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

  The night this resupply mission was to be flown, I decided I was going to go along to see how it went. When I got to the airfield, I found the supply sergeant there getting ready to load a crate full of white Leghorns — both chickens and roosters all mixed together — onto the U-10, and the crate was about twice as long as the inside dimensions of the aircraft. So about half of it was sticking out. In fact, so much was sticking out that the sergeant had to ride on top of the crate and the parachute all the way out to the drop to keep it from getting jerked out the door.

  When we cranked up, feathers started flying. The force of the prop was blowing them off the chickens. But I didn't say anything; it was his show, not mine. And I kept quiet when we took off from the airport, although there was a cloud of feathers big enough to almost hide the plane.

  From then on, things went pretty smoothly, and we went out and made a good drop.

  The next morning, I went out to the swamp where the A-Detachment had their base camp area set up to check on how they were doing, and the first thing I saw was this one naked rooster, with a piece of heavy-duty cable looped around his leg, which was all they could find to tie him up with. The only feather on him was a tail feather sticking up, about three inches long, and it was broken.

  When I asked them what in the world they were going to do with that rooster, they said, "Well, we haven't decided yet, but we have decided one thing, and that is that he ought to live. Anything that went through that flight and lived deserves to survive for a while longer."

  Dealing with airdrops kept us busy, but we had a lot more to do when we had supplies delivered directly by aircraft. We had to know how to select and set up an airstrip, mark it, and then bring in an airplane at night. This was especially tough because we did all this totally on our own. We had no Air Force Combat controllers with us. We had only the members of our own detachment and the guerrillas, if we had guerrillas with us, to organize it. Then, when he came in, the pilot had to trust our judgment absolutely. He had never seen the airfield before. It was a blank to him.

  In those days, we had several different kinds of aircraft available for this mission, all of them fixed-wing, because helicopters didn't have range enough for it. The Army had U-10s and Caribous, which were both capable of landing on dirt fields. But we also had available larger Air Force C- 123s and C-130s, which had to be landed on roads, and there were even a few C-47s still around. And from time to time, leased indigenous aircraft would be made available for covert operations.

  What you'd do then is work out the length your airfield had to be, whether it was on a dirt field, a dirt road, or a paved road; you'd walk every inch of that length to make sure it wasn't too rough or rutted; and you'd get rid of rocks, power lines, and other obstacles. You'd check out the trees nearby and compute the approach glide path the plane would have to come in on, so it didn't hit any of them. You (and the guerrillas, if they were available) would then lay out flame pots so that the length of the runway was marked out. Once all that was taken care of, you'd radio in all the data associated with the airfield — its location, its dimensions, and so on — and your mission would be scheduled. That is, your headquarters would work out the particulars of the mission and get back to you with them, something like: "The plane will be there on 23 June, at 0330," which usually meant a window of five or ten minutes. "And it will be approaching on a certain azimuth."

  When the window itself approached, you wouldn't have any radio communication with the pilot. He would land on your visual signal.

  About the time the pilot was five minutes out, the flame pots would be lit. Meanwhile, whoever was running the airfield — officer or NCO — would take a flashlight with a colored filter on it (blue or green, usually — something pretty hard to see) and lie down on the approach end of the airstrip and wait.

  The first thing the pilot would see was the flicker of the flame pots. When he saw those, he knew it was safe to land. That is, he knew not only where the field was and that you had laid it out, but that you had secured the area, and there was no enemy in the neighborhood. The next thing he'd see was the flashlight on the end of the runway, and he would then aim his left wheel at that light (because he was sitting in the left seat) and glide in about six feet above it. That meant that if you were the one holding the flashlight, you lay there absolutely still as he approached, seeming to come right at you, and stayed cool as several tons of airplane (if it was one of the big Air Force ones) lumbered in at man height over you. It was a hairy experience.

  Once he had landed, we'd off-load the cargo and he would take on anything or anyone you had for him to bring out, and then he would turn around and take off in the opposite direction.

  We practiced all that many times.

  SURVIVAL AND ESCAPE-AND-EVASION

  Special Forces soldiers had to be expert at survival, escape, and evasion. They had to know how to live off the land, how to set up snares and traps to catch their food, what was edible and what was not. And they had to be expert swimmers.

  Carl Stiner continues:

  In Vietnam, sometime in 1964—65, two NCOs drowned trying to swim a river while they were trying to evade capture. As a result, the requirement was established that we all had to be able to swim (I think it was a mile). And we had to be able to swim at least half a mile with our boots and combat gear on.

  If you were carrying a rucksack and it was essential that you had to keep it, you built a raft out of your poncho for the rucksack and other heavy equipment and supplies, including your weapon. Then you towed this raft as you swam.

  You also had to know how to assist your rescue in whatever way possible. Specifically, you had to know how to set up pickup zones, and how to signal searching aircraft with mirrors.

  The officers were taught special code writing, in the event we were captured. It was a very complex and sophisticated system that involved the positioning of letters that were included in specially designated code words. That way, if we were allowed to write letters, we could include codes that would indicate where we were being held.

  Detachment commanders must also have the technical expertise to set up and operate an escape-and-evasion net. The infrastructure available is, of course, critical — safe houses, drop points, and the transportation network. But even more critical is selecting the right people to operate the net (which means you need a system for vetting them to ensure that they continue to be people you can trust), and establishing compartments (cells), so that if one of your operatives or compartments is compromised, the remainder of the mechanism is not. If a cell system is established and operated properly, one cell does not know who is in the next cell.

  Your transportation system must be organized and compartmented in the same way. If the plan is to take people from here to there and drop them off at a point where they can be picked up by someone else and taken to another cell's safe house, only the detachment commanders should know the complete operation of the whole system.

  Meanwhile, the "precious cargo" that enters this net has no say-so over their own security and destiny. Nor would they usually have any means of self-protection: Their lives depend absolutely on the people that make up the net.

  During the time I was undergoing survival, escape, and evasion training, intelligence reports began to indicate — and in vivid detail — the horrific conditions and torture undergone by U.S. military prisoners held by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. As a consequence, another special area, resistance training, was added to our program of instruction.

  Although what we got was not nearly as intense and realistic as the training given today, it was still pretty tough, considering that we were getting a start-up program and didn't have much available time left in our course. It was of great benefit to each of us.

  Today — now that we have the experiences of those prisoners who endured and survived — nineteen days of intensified training have been added to the Special Forces Q Course, called SERE (Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion). During
this training, students are placed in the role of prisoner and subjected (short of personal injury, and under the close watch and care of appropriate medical professionals) to the conditions and treatment they could expect if taken captive. SERE training brings them to the absolute limits of their mental and physical endurance, and is fundamental to survival in captivity.

  Up until the time I went through SERE training, I had been satisfied that I had received the best training possible to develop me technically and tactically as a leader of men in combat. However, I had not yet actually experienced combat.

  The Q Course, and particularly the SERE experience, prepared me for the real experience of combat in ways that everything I'd learned up until then had not. They revealed to me that in order for a leader to possess and project the courage expected by his men in combat, he himself must find the means to be at peace with himself. For me, this strength comes from an abiding faith in my relationship with Cod. This strength allows a person to live one day at a time without fear of death. I have never known an atheist in combat, and I do not ever expect to find one.

  I do not believe that this is a revelation discovered only by Carl Stiner. Based upon my experience, it is a belief that serves as the inner strength and motivation of the greatest majority of all combat leaders, both officer and enlisted. I do not know of a substitute for this.

  THE GRADUATION EXERCISE: GOBBLER WOODS/ROBIN SAGE

  The graduation exercise, an unconventional warfare field-training exercise, which is conducted approximately seventy-five miles northwest of Fort Bragg in the Uhwarrie National Forest and surrounding communities and lasts approximately three weeks, is the culmination of the Q Course. During this period the Special Forces students, now organized as A-Detachments, put into practice the skills they have learned in their training.

  For the purposes of the Gobbler Woods exercise in which Stiner participated, the training area became the fictional country, Pineland, which was run by a corrupt leftist government, backed by a larger Communist country. An insurgency was striving to overthrow the government and bring in democracy, but they needed help. The Communist country had meanwhile pledged to send forces to help the Pineland government crush the insurgents.

  The exercise was made as realistic as possible. For example, local civilians played various parts, and provided support to both sides. The counterinsurgency force, usually an active-duty brigade, and the guerrilla force, approximately 100 to 150 soldiers, were drawn from various support units at Fort Bragg.

  The fledgling Special Forces soldiers were evaluated on their specialties, tactical skills, and overall performance within their A-Detachment.

  Carl Stiner continues:

  I have participated on both sides of this exercise, both as a student and as a guerrilla chief. This is a particular exercise from 1964:

  After they'd been given the mission, the A-Detachment entered an "isolation area" to begin their preparation (the isolation area is part of the preparation for every Special Forces mission). While there, they saw no families, friends, or anybody else who was not involved in preparing them for their mission. For the Gobbler Woods exercise, the isolation period lasted about a week; for a real-world mission, it could last up to six weeks. During this time, they developed their operations order and studied every aspect of the operational area where they would be inserted — the government, terrain, climate, personalities, the guerrilla force, the people, the culture, and anything else appropriate. They were assisted in this by a pool of experts with advanced degrees who provided instruction in specific areas.

  The final phase of isolation was the briefback, usually to the Group Commander and his staff. This covered — to the "nth" degree — every detail of the mission and how it would be accomplished. This had all been committed to memory. No orders or paperwork were carried by any member of the team. After the briefback, the judgment was made whether or not they were ready to go. If that decision was a "yes," they moved directly from the isolation area to the departure airfield ready for launch.

  While the A-Detachment was making its preparations, the guerrilla chief (usually a Special Forces major or captain) had moved to the operational area and begun working at winning the hearts and minds of the local people in order to establish a support infrastructure for the guerrilla force.

  When I played guerrilla chief, the most effective technique 1 found was to drive up on a Sunday morning to Albemarle County (in Pineland) with Sue, and spend the day meeting people. I would visit country grocery stores and restaurants and any other gathering I could find. I was looking for people who needed some kind of help.

  At one stop, for example, I learned that a man with a large dairy operation was having a rough time getting his cows milked on time and was way behind getting his crops in, mainly because his wife was in bad shape with cancer.

  I went to see him, explained who I was, and told him about the training exercise that was about to take place. Though he'd heard of it, he told me, he hadn't participated in the past. I also told him that I grew up on a farm in Tennessee and was well aware of the challenges he was facing working a farm and taking care of a sick wife.

  "In a couple of days," I said, "I'm going to have about 150 soldiers, all wearing civilian clothes, who're going to serve as my guerrillas. I'll be glad to pick four or five farm-raised boys out of this group and let them live and work with you. You can let them bunk in chicken houses, or the dairy barn, or wherever you want them, and they are yours to work to help bring in the crops and to help with the milking, or whatever.

  "All I ask is for you to protect them if the counterinsurgency force" — the 101st Airborne, in this case—"comes around trying to police up my guerrillas. If they do, I just want you to say, 'I don't know anything about that. I don't fool with these things. And I don't want you running over my fields with your trucks.

  "All I ask in return is for you to let me use one of your trucks, maybe a couple of nights a week, to haul fifteen or twenty of my guerrillas over to simulate blowing up a bridge or some similar target."

  "That's fine with me," he told me. "And I appreciate very much the help."

  "That's wonderful, I said. "But how about talking to some of your friends to see if some of them also need some help?"

  He told me he'd do that, and he did.

  I then reminded him about how important it was for us to trust each other. "If we don't," I said, "we stand to lose all of our guerrillas and then we won't be able to help you or your friends."

  He told me he understood that, and he did.

  And so, with this farmer's help, I was able to establish other contacts that ultimately became a key part of my infrastructure throughout the community.

  I also contacted local pastors to find out who in their congregations might need some help, and they offered me good sources that provided protection and support for small groups of my guerrillas.

  It's amazing how you can organize people for our kinds of causes. They all want to get in there and support — sometimes more than you really want. I USUALLY brought my guerrillas out a week before the Special Forces students jumped in, in order to allow time for blending with the local people and getting our operating base set up properly. On the day they arrived, I selected those who'd be going out to work for and live with the contacts I'd made, like the dairy farmer.

  But before they did that, I laid down the law about standards, principles, and conduct: "There is to be absolute integrity," I told them. "Respect for the human dignity of each and every person; respect for property; no abuse (verbal or otherwise); no hanky-panky; and no incidents that would degrade your morality and our ability to live and operate among the people. We are here to help them, and they will help us if we do. We cannot survive without their protection and support. One bad incident from you, and you are gone — and so is your career. And by the way, no alcohol!"

  I would also tell them, "Co to church, sing in the choir if you can, and get to know everybody in that church. If you blend into
that community and cause them to respect you, they will protect you and we'll have their cooperation in everything we do."

  1 always tried to put my guerrillas in key parts of the community. They and the people that support them were my intelligence network. That way I always knew what was going on all over the county.

  A couple of days before the A-Detachment was to jump in, my guerrillas would come together in order to organize our "base camp" and develop plans for the linkup and reception of the A-Detachment. There was also a rehearsal for securing the drop zone.

  After the jump, the assistant guerrilla chief (a Special Forces NCO) usually made the linkup and guided the detachment to the base camp. Once there, they were told they would meet the guerrilla chief the next morning. The A-Detachment spent the rest of the night in the base camp, usually guarded by the guerrillas.

  At the morning meeting, which usually took about an hour, the guerrilla chief always played hardball. He made his initial demands as tough as he could, so it would be close to impossible for the A-Detachment commander to meet them. We did this in order to evaluate the A-Detachment commander's ability to establish rapport and gain enough of the confidence of the guerrilla chief to accomplish the mission.

  After the meeting, the guerrilla chief presented a list of the supplies and materials he wanted and gave a rundown of the capabilities of his force and the training assistance they needed.

  The A-Detachment commander, having done his homework during the detachment's isolation back at Bragg, then presented his training plan for the guerrillas.