In 1964, the Special Forces mission was primarily focused on unconventional warfare (UW), and the chief threat was Soviet expansion in Europe. The entire Special Forces 10th Group was stationed in Europe, and money, weapons, and supplies had been cached in Eastern Europe and in the parts of Western Europe that might be overrun by the Soviets. In the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion, A-Detachments could be dropped behind the lines, or else they could hide and reappear after having been passed over by invading forces, then link up with friendly guerrillas and partisans. Their mission: sabotage, subversion, and organizing and equipping resistance movements. All of this required a high level of independence, analysis, and decision-making.
The Leadership Reaction Course was one of the ways they trained and tested for these qualities. It emphasized teamwork, imagination, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and, of course, leadership, and started with a physically and intellectually difficult puzzle. For instance, imagine a moat in which the water is eight or ten feet deep and the distance from one bank to the other is twelve feet. A team in training is provided with a fifty-five- gallon drum of gasoline and three pieces of timber, two of them ten feet long and the third eight feet. The team's job is to get the barrel (and themselves) across the moat using the materials provided. If the team has what it takes to become Special Forces soldiers, they'll work out a way to do it.
Another method of training was by sensory deprivation. Operating on their own behind the lines in enemy territory puts extraordinary demands on soldiers. One of the most difficult of these is the absence of emotional support. Friendships, trust, and confidence belong to a soldier's makeup as much as obedience, and readily available support provides a powerfully counterbalance to the uncertainty in a soldier's life. Many excellent soldiers stay up to speed primarily because they are praised. They need the certainty that comes from knowing somebody above them considers them to be a good and solid performer.
That is not the case with Special Forces soldiers, who must operate in environments in which every kind of support is minimal, absent, or transitory. Some soldiers have the spirit and will to handle that situation, but many others don't.
The Special Forces sensory-deprivation training program is designed to find who has what it takes. Soldiers are not told the goals or the standards they are expected to reach, or whether they're doing well or badly. A soldier might be told one day: 'You show up at this road junction at 0600 hours in the morning with your rucksack.' When he arrives, an NCO will be waiting with a piece of paper that contains his next instructions, which might be: 'You are to move from this point to this point' — say. twenty-five miles. And then he's left on his own, with no help other than a map and a compass, no idea of how long he has to get from point to point. When — or if — he shows up at the appointed location, his presence is simply acknowledged. He is not told whether he passed or failed, or if he made the journey in the correct time. Success in this exercise comes not only from accomplishing a difficult task, but from doing it totally out of his own internal resources.
Much of Special Forces training is conducted according to similar 'rules.'
In the meantime, the Special Forces soldier must also train for specific skills. As previously noted, in an A- Detachment, soldiers not only have to handle their own specialty, but be prepared to handle everyone else's.
When Stiner met the A-Detachment that he was to command for the next eight months, he was impressed. The members of his detachment were all professional Special Forces soldiers with considerable experience. Most were years older than Stiner, and maybe half were Lodge Act volunteers originally from Eastern European countries. They were already proficient in unconventional and covert warfare and spoke one or two other languages. At the same time, they were more or less new to one another, having been reassigned within the Special Forces following the forming of the 3rd Group, and so had not trained together as an A-Detachment. During the weeks Stiner was taking the Q Course, his A-Detachment was learning what it needed to know to function as a group.
In the '60s, everyone in an A-Detachment was trained in the following skills:
Each soldier had to be an expert marksman on his individual weapon (a pistol) and his M-16 rifle, and be familiar with weapons, such as AK-47s, that he might encounter in the part of the world in which he might be employed. He had to be able to shoot them with reasonable accuracy, and to take them apart and maintain them. In the case of larger weapons such as mortars and machine guns, he had to be able to emplace and employ them properly so they could provide the protection and support they were designed to give.
Each soldier was trained in explosives. He learned the kind of charge, the shape, and the placement for bringing down a bridge or power lines, for cratering charges or breaching, for getting inside a sealed and defended building with the minimum damage to the Structure or to hostages who may be inside. If he had no explosives of his own, he was taught how to obtain what he needed to make them from local sources.
Each soldier received communications training — sending and receiving Morse code, and code writing. If a team was actually working behind enemy lines, they'd only come up on the radio at preappointed times every day or two, when the communications sergeant would get up on his telegraph to send his message. Everyone on the team, however, was capable of operating any kind of communications gear they might be using.
Each soldier received advanced first-aid training.
Each soldier learned how to conduct clandestine and covert operations; how to establish intelligence nets and escape and evasion nets; how to conduct resupply operations at night; how to set up a field for landing airplanes and bring them in, and how to set up parachute drop zones. He learned clandestine infiltration and exfiltration techniques, land navigation, and special (or deep) reconnaissance, in which he would operate in total stealth, in order to put eyes directly on anything an enemy might not want him to see. Often this meant living for days in hide sites — holes in the ground a team would dig and then cover over with dirt, branches, or other concealment.
Each soldier was provided with a working knowledge of the principal language in his group's area of focus — German, say, for members of the 10th Group in Europe, or Swahili for the 3rd Group. Later, language proficiency was increased enormously, and Special Forces soldiers were expected to devote as long as six months or a year, full-time, to attaining fluency in their language. In 1964, fluency was not required, but soldiers were expected to communicate in a simple and rudimentary way.
Similarly, each soldier was provided with cultural training, as appropriate, so that when he went into a country, he knew how to behave in ways that would win friends and not alienate the people he was there to help, and thus harm the mission.
Finally, although each A-Detachment commander had an operations sergeant and a weapons sergeant, it was an officer's responsibility to know indirect fire support — artillery fire and mortar fire — and how to employ it most accurately and effectively. He had to know how to plan defensive fires, or call in air or naval gunfire, if these ever became necessary.
Every Q Course is a mixture of classroom instruction and field training, but with a heavy overbalance toward the field. For Carl Stiner and those fifty or so other officers who were called in with him, it was — once again — an accelerated program, seven weeks rather than the more normal ten. Today the Q Course is even longer.
In the '60s, most classes were conducted at the Special Forces headquarters complex in the Smoke Bomb Hill area of Fort Bragg, in rickety World War II — vintage converted weatherboard barracks or, less frequently, in smaller single-story orderly-room-type buildings. Air-conditioning was not even a dream. Guys didn't go there expecting comfort.
After a week of primary instruction, everyone moved to the field for another couple of weeks to practice the techniques studied in the classroom. This sequence was the norm throughout the course.
Field instruction and practice were conducted in training areas on Fort Bragg and neighboring Camp MacKall, and in the Uwharric National Forest fifty miles away in western North Carolina. In later years, Camp MacKall was transformed into a well-equipped training facility for Special Forces; but in those days, the Camp MacKall training facility did not exist, and there was nothing out there except the remains of a World War II training airfield for the gliders of the 82nd Airborne Division and the concrete foundations of torn-down buildings.
Finally, all the instruction and training were brought together in a major exercise, at the time called Gobbler Woods, and now called Robin Sage, in the Uwharrie National Forest area.
Gobbler Woods worked like this: The student-officers would be formed up into simulated A-Detachments deployed to a fictional country (often, for the sake of the game, called Pineland). There they were expected to contact indigenous Pineland natives and to turn them into guerrillas. These were normally played by soldiers from support units at Fort Bragg (maybe 250 of them), who dressed and acted like civilians.
The A-Detachment's job was to work with the guerrilla chief (who always made it a point to be difficult),
