Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [25]
Officers entering Special Forces training are special before they arrive at Camp Mackall for the assessment and selection process. They are captains and a few first lieutenants who have made the promotion list for captain. In most cases, they’ve had four or five years or more in the Army and have distinguished themselves as superior leaders in their branch of the Army. Today, these numbers are up from my time at Fort Bragg; something on the order of five hundred or more of these officers apply for Special Forces training each year. Close to three hundred are now chosen to attend SFAS. Most have been to Ranger School, and many of those are veterans of the 75th Ranger Regiment. Most are infantry officers, although there’s always a smattering from other branches of the Army—armor, engineering, artillery, and signal corps officers. It might seem that the Special Forces mission is more suited to infantry officers, but a Special Forces battalion commander likes having a mix of talent he can draw upon. The key components an officer brings to the Special Forces table are troop leadership skills and branch experience. Language ability and cross-cultural skills/experience are also very helpful. And today, more than ever, most of these officers are combat veterans. With regard to other SOF units, including SEALs and Rangers, the officer candidates for Special Forces are older, and have more time in service and more leadership experience.
The enlisted Special Forces candidates are also a breed apart in terms of maturity and qualification. While these soldiers are predominately infantryman, they come from all branches of the Army and from all technical specialties. A great many come from the 82nd Airborne Division, which also calls Fort Bragg home, but there are aviation, administrative, and medical specialists, as well as those from the infantry and armored divisions. As a group, they’re more senior, with the junior men having reached the rank of specialist, but most are buck sergeants or higher. It’s not uncommon to have a number of staff sergeants and a few sergeants first class in a selection class. They are older than most soldiers in conventional units, they have superior performance ratings, and, like the officer candidates, most are combat veterans. We often hear about the Army failing to make its recruitment goals, but the Special Forces recruiters are finding that there’s an increasing number of veteran soldiers who want to become Special Forces soldiers. Applications are up and the SF recruiters are able to select the most qualified candidates from a larger pool of qualified applicants.
“These are good times for Special Forces, as far as recruiting goes,” a Special Forces recruiter told me. “And I should know. I’m the guy who has to tell a veteran sergeant in the 82nd that we can’t take him this time around. I tell him to go back to his unit, try to improve his physical qualifications and test scores, and perhaps we can place him in a future class. Who would’ve thought that four years into a war, we’d have plenty of high-quality soldiers willing to extend their enlistments to become Special Forces soldiers.”
The recruiter’s job has been made a lot easier because of 9/11 and the global war on terror. Many good men self-select for Special Forces. These are soldiers who have served with or near Special Forces detachments in Afghanistan or Iraq, and they now know how they want to go back to the fight. They’ve seen what Special Forces do and how they do it, and they want to be a part of that world. By far, the most potent recruiting tool for Special Forces among regular soldiers is a deployed Special Forces detachment.
“I was in Kandahar with a rifle company providing perimeter security for the airport there,” a sergeant candidate in SFAS told me. “This C-17 lands and taxis to the end of the runway and lowers the tail ramp, engines still running. I thought it might be