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

  The seed of another Special Forces mission was planted.

  In 1957, Yarborough took command of the 7th Infantry Regiment and moved it to Germany from Fort Benning, Georgia. From there he was sent to Counterintelligence in Europe… and then to Fort Bragg, to command Special Forces.

  NEW FORM OF WAR

  John Kennedy's thoughts on unconventional warfare were a response to very real worries back in the 1950s and 60s — the seemingly relentless and insidious spread of the "Communist Empire" and the sudden collapse of colonialism.

  Colonialism — the rule by Western powers over Third World peoples for the sake of their economic exploitation — had lasted several centuries. Its death (except in the Soviet version) took approximately two decades, the years following the end of the Second World War.

  Sadly, the departure of the old colonial masters brought few blessings to the newly independent Third World nations; the old masters left behind very few capable indigenous leaders and very little for them to work with. The "white man's burden" was a never-delivered promise. In most newly decolonized Third World nations, the infrastructures necessary to maintain a society as a going concern were lacking — transportation, education, health care, banks and investment, and most of all, enforceable laws and an effective justice system to protect them. More often than not, the emerging Third World leaders were primarily interested in personal aggrandizement and wealth rather than in the long, hard toil needed to build a viable nation.

  The citizens of those nations, meanwhile, wanted what everybody else wants — better lives for themselves and their children. "We've thrown the old masters out," they argued, sensibly (and often after long, hard struggles, pain, and sacrifice). "Now we deserve to see the fruits of our victory."

  When the fruits didn't immediately appear — and in fact seemed to recede ever further into a future ever more squalid and rotten with corruption — its not hard to imagine their dismay, nor to see how quickly their mood turned nasty.

  Naturally, this potentially explosive situation became a major arena in the battle between the Communist powers and the West. At stake were power and influence over a great part of the world's population, as well as control over a vast wealth of natural resources.

  The more ideologically driven Communists started out with a number of advantages in this contest: They had no link with the old, discredited colonial powers, and they promised heaven on earth… and soon. The Chinese, in particular, had also developed effective techniques for transforming the dismay, discontent, and rage against the failed or failing Third World governments into mechanisms that seriously threatened those systems.

  The Western powers (the United States in particular, as their leader) started fighting with serious disadvantages. Communism represented the bright and shiny future. The democracies, and capitalism, represented the discredited past. Nor were the democracies especially skillful in the PSYOPs part of the struggle. Democratic capitalism and the rule of law, adapted to the cultural requirements and traditions of each society, remains the best hope for most of the world's people. The West did not do a very good job selling that truth.

  Meanwhile, Mao Tse-tung's victory in China showed the way for others: Dismay and discontent can be transformed into dissent and dissidence. Dissidence can be transformed into subversion and terrorism. Subversion and terrorism can be transformed into active insurrection. Insurrection can be transformed into guerrilla war. And in time, guerrilla war can be transformed into conventional military action — but only when the guerrillas feel totally confident that the outcome favors them.

  Each stage in the process supports actions aimed at exploiting the ruling system's weaknesses. The aim is not direct confrontation, but to cause a rotting from within. Agents corrupt or "turn" politicians. Other agents take over labor unions, student groups, farmers' collectives; they infiltrate the media, the military, and the police — all as vehicles for propaganda and subversion.

  The revolutionaries do not expect to destroy the system in a single blow or series of blows. Any weakness will do — economic, political, psychological, physical. In fact, the greatest vulnerability of any system is often psychological — will. As a result, eroding the will of the enemy to continue the struggle is always a chief aim of the underground opposition. This can take a very long time — years, even decades. The subversive leadership, as Mao has taught, must always remain patient.

  It follows that each stage is supported by the ones before it, and each stage remains active even as new ones arise. At the same time, the various elements and stages of the subversive underground are protected from detection by means of a complex cell structure. Chop off a finger, but the body remains, and a new finger grows.

  It follows as well that all of these elements depend on near-flawless intelligence, and on the whole they get it. Their eyes are everywhere; they know whatever the people know.

  It follows, finally, that the more active stages depend almost totally on the support of the people — for supplies, intelligence, money, and recruits. Very often this support comes at great risk and considerable cost. The governing bodies — like the Germans in occupied France — look for payback opportunities, or else simply for ways to send a strong message. The more threatened they become, the more likely they are to flail about violently — to the psychological advantage of the revolution.

  Of course, standing up under such assaults requires strong, highly motivated people.

  From this comes Mao's famous sea and fish image. The people are the sea; the revolutionaries arc the fish. The sea supports the fish. It also hides them from predators. The revolutionaries only want to show themselves when they are not themselves vulnerable. Then they fade back into the sea, or the mountains or the jungle.

  Of course, the revolutionaries almost always received support from one or another Communist power. It was a war by proxy.

  Meanwhile, all too often, Third World leaders sold their services to the highest bidder, or to whichever bidder was handy at the moment.

  This was President Kennedy's new kind of war. It went under many names — revolution, peoples' war, subterranean war, multidimensional war, slow-burn war, war in the shadows. All of these names were useful, and described a significant aspect of the struggle.

  The focus on concealment and complexity, however, points to a hard but basic truth: The old way of fighting wars simply did not work. You couldn't just send in the cavalry, or an armored corps. You could bomb a people back into the Stone Age, and their children would come out of their holes, throw stones, and vanish back into the holes.

  Where's the enemy? Who are we actually fighting? When we take a piece of territory, do we hold anything worth holding?

  The President had it right: A new kind of fighting force was required. This force had to know guerrillas inside and out — how they lived, how they fought, how they swam in the sea of the people. The Bank-Volckmann-McClure Special Forces had no problems there, but skill at behind-the-lines sabotage and running around with guerrillas was far from enough. For the early Special Forces, guerrillas and partisans were expected to be our friends. A reorientation was needed when guerrillas became our enemies. It wasn't a gigantic reorientation, but attitudes had to change and new skills had to be learned.

  For one thing, you couldn't begin to uproot guerrillas without at the same time understanding and attacking the shadowy mechanisms that spawned and sustained them — the vast network of subversion, terror, support, and intelligence. But doing so without utterly wiping out the very freedoms that the United States was trying to preserve and promote was a daunting task.

  Nor was it easy to go into somebody else's home and set their house in order. Sovereign states consider internal subversion a very touchy matter. They are not eager to give foreigners access to the mechanisms that support it. In fact, the governments of these states are often themselves diseased. The cure proposed by the revolutionaries may well be the wrong cure, yet their cause may be just.

  This meant tha
t if American Special Forces were going to do any good at all in a counterinsurgency situation, they would have to be able to walk a very thin and risky line. They would have to act toward the local government with great care and finesse, based on the direction they'd been given by their own commanders and government, while developing more than a skin-deep rapport with the native peoples.

  In view of this very sensitive psychological and political environment, it became evident to Bill Yarborough that the criteria for Special Forces would have to include far more than just expertise in guerrilla warfare. Personal character became extremely important — the judgment, maturity, self-discipline, and ability to work harmoniously with people who were culturally very different from Americans.

  What kind of soldier operates effectively in such an environment?

  First of all — and this is as true now as it was in 1961—it is one who thinks in ways that conventional soldiers are not expected to. Like all soldiers, Special Forces men work under a chain of command, but unlike the others, they may not always have direct or even regular communication with their superiors. That means that at times they need to act on their own, which means they inevitably make decisions on their own — though based, it is hoped, on a clear understanding of their commanders' and their nation's intent. At times these decisions have an impact far greater than those that more conventional soldiers may be called on to make. They may not only radically change lives or lead to deaths, they may also affect policy decisions going all the way up the chain of command to the President.

  At the same time, tough problems come up that only Special Forces soldiers can solve. Many of these problems are practical — a Special Forces soldier might be required to deliver babies, extract teeth, or design a bridge and supervise its construction. Others are psychological — Special Forces soldiers may well need to persuade, cajole, or manipulate a not-very-friendly local leader to work for goals that may be in the United States' interest but not obviously in his. Either way, the problems are typically unexpected, complex, and open-ended, and there is no guarantee of help from above.

  In addition, Special Forces soldiers cannot focus their individual tactics, techniques, capabilities, and thinking on a few specifics. They can't simply rely on well-honed soldier skills. They are taught, and arc expected to think, in the broadest terms. When they work a problem, they are not merely trying to solve it in the best way for their team but in the best way for the United States. They need to be able to see and handle such problems in all their complexity.

  Soldiers are called "special" in part because they can be trusted to make such decisions.

  Empowered though he was by the President to make those soldiers, Bill Yarborough had a big job ahead of him. He had to take the "old" Special Forces and turn it into the "new" Special Forces — and not all of the "old" wanted to become "new." He had to grow the small and marginal outfit into a force of significant size with greatly increased output, yet bring into the force the very best recruits. This meant "raiding" the rest of the Army for people nobody in the rest of the Army was willing to give up (he was empowered to do so, but at the cost of much resentment). He had to weed out those who did not make the mark, while educating and training to the very highest standards the picked and tested men who remained, and then he had to fill these men, individually and collectively, with pride and self-esteem. Meanwhile, he had to study the nature of the enemy and the ways others had learned to combat such an enemy; he had to do it to a depth rarely — if ever — accomplished by a military organization; and he had to find ways to make his Special Forces not just learn these insights, but incorporate them into their blood and sinews. And finally, he had to continue to sell his always fragile and vulnerable Special Forces to the "big" Army and to the American people.

  A NEW KIND OF FIGHTING FORCE

  Bill Yarborough faced a big job, but first he had to clean house — which involved raising the bar.

  Not long after he took over Special Forces in 1961, Yarborough came to realize that a significant portion of the SF old-timers did not measure up to the standards his new fighting force required. These old guys were a rough lot — fire-breathers and flame-spouters. They were extraordinary soldiers, but not all of them could be counted on to operate well in politically and psychologically sensitive situations.

  "The ones 1 was especially anxious not to retain in the Green Berets," Yarborough remarks, "were the 'old jockstrap commandos,' the Ranger types. And I must say there were considerable numbers of those in Special Forces.

  "I'd fought with Rangers during World War 11, and I had known and admired them for their best qualities: They were gallant 'bloodletters.' They were fighting machines. They were anything but diplomats, and rejected any suggestion that they ought to be. And they paid little attention to what we might call the more humane qualities, like compassion, pity, and mercy. If such things suited the occasion, all right; but if they didn't, that was all right, too. They were there to cut a swath. Wherever you turned the Rangers and commandos loose, boy, there they would go. There wasn't any question about it.

  "Well, some of my Army colleagues in key positions in the Department of the Army continue to look upon Special Forces as a kind of commando. They have never been able to understand why we had to get rid of so many of the old jockstrap guys, or why later we had to have such a high attrition rate in the Qualification Course. They couldn't understand the attrition rates for judgment, or for inability to understand humanity…. A guy who wouldn't get down on his belly alongside a Montagnard and show him the sight picture [in aiming a weapon] was no use to me.

  "We continually got called to task about our high attrition rate, but as long as I had anything to do about it, we didn't bend one inch, and I would back to the limit every man who came out of that cauldron, out of that system."

  Some of the old SF guys were a rough lot off-duty as well as on — and that presented Yarborough with yet more problems.

  Because Special Forces was a marginal outfit where promotions were scarce, the best officers tended to avoid the assignment if they could. In those days, the level of SF training for officers was also low; the Q Course, for example, could be waived for field-grade officers, and often was.

  For various reasons, the future for good Special Forces NCOs was brighter, and NCO quality tended to be higher. The NCOs' expertise also tended to be high (many of them were World War II and/or Korea veterans with considerable experience in the field; most had been shot at), and Yarborough wanted to make the most of their expertise in teaching his younger soldiers. But they also tended to act as though they had carte blanche to do things pretty much as they pleased. They tended to run a bit wild when they were out there with the younger guys.

  They had to be reined in.

  The officers, though, were a bigger problem. There were outstanding exceptions, but too many officers looked at the assignment as a place to park and have macho fun — drinking, wild parties, womanizing, playing around with other guys wives.