• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1685 0

before them, the Phase IV cadre refer to them as students. They are once more broken down into student ODAs and board an assortment of buses, trucks, and semitrailers that resemble cattle cars. After a stop at the armory to draw weapons, they head for Camp Mackall and the Rowe Training Facility. They are Class 2-05 for this phase of training. Once there, they pretty much know the drill. By 1000, the students have found their assigned team spaces—the all-too-familiar barracks/team-room facilities. For Phase IV, they’re a combination of Quonset-hut-style buildings and temporary mobile-home-type condo bays set on post-and-pier foundations with common sidewalls. Only in Phase IV, these team huts become isolation facilities. Within the training scenario, these are ODAs preparing for war. The student ODAs quickly settle into their quarters and draw additional equipment for the phase—radios, medical equipment, night-vision goggles, military GPSs, and a considerable amount of consumables like Chemlites, flares, MREs, and blank ammunition. After the equipment draws, each man lays out his personal and assigned team equipment on a poncho liner for inspection. By midafternoon, the candidates form up next to the battalion headquarters, the same area where many of them received their SFAS briefings. One of the phase cadre sergeants quickly covers the now-familiar rules for Special Forces training at Camp Mackall—no nonmilitary books, no cell phones, no personal computers, and no personal GPSs. Then the 1st Battalion commander steps in front of the formation.

“Gentlemen, welcome back to Camp Mackall,” Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jackson says to Class 2-05. “This is it, Phase IV. This is where you take everything you’ve learned and put it all together in an operational environment. We expect you to work with indigenous forces in an unconventional-warfare scenario. That means dealing effectively with military, paramilitary, and civilian personnel. This phase is all about managing the human terrain. The indig forces you will work with will have different motivations and values than you. This is probably the last time many of you will train men for war that speak your language. You’ll have to find common ground and to pursue common interests with these men; you’ll have to win them over. It’s all about people. Your job is to teach them, train them, and bond with them. It’s a by, with, and through business, in this phase and on deployment in the Special Forces groups. Like all phases of training, we have performance review boards. There are three things that will get you to the board. The first is an inability to positively interact with others. The second’s the inability to grasp the material we teach here. Before you head into the field on Robin Sage, we’ll be teaching you some important skills. Show us a poor learning curve and you will find yourself recycled to the next class. And the last thing that’ll get you to the review board is lack of focus or not taking this training seriously. The Robin Sage exercise is one long, continuous stage performance. Get your head in the game and keep it in the game. Treat the training scenario like the real thing—be an actor and stay in character.

“Finally, I want you to enjoy this training, and get all you can out of it. If you stay in role and work the scenario, it can be very rewarding. The guys coming back from combat deployments say Afghanistan is Robin Sage on steroids. Robin Sage and the Pineland scenario isn’t just some war game. It’s effectively trained several generations of Green Berets in unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense. This is real-time, downrange stuff. Take it seriously, gentlemen. A year from now, all of you will be deployed and in harm’s way. Command Sergeant Major?”

Sergeant Major Frank Zorn steps before the class. “It won’t get any better than this,” he says with an easy grin. “Nobody’s shooting at you, which, by the way, is the last time you will have it that way. If you are taking real fire, it’s not part of the training. There are some locals out there that like