Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

A new answer was needed: Only picked men should be allowed in that kind of arena. In years to come, he took this insight to other politically charged environments such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.

In Vienna (and later in Southeast Asia), civilians had high expectations for the Americans who had appeared among them. They had status and stature. They represented a vast, powerful country; they were there to help. If these expectations were going to be realized, then the old Army way wasn't going to work.

'Ordinary' soldiers were not up to the job at hand. 'Special' soldiers were needed.

Bill Yarborough lost that battle. But the point lodged in his mind.

His next years followed the normal, and not very exciting, path expected of midlevel Army officers. He graduated from the British Staff College in Camberley, England, in 1951, then spent the next two years as a staff officer in London representing the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff on the project to construct the framework for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There he met and befriended a man who would come to have a large influence on Special Forces, Roger Hilsman. Another West Point graduate, and a World War II guerrilla fighter with Merrill's Marauders in Burma, Hilsman later became the State Department's head of intelligence, then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs during the Kennedy years, and one of Kennedy's chief foreign policy advisers. More than anyone else, Hilsman was the Kennedy adviser responsible for his interest in irregular warfare.

After leaving England, Yarborough attended the Army War College and remained there on the faculty for two years after graduation. During that time, he made a study of the various forms future wars might take, including guerrilla war. In connection with that study, he visited the Special Forces at Fort Bragg, then under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Edson D. Raff, another pioneer paratrooper and veteran of the 1942 North African invasion. At Special Forces Headquarters, Yarborough got a VIP briefing on their mission and capabilities, but despite Raff's enthusiasm, he was not much impressed with what he saw: During a big war, he concluded, Special Forces might have some influence on guerrillas and orient them to our cause, but it would be a mere sideshow.

In 1956, he was sent to Cambodia, as Deputy Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, where he spent a great deal of time in the field with Cambodian troops — another enlightening experience (he loved Cambodia). He was impressed, first of all, with the physical difficulties of waging conventional war in that environment, and then with the Cambodian soldiers' ability to exist and thrive in that environment nevertheless.He tells about it:

In 1956, General Ciccolella and I, serving on the MAG there, made several trips to the eastern provinces. At one time we went all the way from Phnom Penh over to Ban Me Thuot, and through a road the French had carved out, now overgrown. The rusting machinery was still there, and along the border areas the forces on both sides [Communist and anti-Communist] had met and recoiled, I guess, because there was no evidence of military activity along the border between Cambodia and Vietnam; hut when one got inside the boundaries of Vietnam, fortifications looked over most logical approaches.The going in those two provinces was very difficult, especially in the rainy season. On one of our trips, we got caught in torrential rains.We had with us a small contingent of Cambodians, a three-quarter-ton truck, two jeeps, and a trailer. Darkness fell, quickly, as it does in the tropics; and the road we were on began to disappear under water. On each side of us was nothing but flat land, and 1 began to feel desperate. Not only was it possible for us to down, but we could also flounder around in this flooded and featureless landscape and get completely lost, which was not acceptable either.So what to do?Well, just before the last vestiges of light were gone, we found a little mound — a small hill — and we pulled our equipment up onto it as the rains continued to pelt down on us. Then we deployed our sleeping bags under what cover we could find and tried to get a little rest. Next morning we'd see what else we could do.About three in the morning, we heard sounds from the direction we'd just come from. Soon we could make out blinking through the rain — a flashlight here and there — and the sounds a mule train might make, coming up the road.About half an hour later a young Cambodian lieutenant came up, wet to the skin; he saluted and then asked: 'Est-ce que je peux vous aider?' — Can I help you out?And we said: 'Well, who are you? Where are you going? How did you get here?''We're going to the border post along the frontier,' he said, 'and we're just moving through the mud.''How are you doing it?' He showed us: What they were doing was using a winch on the front of a three-quarter-ton truck. They'd attach a line onto a tree and winch forward about twenty-five or thirty feet. And then they'd repeat the process. They'd moved all the way along the road this way.'Are you going to stop here for the night?' we asked. 'Or wait until the rain stops?''Oh no, there's a much better place on up ahead. We'll go on up there.' And then he said, 'Can we pull you along?''No, we'll wait for dawn, ' I said.So when dawn came, we moved out. The waters had receded a little bit, and you could see where you were going.About ten miles ahead, we came to the encampment where the Cambodian lieutenant had by now laid out his command post gear. By that time, the Cambodian officers had taken off their uniforms and changed into their 'sampots' — a wrap-around garment — and the soldier orderlies were serving them. They were completely at home in that environment… really good jungle and frontier soldiers.Some time later, we finally got to the frontier post that was our destination. It was like a fort in our Old West. It had sharpened stakes around it to keep out the primitive hill tribes they called the 'Mnongs' and the Vietnamese called the 'Montagnards.' In the morning, the bugle would sound, the flag would go up, and the Khmer soldiers would go out on the town (which was nearby), trading with zircons, just like our frontier soldiers trading with the Indians. At night they came back inside the fort.well, my feeling was that Cambodians would make superb irregular warfare soldiers, the guerrilla warfare type.

The seed of another Special Forces mission was planted.

In 1957, Yarborough took command of the 7th Infantry Regiment and moved it to Germany from Fort Benning, Georgia. From there he was sent to Counterintelligence in Europe… and then to Fort Bragg, to command Special Forces.

NEW FORM OF WAR

John Kennedy's thoughts on unconventional warfare were a response to very real worries back in the 1950s and 60s — the seemingly relentless and insidious spread of the 'Communist Empire' and the sudden collapse of colonialism.

Colonialism — the rule by Western powers over Third World peoples for the sake of their economic exploitation — had lasted several centuries. Its death (except in the Soviet version) took approximately two decades, the years following the end of the Second World War.

Sadly, the departure of the old colonial masters brought few blessings to the newly independent Third World nations; the old masters left behind very few capable indigenous leaders and very little for them to work with. The 'white man's burden' was a never-delivered promise. In most newly decolonized Third World nations, the infrastructures necessary to maintain a society as a going concern were lacking — transportation, education, health care, banks and investment, and most of all, enforceable laws and an effective justice system to protect them. More often than not, the emerging Third World leaders were primarily interested in personal aggrandizement and wealth rather than in the long, hard toil needed to build a viable nation.

The citizens of those nations, meanwhile, wanted what everybody else wants — better lives for themselves and their children. 'We've thrown the old masters out,' they argued, sensibly (and often after long, hard struggles, pain, and sacrifice). 'Now we deserve to see the fruits of our victory.'

When the fruits didn't immediately appear — and in fact seemed to recede ever further into a future ever more squalid and rotten with corruption — its not hard to imagine their dismay, nor to see how quickly their mood turned nasty.

Naturally, this potentially explosive situation became a major arena in the battle between the Communist powers and the West. At stake were power and influence over a great part of the world's population, as well as control over a vast wealth of natural resources.

The more ideologically driven Communists started out with a number of advantages in this contest: They had no link with the old, discredited colonial powers, and they promised heaven on earth… and soon. The Chinese, in particular, had also developed effective techniques for transforming the dismay, discontent, and rage against the