Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [77]
The X-Ray Special Forces selectees return to Fort Bragg for their Special Forces Preparation Course. They are once again in barracks that appear identical to those where they suffered through their Pre-SFAS Training. The prep-course barracks are located next to the Pre-SFAS Training buildings, but inside they’re arranged very differently. They are set up in “ODA configuration,” a living/working arrangement that’ll characterize much of their training in the Q-Course and much of their operational life as a Green Beret. Each floor of the dated, two-story structures houses a student Operational Detachment Alpha, or student ODA—a team of twelve to fourteen students. For much of the Special Forces Qualification Course, the trainees or students (they are no longer candidates) will train and learn in these ODA-sized student groupings. Most of these men will go to war as young sergeants in a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha. One end of the barracks houses a small head/ laundry/shower facility, much the same as the Pre-SFAS barracks. Next is a bay that takes perhaps half the assigned floor space. This is the team area, or team room, where the daily planning, preparation, and instructional life of the team takes place. Along the walls are racks for weapons, and lockers and shelving for ammunition and operational equipment. The interior of the team room is taken with a ring or U-shaped arrangement of tables surrounded by chairs—one for each member of the team. The tables encircle two sand tables—four-foot-square, shallow sandboxes where the student ODAs can build terrain models for operational planning. In and around this team bay are whiteboards, butcher-block paper pads, and easels for planning and briefing. These mission-planning/mission-briefing areas are where the new X-Ray selectees will spend most of their waking hours. At one end of the room is a stack of boxed MREs. When the student ODAs aren’t in the field, they’ll live and eat most of their meals in the team room. The third section of each team’s space is a small sleeping bay crammed with double bunks and just enough room for a man to slip between them and crawl into his rack. Special Forces detachments live in similar eat-sleep-work environments all around the world.
The prep course is a sixteen-day course of instruction that teaches individual movement, patrol movement formations, types of patrols (including reconnaissance, ambush, and raid patrols), mission planning, and troop-leading procedures. Unlike Pre-SFAS Training, the prep course is continuous, 24/7—no weekends off. The information is presented in the classrooms, and then the student teams move into the training areas on Fort Bragg to practice in the field what they learned in the classroom—a day in class, then a day out in the woods. These days begin with physical training (PT) at 0600 and often end with a patrolling practical at 2130 (9:30 p.m.). Each team has an assigned cadre sergeant who is a sergeant first class. This veteran Green Beret is assigned to each student team or student ODA in the prep course. My student ODA cadre sergeant is Sergeant First Class Owen Tell.
“We have a little over two weeks to get these soldiers through the basics of small-unit tactics. In that