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By Root 1691 0

character and role of Army Special Forces: Vietnam, El Salvador, and Afghanistan. We’ve already talked about Captain Vernon Gillespie and the work of his ODA at Buon Brieng. There were close to 250 of those types of operations during the Vietnam period—village or hamlet outposts from which Special Forces detachments worked and managed irregular-force resistance. I think the operations of Gillespie’s detachment fairly characterized Special Forces in Vietnam, but there were others. Special Forces personnel served in other operational and advisory roles, including some of the most secret and dangerous cross-border operations conducted by the secret Military and Assistance Command, Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group. The story of MACV-SOG and the Green Berets who served with that organization are beyond the scope of this book, but they’re well chronicled in John Plaster’s fine book, SOG: The Secret Wars of America’s Commandos in Vietnam. These advisory roles sometimes led to vicious battles, as in the case of the embattled Special Forces garrison and their Montagnard allies at Lang Vei. On the eve of the siege at Khe Sanh in early 1968, the North Vietnamese attacked Lang Vei in force and with armor. This heroic stand is the worthy subject of William Phillips’s book, Night of the Silver Stars. In size and scope, the Vietnam War, more than any conflict before or since, shaped and defined Special Forces. However, given time, the current global war on terror may change that.

The needs of the war in Vietnam and President Kennedy’s demands for a counterinsurgency capability in our military prompted a dramatic growth in Special Forces. By 1969, there were almost thirteen thousand men in seven Special Forces groups. The 5th Special Forces Group alone grew to over thirty-five hundred personnel. Yet by 1974, the force had been reduced to three active-duty groups. In 1980, on the eve of our involvement in El Salvador, there were some three thousand Green Berets in uniform and on active duty.

Few conflicts in the history of SOF are so shrouded in secrecy and controversy as our involvement in El Salvador. Like Vietnam, it was an exercise in foreign internal defense. And like Vietnam, we supported a regime that was anti-Communist and corrupt. And again like Vietnam, it was a decade-long struggle. In the early 1960s through the early 1970s, if you were a Special Forces warrior and you were downrange in harm’s way, it was Vietnam. In the decade of the 1980s, it was El Salvador. A case can certainly be made that our Special Forces deployed to El Salvador were successful in saving that nation from a takeover by Communist rebels. There were also allegations of human rights violations and the infamous death squads sanctioned by the Duarte regime. The Special Forces personnel I interviewed say they were in El Salvador to train the El Salvadoran armed forces and that they did not tolerate, nor do they condone, these reported abuses. I believe them; I believe they trained the El Salvadorans and, on occasion, fought alongside them. And I believe Special Forces served with honor in El Salvador. Yet it was a messy affair, and the legacy of abuses in El Salvador on the part of the Duarte government is often invoked whenever we try to help a friendly government counter an insurgency. In early 2005, media stories appeared announcing that Special Forces were preparing to undertake the training of indigenous hunter-killer teams to deal with the insurgency in Iraq. This tactic was immediately dubbed the “Salvador Option.”

It is not the purpose of this work to deconstruct the Special Forces activity in that Central American nation, but to point out that it was another decade-long foreign-internal-defense effort. It is worth mentioning that insurgencies, with the notable exception of the one we backed in Afghanistan, are historically long and bloody. A great many Special Forces detachments spent a lot of time in those steaming jungles teaching military and counterinsurgency skills to El Salvadoran army troops. It is noteworthy that this was the last major