Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [110]
Sergeant Adams joined the Army after he graduated from Parkway South High in St. Louis in 1990. He’s been a Green Beret since 1993, and is qualified as a sniper and in military free-fall parachuting. Like First Sergeant Blaylock, he’s from 3rd Group. Adams has made deployments to Ghana, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mauritania, Djibouti, Qatar, Yemen, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Sergeant Adams explains how the deployed Special Forces detachments have come up with a whole protocol for the storage of equipment and ammo, including where to keep personal weapons if a soldier is driving or manning one of the vehicle weapons systems. The modifications are the evolution of trial and error—what works and what doesn’t. This knowledge is handed down from team to team. Given the speed and tactical requirements of Special Forces work, and that they are moving at night whenever possible, they use unarmored Humvees.
“All of you should learn how to weld if you don’t already know how. There’s always a welder handy when you’re deployed. Make the modifications as necessary for your team and mission requirements. And don’t forget that as a weapons sergeant on your detachment, you have to see that all guns on the truck are working and serviceable and that the ammo is in good order. You also have to see that every man on your team knows how to load, man, and use every weapon. This means you have to schedule live-fire drills for your team; don’t assume that your junior engineer—or the senior one, for that matter—knows how to use a mounted 240 or an Mk19 grenade launcher.”
Throughout the course, the Bravo candidates alternate between the classroom and the firing ranges. The classroom work is more heavily weighted during the early part of the course to allow for more range time during the latter portion of the instruction. They’re routinely tested on all material and weapons systems. On the ranges, they get to shoot, and that’s why many of these Special Forces candidates wanted to become weapons sergeants.
At the sniper ranges, they spend time with the Remington M700 SOPMOD (special operations modification), the standard sniper rifle in the Special Forces inventory, as well as the heavy-caliber and special-purpose sniper systems. In the classroom, they receive a thorough orientation on foreign sniper rifles. On the rocket ranges, they fire the two rockets in the U.S. inventory, the AT4 and the Carl Gustaf. The AT4 is a light weapon that gives a squad-sized unit in the field an antiarmor capability. The Carl Gustaf is larger and more accurate. Still a squad weapon, it is usually carried when the squad’s primary mission is launching rockets. They also fire foreign-made RPGs, or rocket-propelled grenades.
“After firing the Russian-made RPG-7, I see why it’s causing us such headaches in the hands of the insurgents,” PFC Roberto Pantella tells me. “It’s a very user-friendly and accurate weapon.”
The prospective Bravos receive training on surface-to-air rockets, the U.S.-made Stinger and the Russian-made SA-7 Strella. All training I observe is with simulators. These are very expensive weapons systems, and so are the targets, so there’s no live-fire training with the SAMs.
Standoff weapons systems include grenade launchers and recoilless rifles. Some of these systems are quite dated, while others feature the latest in technology. The 106mm recoilless rifle, married up with a .50-caliber spotting rifle, is identical to the ones we used in Vietnam—very accurate and very lethal. Forty-millimeter grenade launchers have been around for a while as well. The M79 and M203, the latter now adapted to the standard M4 rifle, have been in inventory for forty years. Automatic, high-velocity grenade launchers are relatively new. The newest is the Mk47 grenade launcher.
“You won’t believe what the Mk47 can do,” Specialist Tom Kendall tells me. “It has a laser range finder with a CRT screen. You just put the laser on the target, match the sighting mechanism to the laser, and fire. It’s a Nintendo game. Your first