most important, he himself was a warrior.

  Yarborough joined the Army as an enlisted man in 1931, an experience that gave him invaluable insight into the folks on the ground. He later put that to good use when he commanded Special Forces.

  He won an appointment to West Point a year later. At the Academy, he and his classmate Ted Clifton came to run a school publication, the West Point Pointer. Clifton was editor and Yarborough managing editor; he wrote feature articles and drew cartoons — a practice that has stayed with him all his life.

  Yarborough graduated in 1936, received his commission as a second lieutenant from the hands of General John J. Pershing, and was assigned to the 57th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, stationed at Fort McKinley on Luzon. In the period before he left for the Philippines, he wooed and married another army brat — though that was not all that Norma and Bill Yarborough had in common: They both shared a lifetime love of the Far East and of the art of Asia (their home in North Carolina is filled with it).

  After a three-year tour in the Philippines, Yarborough characteristically found his way to the cutting edge of the new Army, which in the early 1940s meant jumping out of airplanes with a parachute (a not-very-well-developed device). He was among the first to volunteer for and test this new and very dangerous form of warfare.

  Paratroopers gave armies greatly increased mobility, but at a cost. The air transports that flew them were vulnerable, and paratroopers couldn't carry much in the way of support or firepower with them. In their early days, in other words, airborne units operated more like Special Forces teams than regular infantry.

  Meanwhile, as he learned the jump trade, his Airborne superiors offered him a chance to exercise his love of symbols.

  It's easy for outsiders to miss the point of the Army's wealth of institutional symbols. Qualification badges, ribbons, decorations, unit patches — even special hats or boots or songs — have a big place in a soldier's sense of identity and pride. They're certainly not essential, but they are more than gaudy decoration. Strong men will choke up now and again when they are put in the presence of some particularly meaningful piece of colored cloth.

  This is not to say that there is no place for flamboyance and swagger in a soldier's outfit. You want dignity but you don't want a soldier to look timid. A modicum of flair doesn't hurt here. Yarborough has always been conscious of these truths. "A distinctive uniform," he writes, "enhances an individual's pride, makes him a man apart, makes him special."

  Not surprisingly, his paratroop superiors were aware of his knack for drawing and design, and so he was asked to create the first airborne qualification badge, and then to have a silversmith produce enough of them to award the first group of qualifying paratroopers. Airborne forces still wear the wings Bill Yarborough designed.

  His talents were not limited to airborne wings. He had a further knack for designing specialized clothing: the first airborne jump boots, for instance — jump boots have had the same kind of meaning for paratroopers that green berets have for Special Forces — and he would later create other pieces of military clothing, some of which found their way into the catalogs of outdoor-clothing specialists such as L.L. Bean.

  Early on in his command of the Green Berets, he argued for the use of the Bowie knife, both as a weapon useful in hand-to-hand combat and as a symbol of accomplishment. At one time sabers had satisfied that kind of need, but the Army had taken away sabers. They were no more practical in the twentieth century than horse-mounted cavalry. To Yarborough, the Bowie knife seemed like a splendid replacement, rich in frontier tradition and heroic resonance.

  Yarborough's dream was to present a Bowie knife to each new member of his Special Forces, together with the green beret. The knife would have an inscription on each side: on one the soldier's name, and on the other the Special Forces motto, de oppresso liber ("to free the oppressed").

  The Army never approved the idea — but Bill Yarborough kept coming up with others.

  Like the movies, for instance.

  Back in 1941, Bill Yarborough had become a leader of the new breed of airborne warrior, and he had learned an important lesson about selling a cutting-edge-but-maybe-somewhat-suspect military unit to both the Army and the American public.

  Hollywood helps.

  In 1941, RKO made a movie called Parachute Battalion about three young men, played by Robert Preston, Edmund O'Brien, and Harry Carey, who go through parachute training. Since it would not do to have big stars risk their lives jumping out of airplanes, Bill Yarborough and his paratroop companions stood in as stunt doubles. It was not a memorable movie, but it did glamorize airborne forces, and made both the "big" Army and the public take more notice of them.

  Later, Yarborough grabbed a similar opportunity
when the writer Robin Moore presented himself at his doorstep with an idea for a novel about Special Forces. Yarborough liked the idea so much that he became a kind of muse in the writing of The Green Berets, which later became the hit John Wayne movie.

  The Green Berets turned out to be the Special Forces "Gabriel Demonstration" for the American public.

  But Yarborough didn't stop there.

  As far back as his service as an enlisted man, he'd loved military bands. He loved the way the old marches and military hymns stirred the heart. Later, as Special Forces commander, he felt strongly that the Green Berets deserved a heart-stirring military hymn of their own. First, he got the bandmaster at West Point to write a Green Beret march. Then one day, totally out of the blue, a young SF sergeant named Barry Sadler came into Yarborough's office and started playing a song he'd written called "The Ballad of the Green Beret."

  Fighting soldiers from the sky, Fearless men who jump and die….

  One thing led to another, and before long, Sergeant Sadler, still on active duty, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show to sing his ballad. The public was knocked out; the song was a hit; it was translated into many languages; affection and respect for U.S. Special Forces mushroomed — and Bill Yarborough not only had a hymn, he had another huge public relations success for his Green Berets.[4]

  Now he had his Special Forces novel, his Special Forces movie, and his Special Forces hymn. He needed only one more further component: a Special Forces prayer — some nondenominational words that would express and define the way Special Forces soldiers might relate to their God (there being no atheists in foxholes). It had to be something that would relate to all of his men, whatever the race or creed. And this is what he wrote:

  Almighty God, who art the author of liberty and the champion of the oppressed, hear our prayer.We, the men of Special Forces, acknowledge our dependence upon thee in the preservation of human freedom.Go with us as we seek to defend the defenseless and to free the enslaved.May we ever remember that our nation, whose motto is "In God We Trust," expects that we shall acquit ourselves with honor, that we may never bring shame upon our faith, our families, or our fellow men.Grant us wisdom from thy mind, courage from thine heart, strength from thine arm, and protection by thine hand.It is for thee that we do battle, and to thee belongs the victor's crown.For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

  Meanwhile, back in World War II, Yarborough continued to jump out of airplanes, but now in combat — in the invasion of North Africa in November of 1942 (the first use of American parachute troops in combat) and in later operations in Tunisia. The parachute battalion he commanded for the invasion of Sicily lost twenty-three airplanes to "friendly" antiaircraft fire. His paratroop battalion later fought at Anzio, and one of his troops, Sergeant Paul B. Huff, was the first parachute soldier to win the Medal of Honor. Later, his battalion dropped into southern France and fought along the French Riviera to the Maritime Alps. As the war was ending, he received a battlefield promotion to full colonel and was given command of an infantry regimental combat team that fought along the rugged Italian coast to Genoa. During the process, he won a Silver Star.

  Previously, however, he had come close to shooting his military career in the foot.

  Always outspoken, Yarborough had openly questioned his division commander's handling of the massive airborne assault into Sicily that had resulted in many transports getting shot down, with great loss of life. His commander, then — Major General Matthew Ridgeway, was not pleased with his subordinate's outburst and relieved him of his command. Fortunately, Ridgeway's superior, then-Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the 5th Army commander, liked Yarborough and saw promise in the rash young man. Clark gave him a temporary staff job, and later another fighting command.

  In time, Yarborough and Ridgeway became good friends, and in fact, Yarborough came to realize that Ridgeway had done what was necessary when he'd ordered the assault. It was like with Eisenhower and D Day. The attack had to be so overwhelming that it would prevail despite the staggering losses. It is every commander's nightmare — but it was a powerful lesson for young Yarborough.

  After the war, he was sent to Vienna as the provost marshal of U.S. forces in Austria and provost marshal in Vienna. The job resembled a police chief's, but also involved cooperation with the equivalent officers of the three other occupying powers: England, France, and the USSR. It proved to be Yarborough's first introduction to what was later called "civil affairs."

  Since the official mission of the four occupying powers was to restore civil order and the rule of law, Yarborough grew interested in how the occupying troops might be disrupting that process — by, for example, criminal activities. To that end, he initiated a statistical study showing the nationalities responsible for the greatest number of crimes and the nature of those crimes. He then published regularly a booklet showing the curves of murder, rape, theft, arson, black market, and so on.

  The results were fascinating. The Russians committed by far the most crimes, followed by the French, the Americans, and then the British.

  There were a lot of factors. For one, the nationalities that had suffered most under the Germans and Austrians were hardly eager to protect German or Austrian legal rights. But it was equally true that the kinds of soldiers in occupation had a lot to do with how well they conducted themselves. The American troops that had been in combat were fairly well-behaved and responsive to discipline, but when their replacements began to arrive to take over the occupation, discipline began to collapse and crime rates began to rise.

  The Russians, it seems, screened their soldiers not at all. In fact, as Yarborough learned from his Russian counterpart, who became a good friend, it was doubtful if many of the Russian commanders even knew where their people were. Their comings and goings made a mockery of regulations.

  Yarborough tried to fix the American part of this situation several times. In his view, Vienna was not just an occupied capital; it was a major, politically charged test case, the success or failure of which could determine the future political direction taken by a great part of Europe. It seemed to him the United States should send representatives who would present the country in a good light, people who would create positive psychological leverage.

  However, when he went to his superiors with this suggestion, he was told in no uncertain terms to forget it. He'd have to take his share of people with everybody else — the Army way — and leave the rest to leadership. This was, as he put it, "the old answer."

  A new answer was needed: Only picked men should be allowed in that kind of arena. In years to come, he took this insight to other politically charged environments such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.

  In Vienna (and later in Southeast Asia), civilians had high expectations for the Americans who had appeared among them. They had status and stature. They represented a vast, powerful country; they were there to help. If these expectations were going to be realized, then the old Army way wasn't going to work.

  "Ordinary" soldiers were not up to the job at hand. "Special" soldiers were needed.

  Bill Yarborough lost that battle. But the point lodged in his mind.

  His next years followed the normal, and not very exciting, path expected of midlevel Army officers. He graduated from the British Staff College in Camberley, England, in 1951, then spent the next two years as a staff officer in London representing the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff on the project to construct the framework for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There he met and befriended a man who would come to have a large influence on Special Forces, Roger Hilsman. Another West Point graduate, and a World War II guerrilla fighter with Merrill's Marauders in Burma, Hilsman later became the State Department's head of intelligence, then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs during the Kennedy years, and one of Kennedy's chief foreign policy advisers. More than anyone else, Hilsman was the Kennedy adviser responsible for his interest in irregular warfare.

  A
fter leaving England, Yarborough attended the Army War College and remained there on the faculty for two years after graduation. During that time, he made a study of the various forms future wars might take, including guerrilla war. In connection with that study, he visited the Special Forces at Fort Bragg, then under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Edson D. Raff, another pioneer paratrooper and veteran of the 1942 North African invasion. At Special Forces Headquarters, Yarborough got a VIP briefing on their mission and capabilities, but despite Raff's enthusiasm, he was not much impressed with what he saw: During a big war, he concluded, Special Forces might have some influence on guerrillas and orient them to our cause, but it would be a mere sideshow.

  In 1956, he was sent to Cambodia, as Deputy Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, where he spent a great deal of time in the field with Cambodian troops — another enlightening experience (he loved Cambodia). He was impressed, first of all, with the physical difficulties of waging conventional war in that environment, and then with the Cambodian soldiers' ability to exist and thrive in that environment nevertheless.He tells about it:

  In 1956, General Ciccolella and I, serving on the MAG there, made several trips to the eastern provinces. At one time we went all the way from Phnom Penh over to Ban Me Thuot, and through a road the French had carved out, now overgrown. The rusting machinery was still there, and along the border areas the forces on both sides [Communist and anti-Communist] had met and recoiled, I guess, because there was no evidence of military activity along the border between Cambodia and Vietnam; hut when one got inside the boundaries of Vietnam, fortifications looked over most logical approaches.The going in those two provinces was very difficult, especially in the rainy season. On one of our trips, we got caught in torrential rains.We had with us a small contingent of Cambodians, a three-quarter-ton truck, two jeeps, and a trailer. Darkness fell, quickly, as it does in the tropics; and the road we were on began to disappear under water. On each side of us was nothing but flat land, and 1 began to feel desperate. Not only was it possible for us to down, but we could also flounder around in this flooded and featureless landscape and get completely lost, which was not acceptable either.So what to do?Well, just before the last vestiges of light were gone, we found a little mound — a small hill — and we pulled our equipment up onto it as the rains continued to pelt down on us. Then we deployed our sleeping bags under what cover we could find and tried to get a little rest. Next morning we'd see what else we could do.About three in the morning, we heard sounds from the direction we'd just come from. Soon we could make out blinking through the rain — a flashlight here and there — and the sounds a mule train might make, coming up the road.About half an hour later a young Cambodian lieutenant came up, wet to the skin; he saluted and then asked: "Est-ce que je peux vous aider?" — Can I help you out?And we said: "Well, who are you? Where are you going? How did you get here?""We're going to the border post along the frontier," he said, "and we're just moving through the mud.""How are you doing it?" He showed us: What they were doing was using a winch on the front of a three-quarter-ton truck. They'd attach a line onto a tree and winch forward about twenty-five or thirty feet. And then they'd repeat the process. They'd moved all the way along the road this way."Are you going to stop here for the night?" we asked. "Or wait until the rain stops?""Oh no, there's a much better place on up ahead. We'll go on up there." And then he said, "Can we pull you along?""No, we'll wait for dawn, " I said.So when dawn came, we moved out. The waters had receded a little bit, and you could see where you were going.About ten miles ahead, we came to the encampment where the Cambodian lieutenant had by now laid out his command post gear. By that time, the Cambodian officers had taken off their uniforms and changed into their "sampots" — a wrap-around garment — and the soldier orderlies were serving them. They were completely at home in that environment… really good jungle and frontier soldiers.Some time later, we finally got to the frontier post that was our destination. It was like a fort in our Old West. It had sharpened stakes around it to keep out the primitive hill tribes they called the "Mnongs" and the Vietnamese called the "Montagnards." In the morning, the bugle would sound, the flag would go up, and the Khmer soldiers would go out on the town (which was nearby), trading with zircons, just like our frontier soldiers trading with the Indians. At night they came back inside the fort.well, my feeling was that Cambodians would make superb irregular warfare soldiers, the guerrilla warfare type.