collectively, with pride and self-esteem. Meanwhile, he had to study the nature of the enemy and the ways others had learned to combat such an enemy; he had to do it to a depth rarely — if ever — accomplished by a military organization; and he had to find ways to make his Special Forces not just learn these insights, but incorporate them into their blood and sinews. And finally, he had to continue to sell his always fragile and vulnerable Special Forces to the 'big' Army and to the American people.
A NEW KIND OF FIGHTING FORCE
Bill Yarborough faced a big job, but first he had to clean house — which involved raising the bar.
Not long after he took over Special Forces in 1961, Yarborough came to realize that a significant portion of the SF old-timers did not measure up to the standards his new fighting force required. These old guys were a rough lot — fire-breathers and flame-spouters. They were extraordinary soldiers, but not all of them could be counted on to operate well in politically and psychologically sensitive situations.
'The ones 1 was especially anxious not to retain in the Green Berets,' Yarborough remarks, 'were the 'old jockstrap commandos,' the Ranger types. And I must say there were considerable numbers of those in Special Forces.
'I'd fought with Rangers during World War 11, and I had known and admired them for their best qualities: They were gallant 'bloodletters.' They were fighting machines. They were anything but diplomats, and rejected any suggestion that they ought to be. And they paid little attention to what we might call the more humane qualities, like compassion, pity, and mercy. If such things suited the occasion, all right; but if they didn't, that was all right, too. They were there to cut a swath. Wherever you turned the Rangers and commandos loose, boy, there they would go. There wasn't any question about it.
'Well, some of my Army colleagues in key positions in the Department of the Army continue to look upon Special Forces as a kind of commando. They have never been able to understand why we had to get rid of so many of the old jockstrap guys, or why later we had to have such a high attrition rate in the Qualification Course. They couldn't understand the attrition rates for judgment, or for inability to understand humanity…. A guy who wouldn't get down on his belly alongside a Montagnard and show him the sight picture [in aiming a weapon] was no use to me.
'We continually got called to task about our high attrition rate, but as long as I had anything to do about it, we didn't bend one inch, and I would back to the limit every man who came out of that cauldron, out of that system.'
Some of the old SF guys were a rough lot off-duty as well as on — and that presented Yarborough with yet more problems.
Because Special Forces was a marginal outfit where promotions were scarce, the best officers tended to avoid the assignment if they could. In those days, the level of SF training for officers was also low; the Q Course, for example, could be waived for field-grade officers, and often was.
For various reasons, the future for good Special Forces NCOs was brighter, and NCO quality tended to be higher. The NCOs' expertise also tended to be high (many of them were World War II and/or Korea veterans with considerable experience in the field; most had been shot at), and Yarborough wanted to make the most of their expertise in teaching his younger soldiers. But they also tended to act as though they had carte blanche to do things pretty much as they pleased. They tended to run a bit wild when they were out there with the younger guys.
They had to be reined in.
The officers, though, were a bigger problem. There were outstanding exceptions, but too many officers looked at the assignment as a place to park and have macho fun — drinking, wild parties, womanizing, playing around with other guys wives.
That had to stop.
Early on in his command, Yarborough took his officers — captain and higher — out into the pine woods on the base and told them straight what he expected of them. He was not gentle.
The event was long remembered as Yarborough's 'Talk in the Woods.'
'As long as I'm in charge of Special Forces,' he told them, 'the rules are going to change. There'll be a new start.
'First, there will be no womanizing, no drunkenness, no wild parties, no adultery. There'll be no troublemakers. No wild men. From now on all that stuff is out — and there will be no deviations. There will be moral standards, there will be disciplinary standards, there will be appearance standards.
'Second, all officers will go through the Q Course. No exceptions. No matter what his rank.
'Third, everything I'm saying applies to all ranks. No exceptions. So you're going to make it all clear to every one of your NCOs.
'Finally, if you don't like it, you can deal with it in two ways. You can end your career. Or you can come to my office and request to be transferred out. Otherwise, if you want to stay in this unit, there will be big changes.'
The worst got out. The best stayed. And Yarborough moved on to the real work that remained.
Meanwhile, Special Forces officers and NCOs began to find promotions coming their way. If you got into Special Forces, and you could cut it, you could expect to get promoted very quickly and look forward to a long Army career, if you wanted it.
So Special Forces stopped being the end of the road for wild men, misfits, and has-beens. It became the place you wanted to be. It was the place where the action was.
Soon after the Kennedy administration had identified 'counterinsurgency' as an official instrument of United States foreign policy, it became clear that some of the major weapon systems needed for counterinsurgency would have to be forged from among the resources specific to the behavioral and social sciences — psychology, anthropology, political science, economics, history, and international relations. The problem would be to integrate these disciplines with more direct military functions to produce an effective instrument in the murky environment of actual counterinsurgency campaigns.
The Special Warfare Center had to explore this new field.
Bill Yarborough was himself a scholar and an intellectual, and his experience in intelligence and counterintelligence had taught him a great deal about how to go about understanding ones adversaries (and one's friends). He knew where and how to look for sources of knowledge and inspiration.
He went first to Roger Hilsman, who had already played a major role at the State Department and White House in promoting the concept of counterinsurgency and the convoluted world of irregular warfare. Hilsman came down to the Special Warfare Center on several occasions, and provided Yarborough and his staff and students with background information and insights.
Yarborough and his staff also studied positive and negative examples: Positive in the case of the British, whose triumph in Malaya pointed the way toward a workable counterinsurgency doctrine — a combination of sophistication about native cultures and a willingness to be uncompromisingly brutal in infiltrating local insurgencies and then uprooting them from the people. Negative in the case of the French defeat in Indochina and their phony victory in Algeria.
Others who regularly gave him counsel included experts like Charles M. Thayer, the head of the U.S. military mission to Yugoslavia during World War II and who later headed the Voice of America; Dr. Jay Zawodny, then professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who had fought with the Polish underground in Warsaw during the Second World War and later authored numerous works on irregular warfare and psychological operations; and several others of equal expertise.
Some of the sources consulted and studied were controversial. Yarborough was not afraid to shock his students. Conventional thinking was not going to get the job done.
The left-leaning French soldier-writer Bernard Fall, for example, was a frequent lecturer at the Special Warfare School's irregular warfare classes. The author of the now classic history of the French war in Indochina,
