Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [30]
During this fourteen-week OSUT process, some recruits, and those include a few X-Rays, decide that this life is not for them—that they don’t want to be soldiers under any circumstances. Army life comes with a decided lack of privacy and loss of freedom. For the X-Ray soldiers, the image of donning that Green Beret meets the growing reality that the road to becoming a Green Beret is very hard and very long. So they volunteer out; they quit. Even for the most capable and motivated, the transition from college student or computer technician or management trainee to soldier isn’t an easy one. And along with all this new regimentation, barracks life, and the shouting of drill instructors is the sure knowledge that if Basic Combat Training and Advanced Individual Training is hard, what’s it going to be like when they get to Fort Bragg and Special Forces training?
After OSUT, the new X-Rays are off to three weeks of Army Airborne School, more commonly referred to as jump school. At this point, a few of the X-Rays decide that while they want to learn to parachute, the long journey of Special Forces training is not for them. At this point, they may or may not be allowed into jump school, but they have earned themselves a set of orders to the 3rd or 4th Infantry Division, or some other duty station that serves the needs of the Army. After three weeks of Airborne School and five parachute jumps, the same as when I went to jump school almost forty years ago, they are now airborne-qualified infantry soldiers. Friday afternoon after their jump-school graduation, they blouse their trousers into their jump boots, pin on their silver parachute wings, and board the buses for the trip from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
On the twelve-hour trip from Benning to Bragg, the X-Rays have some time to think about their sixteen or seventeen weeks in the United States Army. They have three Army schools behind them. They’ve struggled and sweated, and they’ve succeeded. With each school, there was a graduation ceremony of sorts and they were congratulated for their achievement—something the Army does very well. The new soldiers were allowed a day or a weekend to savor their achievement, then it was on to the next school. For the most part, few of them have been seriously challenged, although jumping out of a perfectly good airplane is not for sissies, and something that may have never entered their mind six months ago. Now they’re about to begin their Special Forces training. They know something of what is ahead. The rumor mill easily reaches from Fort Bragg to Fort Benning—some fact and a lot of fiction. The Special Forces cadres visit them at Fort Benning and candidly tell them something of what’s in store when they do get to Fort Bragg. But all they really know is that it’ll be hard—harder than anything they have faced in their short Army careers.
WATER AEROBICS. Pre-SFAS students pause midstream on a run for some jumping jacks—not unwelcome in the North Carolina summer heat.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PREPARATION
It is well after midnight by the time the three buses finally crawl off I-95 and turn west. Leaving the interstate, they thread their way through the outskirts of Fayetteville and onto the All American Freeway, a short, four-lane superhighway that leads into the bowels of Fort Bragg. At the gate, a guard steps aboard the lead bus and looks down the aisle of sleepy soldiers. They’re awake, but just barely. The buses aren’t civilian charter buses, but school-type military buses.
“More Special Forces trainees?” the guard asks the driver as he checks the trip pass.
“I reckon,” the driver replies. He’s as tired as the soldiers he’s driving. The guard’s an MP, but the driver is a civilian contract employee.
After the buses are checked through, they continue down All American, turn left on Longstreet Road, and continue for nearly a mile, then right on Gruber Road, and right again onto Pratt Street. The sprawling base