Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [143]
Captain Santos and one of his men conduct these interviews or receive the briefings with the rest of the ODA in close attendance. Master Sergeant Rameres sits in on all of them and conducts a short critique after each.
“Always remember that no matter whether it’s a local civilian or the battalion communicator or a pilot, every one of these people can help you with your mission. Take a moment or more as necessary to build rapport and elicit every scrap of information you can. You need what these people know and can do for you, and if you’re not sure of what they’re telling you, ask the question a different way. And be careful what information you give. With the pilot, tell him only what he has to know to support your mission. He may become a POW, and you don’t want him to have the details of your movements on the ground.”
Three days after the course of action briefing, Captain Santos stands before Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jackson, the 1st Battalion commander, to deliver his briefback. He begins with an overview of the mission, a restatement of the commander’s intent, and the desired end state. Then he plunges into the mechanics of the operation. All of the team members contribute, but Santos does most of the talking. The briefback details ODA 912’s mission, the team leader’s intent, task organization, threat analysis, concept of operations, logistics, command and signal, and personnel issues. Two hours and seventy-six PowerPoint slides later, Santos asks if there are any questions. There is close to an hour of critique and discussion of 912’s planning effort. Lieutenant Colonel Jackson’s comments are a balance of the exercise briefback critique and considerations for real-world operational planning.
“You have to plan carefully and you have to plan methodically,” Jackson says in closing. “Don’t forget the administrative issues. It’s easy to go past the admin stuff and into the meat of the mission. Get into the details that protect your people. When you deploy for real, make sure your men have a will made out. Make sure it’s in writing how and where they want to be buried and who gets the insurance money. Keep track of your funds; helos crash, and money gets burned up. These are real-world issues. Build these details into your training scenarios—you’ll soon be doing this down range, where it counts. Looking ahead to Robin Sage in Phase IV, you’ll have one more time to do this in training before it’s real—real lives and real bullets. If you can manage an unconventional-warfare campaign within the political, military, and cultural boundaries of the Pineland scenario, you can handle any unconventional-warfare or foreign-internal-defense situation in the world. That’s where we are going with this. We’ll see you gentlemen out at Camp Mackall in a week or so.”
The last item before the student captains from 912 leave Phase III is their final counseling sessions. These sessions are much like the mid-course counseling, but more in depth. The 18 Alpha candidates’ Special Forces training folders are getting pretty fat by this stage of the Q-Course. Each one is a detailed chronology of the officer’s performance, along with specific comments and evaluations since the beginning of Phase II. There are summations of counseling sessions, TAIS coaching points, Volkmann Exercise performance reports, role-playing contact reports, debriefing reports, self-assessment reports, leadership assessment reports, peer evaluations, spot reports—both positive and negative—and their physical training scores. This is not the first special operations training venue I’ve been around, and I can say I have never seen this much attention to so much detail—such focus on individual performance and analysis. Each man’s jacket has eight to ten pages of typewritten assessment and critique information.
The End of Phase