Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [11]
GETTING IT RIGHT. Special Forces soldiers are teachers as well as warriors. Here Sergeant Daniel Barstow, right, briefs Specialist David Altman during Phase II training.
CHAPTER ONE
SPECIAL FORCES 101—HISTORY, TRAINING, AND ORGANIZATION
As with most SOF components, the Army Special Forces have a proud history of service to the nation. Special Forces can trace their roots back to the mid-1700s and the tactics of Major Robert Rogers and his men during the French and Indian War. My own notion of Special Forces goes back a ways, but not quite that far.
In January 1965, I received my copy of National Geographic magazine. I was a midshipman at the Naval Academy, and my mother back in Indiana saw to it that my subscription never lapsed while I was in school. On the cover was a soldier in a green beret toting a World War II–era M1 carbine and leading two files of Asian soldiers along a dirt road. The beret had a red and yellow flash, which I later came to know as the mark of the 5th Special Forces Group, the group stood up for duty in Vietnam. The handsome officer with the serious look on his face was Major Edwin Brooks. Brooks commanded the U.S. SpecialForces in an area of South Vietnam known simply as the Highlands, a mountainous area populated by thirty-some hill tribes and contested by the North Vietnamese. I was in my second year at Annapolis, and my focus was trying to keep my grades at a passing level, which I did, and prepare for an upcoming Army-Navy indoor track meet, which didn’t go so well. I beat my cadet that year, but Army won. For under-class midshipmen at the time, the war in Southeast Asia was still small and very far away. At Annapolis, it was academics, parades, uniform inspections, and all the military stuff that goes with preparing young officers for duty in the fleet. There were a few of us who had an inkling that we wanted something different and hoped to become frogmen—members of the Navy Underwater Demolition Teams. In my class, the Class of 1967, seven of us ultimately became Navy frogmen. We knew little of SEALs, a secret organization that had been in existence only a few years. The men in National Geographic certainly appeared to be serious men at war. But what kind of war was this? It seemed to me that what these guys called Army Special Forces were doing looked a lot different from what we midshipmen at the Naval Academy were being groomed for.
The National Geographic article featured an Army captain by the name of Vernon Gillespie. Gillespie and another SF officer, along with ten enlisted soldiers, formed what I learned was Special Forces A-Team—the Operational Detachment Alpha, or ODA. Gillespie and his men were encamped near a village called Buon Brieng along with several thousand refugee tribesmen. These twelve soldiers had trained and equipped a seven-hundred-man force of these tribesmen, who were called Montagnards, and led them into the field against the Vietcong. They also helped manage the daily affairs of the village. This was their village and their tribe, the Rhade tribe. Captain Gillespie and his team were running a municipality, fighting a war, and surrounded by Communist insurgents. Gillespie also had to serve as a diplomat as well. In addition to fighting the Vietcong, he had to manage the tension between the small contingent of the Vietnamese army at Buon Brieng and the Montagnards. The Vietnamese and the hill tribes disliked and distrusted each other. However, both liked and trusted Americans like Captain Vernon Gillespie, so he was able to deal with both sides.
Gillespie was like a shuttlecock, bouncing between his team, the Montagnard battalion commander (a man who, by tribal ritual, was his blood brother), the Vietnamese garrison commander, and Major Brooks, who was stationed at Ban