Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [187]
“In some ways, this is harder than being out in the swamps at Camp Mackall,” Captain Matt Anderson told me. He was studying Arabic. “You get to go home every night, but you have to discipline yourself to turn off the TV, put on the headphones, and listen to your language.”
The new Green Berets, with their tab, head out for their groups and duty in a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha—a real go-overseas, go-in-harm’s-way ODA. For a few, there will be time for stateside training with their detachments prior to deployment. For others, when they check into their group headquarters, they will learn that their detachments are on deployment.
“We’ve had young X-Ray soldiers get on a plane for Afghanistan within days of leaving the Q-Course,” a battalion command sergeant major from 3rd Group told me. “When he gets to the forward operating base, we send them right out to a team in the field.”
“The new kids do just fine,” said a team sergeant with 3rd Group. “We have a lot of confidence in the current training at the Q-Course and the new guys they’re sending us. We get them right in the operational flow. They’re green, but as long as they listen, they can help the team. Some are better than others, but we use them to the limits of their experience. We have a lot of work to do.”
Training for the new men depends on the time available when they reach their detachment and the detachment’s next deployment rotation. The twelve-man detachments specialize in various military disciplines: scuba, high-altitude low-opening (HALO) parachuting, mountain operations, maritime operations, and urban combat. If there’s time, they will attend schools or courses that train them in these specialties. Given the current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new guys almost always need time behind the gun. During whatever time is available to them in the form of predeployment, mission-readiness training, they do a lot of shooting. Time and school quotas permitting, the groups try to get their new men to formal tactical and shooting schools. There are two schools that top the list. First is the Special Operations Target Inderdiction Course, which is an advanced sniper course. The second is the Special Forces Advanced Reconnaissance, Target Analysis, and Exploitation Course. This course is all about tactical battle-space management for small units in urban terrain. Both are high-speed courses that prepare the new SF soldiers for the realities of modern combat. But when the detachment is due for rotation overseas, the new Q-Course grads will deploy with their teams. There is no leaving a man back to attend a school.
I found the notion of new Special Forces soldiers making a combat rotation within weeks of their Q-Course graduation intriguing. Newly minted Navy SEALs will have up to eighteen months of individual, team-centric, and predeployment training before they go into harm’s way. I really wanted to see these new Green Berets in action. So I started back up my chain of command—JFK Special Warfare Center and School to the U.S. Army Special Operations Command to the U.S. Special Operations Command—and asked, “Any chance I can go over and visit some of my guys?” Long ago, I began to think of these new men collectively as “my guys.”
“You want to go downrange?” I said I did. “Sure,” they told me, “we’ll get you there,” and they were true to their word.
In May 2006, for the first time in close to thirty-five years, I found myself en route to an active theater. The last time I went to war—my war—it was on a C-54 transport plane, a version of the old DC-4. It was the same unpressurized,