cancer.
I went to see him, explained who I was, and told him about the training exercise that was about to take place. Though he'd heard of it, he told me, he hadn't participated in the past. I also told him that I grew up on a farm in Tennessee and was well aware of the challenges he was facing working a farm and taking care of a sick wife.
'In a couple of days,' I said, 'I'm going to have about 150 soldiers, all wearing civilian clothes, who're going to serve as my guerrillas. I'll be glad to pick four or five farm-raised boys out of this group and let them live and work with you. You can let them bunk in chicken houses, or the dairy barn, or wherever you want them, and they are yours to work to help bring in the crops and to help with the milking, or whatever.
'All I ask is for you to protect them if the counterinsurgency force' — the 101st Airborne, in this case —'comes around trying to police up my guerrillas. If they do, I just want you to say, 'I don't know anything about that. I don't fool with these things. And I don't want you running over my fields with your trucks.
'All I ask in return is for you to let me use one of your trucks, maybe a couple of nights a week, to haul fifteen or twenty of my guerrillas over to simulate blowing up a bridge or some similar target.'
'That's fine with me,' he told me. 'And I appreciate very much the help.'
'That's wonderful, I said. 'But how about talking to some of your friends to see if some of them also need some help?'
He told me he'd do that, and he did.
I then reminded him about how important it was for us to trust each other. 'If we don't,' I said, 'we stand to lose all of our guerrillas and then we won't be able to help you or your friends.'
He told me he understood that, and he did.
And so, with this farmer's help, I was able to establish other contacts that ultimately became a key part of my infrastructure throughout the community.
I also contacted local pastors to find out who in their congregations might need some help, and they offered me good sources that provided protection and support for small groups of my guerrillas.
It's amazing how you can organize people for our kinds of causes. They all want to get in there and support — sometimes more than you really want. I USUALLY brought my guerrillas out a week before the Special Forces students jumped in, in order to allow time for blending with the local people and getting our operating base set up properly. On the day they arrived, I selected those who'd be going out to work for and live with the contacts I'd made, like the dairy farmer.
But before they did that, I laid down the law about standards, principles, and conduct: 'There is to be absolute integrity,' I told them. 'Respect for the human dignity of each and every person; respect for property; no abuse (verbal or otherwise); no hanky-panky; and no incidents that would degrade your morality and our ability to live and operate among the people. We are here to help them, and they will help us if we do. We cannot survive without their protection and support. One bad incident from you, and you are gone — and so is your career. And by the way, no alcohol!'
I would also tell them, 'Co to church, sing in the choir if you can, and get to know everybody in that church. If you blend into that community and cause them to respect you, they will protect you and we'll have their cooperation in everything we do.'
1 always tried to put my guerrillas in key parts of the community. They and the people that support them were my intelligence network. That way I always knew what was going on all over the county.
A couple of days before the A-Detachment was to jump in, my guerrillas would come together in order to organize our 'base camp' and develop plans for the linkup and reception of the A-Detachment. There was also a rehearsal for securing the drop zone.
After the jump, the assistant guerrilla chief (a Special Forces NCO) usually made the linkup and guided the detachment to the base camp. Once there, they were told they would meet the guerrilla chief the next morning. The A-Detachment spent the rest of the night in the base camp, usually guarded by the guerrillas.
At the morning meeting, which usually took about an hour, the guerrilla chief always played hardball. He made his initial demands as tough as he could, so it would be close to impossible for the A-Detachment commander to meet them. We did this in order to evaluate the A-Detachment commander's ability to establish rapport and gain enough of the confidence of the guerrilla chief to accomplish the mission.
After the meeting, the guerrilla chief presented a list of the supplies and materials he wanted and gave a rundown of the capabilities of his force and the training assistance they needed.
The A-Detachment commander, having done his homework during the detachment's isolation back at Bragg, then presented his training plan for the guerrillas.
The initial phase of formal training usually started the next morning. While this was under way, the A- Detachment assessed and validated the training readiness of the 'G' (guerrilla) force for conducting operations. Meanwhile, the detachment commander and the guerrilla chief formulated an operation plan together, with specific targets for accomplishing the overall strategic objective.
In addition to the tactical aspects of the plan, psychological operations and civil affairs played a vital role to ensure the support of the people. The entire effort
Of course, I had already started civil affairs work within the community by providing selected guerrillas to work with people like the dairy farmer whose wife had cancer. But more could be done — such as medical assistance missions, for example, where our medic treated minor illnesses in the more remote parts of the county where medical help was scarce. We also had guerrillas (free labor) clean up playgrounds and cemeteries and the like. And to widen and strengthen my intelligence net and base of support, I provided guerrillas (in pairs) to the city and county maintenance departments.
The A-Detachment itself had been augmented with a psychological operations specialist, who (among other things) could produce leaflets (though in a very rudimentary way compared with what we can do today). Nevertheless, we produced and distributed leaflets designed to degrade the will, loyalty, and combat effectiveness of the counterinsurgency force, and to bolster and widen our support among the people.
We distributed our leaflets by airdrop at night, or by hand; and they were amazingly effective, especially in inhibiting the counterinsurgency force. For example, landowners and farmers would prevent them from using or even crossing their land — while at the same time harboring us and providing support.
1 guess this was the beginning of my understanding of the real power of psychological operations. If you can influence and control people's minds, then you are well on the way to winning, while keeping the loss of lives to a minimum.
By the end of the first week, the training of the guerrillas was going well, and they were hitting one point target (a bridge, for instance) each night. Meanwhile, local farmers, bread-delivery distributors, and the county maintenance department were providing trucks for our transportation — and were even scouting some targets for us. By the end of the second week, the guerrillas had progressed to platoon-size (thirty to forty men) raids on larger targets. By the third and final week, they were making even larger raids.
Throughout all this activity (while operating in a community we had never known before), we didn't lose a single man to the counterinsurgency force — although they chased us day and night. Nor did we have a single bad incident from either our A-Detachment soldiers or the guerrilla force. Nobody did anything we would not be proud of.
As a result of our operations, the leftist government of Pincland was overthrown and replaced by a democracy.
Was it now time for the A-Detachment to go home? Not quite yet.
An important aspect of unconventional warfare is bringing it to closure. Quite simply, no new government can exist for long without the support of the force that helped to bring it to power, nor can they risk having a formidable armed band running around out of control. The best way to deal with these possibilities was for our guys to work out a plan to disarm and disband the 'G' force. And they had to do it before they could go home. (In real life, the smoothness of this operation usually depended on concessions made by the new government to the guerrilla leader.)
And so ended the Q Course of 1964. I'm proud to say that all the SF students who participated earned the 'flash' that made them fully qualified as Green Berets.
