For instance, a Special Warfare Directorate was created within the office of the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations. In January 1961, this directorate initiated the first courses of instruction in counterinsurgency at the Special Warfare School.
Then, early in 1962, a board of thirteen general officers chaired by General Hamilton Howze gathered at the Special Warfare Center. The Howze Board recommended that all Army officers from colonel through four-star general, as well as all the Army divisions in the United States, should be educated and trained in counterinsurgency. The Board also recommended doubling Special Forces from the then-2,300 to 4,600. By mid- 1968, this level had been raised to eight Special Forces groups totalling more than 9,000 men.
Meanwhile, the show Yarborough and Clifton put on for the President that October day was really the culmination of three entwined, but not (at that time) totally recognized or understood, forces.
First — and he did not know this — Bill Yarborough had been handpicked by Kennedy for the command of Special Forces, with help and advice from Ted Clifton. The President had told the Army Chief of Staff that he wanted Yarborough, so Yarborough he got. This token of executive preference was inevitably resented by 'those guys there at the Pentagon,' who liked to be in charge of picking who went where. They didn't like it when the President took that power away from them, and this meant that Yarborough started with strikes against him.
Second, Bill Yarborough knew that Special Forces was the only U.S. military concept oriented toward the 'new form of warfare' that so worried the President, but he also knew that this would be a very tough sell to the Army without Kennedy's help. The Army had continued to fight World War II — a firepower and massed-forces war — for decades after that war was won. It meant that Yarborough would have to sail close to the wind in order to promote and sell Special Forces. He would have to convince the president and the American public. As Ted Clifton had known well when he passed Yarborough's name to Kennedy, Yarborough was a master promoter—'Showbiz' to his friends. He was the man for the job.
Third — and this is the primary reason why that October day was Special Forces' defining moment — now that he had been empowered by his commander-in-chief, Bill Yarborough began to transform Special Forces, making it over in his own image. Yarborough was a creature of many dimensions. And that was what Special Forces became.
In leaving that legacy, he proved through his genius, his vision, and his actions that the Clifton-Kennedy laying-on-of-hands that had brought him to Fort Bragg was the correct choice. Before Yarborough, U.S. Special Forces had been a career backwater. The Special Forces that exist today, with the help of hundreds of other great men, are largely his creation.
In the beginning, Yarborough had been far from pleased to take on the Special Forces job. When he was told to report to Fort Bragg, he was a high-level counterintelligence operative in Europe — commander of the 66th Counterintelligence Corps Group, headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, where he was charged with providing security for all of the U.S. Army in Europe. His counterintelligence teams worked through field stations throughout Germany, as well as in Italy, Switzerland, and Paris, and they also worked closely with German, British, and French security agencies. It was a job that he adored and hated to leave. He loved its international character, its record of successes — they identified, captured, or 'neutralized' an amazing number of enemy agents — and its dynamic of intrigue and labyrinthine complexity. It was a terrific job for a highly intelligent man.
Trading all that in for command of what seemed to be a static operation didn't look like fun, nor did it seem to offer much scope or excitement for a man like Yarborough.
'I couldn't have been more wrong,' he says now.
Where he was wrong, in fact, was not in his early characterization of his new command, but in not yet seeing what John Kennedy already knew, that a new kind of force was needed to fight a new kind of war. Aaron Bank's Special Forces had preserved in amber his vision of the OSS and Jedburgh World War II glory days. What was needed now was to transform the soldiers that Bank and Volckmann had trained to rampage behind the lines into fighting men who were far more highly skilled, imaginative, flexible, culturally sensitive, and resourceful.Yarborough produced men capable of handling missions that were far more complex than those he had encountered as an intelligence officer in Europe — and did so with style, finesse, and precisely focused force (when necessary).
It wasn't what Special Forces had been that was important; it was what they would become — that was the creation of Bill Yarborough.
SHOWBIZ
An army career is not exactly the expected choice of profession for a self-described oddball with an affinity for new ideas. Even stranger, Bill Yarborough was an army brat; his father, a decorated veteran of World War I combat in Siberia and a Russian linguist, retired as a colonel. He had no illusions about army life. Worse, he was a sensitive and highly intelligent young man with artistic tendencies. He loved to draw and paint. Such people tend to have trouble with the Army's sometimes numbing regulations, thickheaded bureaucracy, and paucity of vision.
On the other hand, young Bill Yarborough recognized that, despite the occasional institutional silliness, his father's calling was a noble one, that the life could be both fulfilling and fun, and that, most important, he himself was a warrior.
Yarborough joined the Army as an enlisted man in 1931, an experience that gave him invaluable insight into the folks on the ground. He later put that to good use when he commanded Special Forces.
He won an appointment to West Point a year later. At the Academy, he and his classmate Ted Clifton came to run a school publication, the
Yarborough graduated in 1936, received his commission as a second lieutenant from the hands of General John J. Pershing, and was assigned to the 57th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, stationed at Fort McKinley on Luzon. In the period before he left for the Philippines, he wooed and married another army brat — though that was not all that Norma and Bill Yarborough had in common: They both shared a lifetime love of the Far East and of the art of Asia (their home in North Carolina is filled with it).
After a three-year tour in the Philippines, Yarborough characteristically found his way to the cutting edge of the new Army, which in the early 1940s meant jumping out of airplanes with a parachute (a not-very-well- developed device). He was among the first to volunteer for and test this new and very dangerous form of warfare.
Paratroopers gave armies greatly increased mobility, but at a cost. The air transports that flew them were vulnerable, and paratroopers couldn't carry much in the way of support or firepower with them. In their early days, in other words, airborne units operated more like Special Forces teams than regular infantry.
Meanwhile, as he learned the jump trade, his Airborne superiors offered him a chance to exercise his love of symbols.
It's easy for outsiders to miss the point of the Army's wealth of institutional symbols. Qualification badges, ribbons, decorations, unit patches — even special hats or boots or songs — have a big place in a soldier's sense of identity and pride. They're certainly not essential, but they are more than gaudy decoration. Strong men will choke up now and again when they are put in the presence of some particularly meaningful piece of colored cloth.
This is not to say that there is no place for flamboyance and swagger in a soldier's outfit. You want dignity but you don't want a soldier to look timid. A modicum of flair doesn't hurt here. Yarborough has always been conscious of these truths. 'A distinctive uniform,' he writes, 'enhances an individual's pride, makes him a man apart, makes him special.'
Not surprisingly, his paratroop superiors were aware of his knack for drawing and design, and so he was asked to create the first airborne qualification badge, and then to have a silversmith produce enough of them to award the first group of qualifying paratroopers. Airborne forces still wear the wings Bill Yarborough designed.
His talents were not limited to airborne wings. He had a further knack for designing specialized clothing: the first airborne jump boots, for instance — jump boots have had the same kind of meaning for paratroopers that green berets have for Special Forces — and he would later create other pieces of military clothing, some of which
