Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [18]
While the Special Forces were serving in El Salvador in the 1980s and early 1990s, there were two developments that would shape the future of Special Forces and, indeed, our entire military. The Soviet Union was beginning to unravel, and its support of Communist insurgencies, such as in El Salvador, was on the wane. The Communist government of Fidel Castro in Cuba was a huge drain on the Soviet economy. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, a symbolic end to the failure of the Communist system. But as the world was shaking itself loose from one form of tyranny, another was well under way. Fundamentalist Muslims—the Islamists—had already begun their jihad, their war with the democracies. Many feel, and I’m one of them, that it began formally with the taking of American hostages at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. Then there were the attacks on the American embassy in Beirut and the bombing of the Marine barracks, both in 1983. In 1988, there was the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 259 passengers and crew, along with 11 people on the ground. By the time of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, we were beginning to sense that we had a new enemy. Indeed, prior to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington, D.C., there were over seventy-five hundred terrorist attacks worldwide. We were at war prior to 9/11, but most of us just didn’t realize it.
Throughout the 1990s and prior to 9/11, Special Forces and other SOF components were deployed worldwide on missions that ranged from counterdrug activities to humanitarian assistance to demining operations, but most usually these deployments related to military training. In the vein of foreign military training, there were security assistance programs designed to “provide training assistance in support of legislated programs which provide U.S. Defense articles, military training, and other defense related services.” These foreign military-aid programs deployed Special Forces and other SOF elements to foreign shores and allowed them to live and work in foreign lands. Usually, these deployments came under the Joint/Combined Exchange Training Program. This program allowed Special Forces to sharpen their skills in the training and mentoring of foreign and allied forces. They were beneficial to foreign military units and our Special Forces detachments. Who can tell when the global war on terror will move into a nation that because of prior SF military visits is trained to conduct counterinsurgency operations and is receptive to U.S. military assistance in the face of a terrorist threat? This exchange program kept our Special Forces detachments on deployment and trained in foreign-internal-defense and unconventional-warfare disciplines. This brings us to the third and most current event in Special Forces history: the campaign in Afghanistan. While Vietnam and El Salvador called on SF to perform primarily in a foreign-internal-defense role, their activity in the early days of the Afghan campaign was pure unconventional warfare, one that will be studied for generations as a classic unconventional-warfare campaign.
I clearly remember those turbulent days following the 9/11 attacks, when the face of this enemy became Osama bin Laden. Americans suddenly became aware that this was a new and dangerous enemy. My work on basic Navy SEAL training, The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228, had just been released. I knew immediately