Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

approach routes. With Green Beret help, they dug protective shelters inside the village perimeters. They set up an alarm system, using an old tire rim or an empty artillery shell case, to warn of attack. During all this time, Green Berets worked alongside the villagers, and when attack came, they fought side by side with them.

Green Beret A-Detachments have always featured medical expertise — two highly trained medical specialists, with each of the remaining eight troopers cross-trained in medical skills.

The justification for this expertise came out of the original Special Forces mission, which was to organize and train guerrilla and insurgent forces. During their early days, guerrillas are exceedingly vulnerable. To protect themselves while they grow in strength, they must hide in difficult-to-reach areas such as jungles, swamps, or rugged mountains. Under such conditions, day-to-day survival is often a triumph in itself. If a guerrilla is sick or wounded, he has no outside help on which to rely.

Here is where Green Beret medical skills enter the picture. Green Beret medics could provide the medical knowledge to keep guerrillas going as functioning fighters.

Those skills were put to similar use in the villages, which were scarcely less isolated than the guerrilla bases, and provided even more reason for friendship and trust. Often for the first time, villagers had access to basic dental care, prenatal care, antibiotics, vaccinations, and nutrition and disease-prevention advice.

Training for these missions was intense, difficult, and as realistic as possible. Green Berets returning from foreign missions were sucked dry of information, and they helped train the men replacing them. Replicas of villages were constructed, accurate to the finest detail. In order to prepare for a mission, the Berets lived exactly as they expected to live in the field — food, shelter, work, language, everything.

As a training aid, Yarborough had a portion of a Vietnamese guerrilla village constructed at Fort Bragg, complete with artifacts, livestock, and escape tunnels. On one of his later trips to Vietnam, Yarborough was both amused and gratified to find a replica of his replica village being used by the Vietnamese army at their Infantry Training Center.

Bill Yarborough's devotion to intense Special Forces preparation also included uncommon (for the Army) attention to specialized personal equipment, such as clothing, medical kits, and rations. Predictably, the 'big' Army monolith had a hard time handling this.

Bill Yarborough takes the story from here:

I have always felt that equipment for a Special Forces soldier was primarily for the purpose of keeping him alive and it had little to do with weaponry. The health of the soldier was what counted, and we could best take care of this by making sure he had the best clothing, field medical gear, and rations. As a matter of fact, I felt that if the American had a superior weapon when he was out among indigenous forces who had to make do wath something more basic, his own credibility suffered. I was not convinced, for instance, that the M-16 should be a Special Forces weapon; a survival weapon was more the kind of thing an SF soldier wanted. Or else, if he didn't have the right weapon for particular conditions, he'd take it from the enemy or improvise.To this end, the training system at Fort Bragg included an extraordinarily wide variety of weapons collected from worldwide sources. A Special Forces soldier mas expected to be familiar with all of them and be able to assemble and use them.I didn't see the Special Forces soldier as a direct combat instrument. I saw him as a catalyst who could gather around him those whom he could then train and lend help to lead, and what weapon he carried was secondary.So I put an enormous amount of time in personal equipment and special uniforms, even though such things were not looked on kindly by the Quartermaster Corps and others, who looked at such views as overly romantic, and that in the Army, the essential thing is to give a soldier a good weapon, enough ammunition, clothes on his back, shoes on his feet, and transportation.In 1961, I went to the Quartermaster Depot at Natick, Massachusetts, to see what kind of tropical gear we had in stock for the guys who were going to Southeast Asia. When I got there, I was in for a shock. They didn't have anything suitable for jungle action. All the World War II experience fighting in the jungle and the tropics was apparently down the drain.I did find in the Quartermaster Museum what they called 'tropical fatigues.' But these had the same imagination as ordinary dung shovelers' fatigues. No utility whatever. There was a shirt and pants. The shirt had two small breast pockets and no lower pockets. The pants had ordinary pockets, no cargo pockets. The cloth, though, was okay. It was the kind of cloth that was close-woven enough to make it impervious to mosquito bites.So I said, 'Well, let's see. The cloth is good. We can start with that. 'And I went from there. 'Send me one of those down,' I told them, 'and we'll doctor it up a bit and see what we can do about making it a little more worthy for combat. ' So I took what they were calling 'tropical fatigues' and put cargo pockets on the trousers and two large pockets with bellows pleats on the shirt. I angled the upper pockets on the shirt to allow easier access when web equipment was worn, added epaulets, and also buttoned tabs at the waist to allow the blouse to be gathered. The sleeves were designed to be rolled up, if there were no mosquitoes around and weather permitted.Little by little, with our help, the Quartermaster had a jungle uniform for Vietnam — even though they never admitted they had a requirement for one.Yet making it happen was a hard thing. The paperwork alone for the issue of the jungle uniform weighed many pounds. And with the first batch of uniforms came orders that they would only be worn in the field, and only by Special Forces.That of course changed.It was most fortunate for the United States Army, he concludes with masterful understatement, that when U. S. troops were eventually sent to Vietnam in huge numbers, the tropical field uniform we designed for Special Forces was available for general use.

Meanwhile, as Bill Yarborough was forging his new breed of soldier, the 'big' Army continued on its more traditional paths, casting an ever-colder eye on the oddball operation in North Carolina, with its presidential favor, its substantial funding ('What they get, 1 lose' — the military has always operated in a zero-sum mode), and its license to raid the best units for their best men — especially their best NCOs — and 'take them out of the Army,' as one four-star general put it.

Generals, as generals will, began to murmur among themselves against the Green Beret upstarts and Bill Yarborough's 'private army.' The talk never became public, but a consensus was building in favor of the tried and true: 'They've been feeding soldiers Laotian food down there at Fort Bragg. What the hell for? Firepower wins wars. Not lousy food.' Or more generally: 'They're going their own way down there. They don't respect the rules. They do things their way and not the Army way.'

Some of these charges were not without substance. Though Yarborough never actually broke regulations, he bent them; and where there were holes, he slipped through them. A strict interpretation of regulations would not have been kind to him.

In his defense, he was never dishonest. When you have to improvise, you almost inevitably find yourself slipping between rules. In fact, it's hard to imagine how else to build an organization the rules never foresaw.

The negative currents came to a head soon after John Kennedy's assassination. General H. K. Johnson, the Army's very conventional-minded new chief of staff (he took over from General Maxwell Taylor when Taylor became ambassador to South Vietnam), was one of those generals who simply did not understand the new breed of soldier. He was terribly bothered by what Yarborough was doing. He was just getting away with too much.

Johnson's solution: He had to show Bill Yarborough who was the boss. The Army had several layers between Yarborough and the President. In Johnson's view, Yarborough had ignored them.

Johnson was, in fact, a good and honorable man, and a hero — he'd been a Japanese prisoner during World War II. Before he moved, he visited Yarborough's s operation — and he left very impressed. 'I'll tell you,' Johnson told another general friend, 'he's put together a heck of a fighting team.'

Even so, Yarborough had to go. And besides, he had been on the job for four years. It was time to move on.

By then, Yarborough had gotten his second star, as major general, and he was sent to Korea, where he represented the UN command as the Senior Member of the Military Armistice Commission at Panmunjon. There he dealt with the North Korean and Chinese negotiators in a way that only his experience in Special Forces could have prepared him for. The job called not only for negotiating skills, but also for PSYOPs and propaganda skills. Most observers called him the toughest negotiator the Communists faced at Panmunjon.

From Korea, he served at the Pentagon, where his most important job was to run Army Intelligence (his official title was Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence). IIe was later (in 1966) promoted to Lieutenant General and given command of I Corps Group in Korea, and then in 1969 he moved on to Hawaii as Chief of Staff and Deputy Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Army, Pacific. He retired in 1971, after thirty-six years of active service.