look bad.
Well, we were sitting in the back of the room, while the big chiefs — the Corps commanding general, his G-3 and G-2, and the Allied commanders participating in REFORGER — were up front on a kind of stage looking at us get painted as black sheep. It didn't sit well with us.
So REFORGER continued down the road, and we looked like we were just cooling our heels; but what we really did was select one of the division headquarters. 'Before the exercise is over, we are going to destroy the division headquarters,' we promised ourselves. And then we prepared and deployed a small reconnaissance team from one of the A- Detachments to check out the operational area.
The team, which wore civilian clothes and spoke fluent German, made the initial preparation by studying the operational area and deciding on individual cover stories, in case they were stopped by German authorities or in some way became involved with American military units. To the Germans, they were Americans on leave and carried the proper documents. To the Americans, they were local Germans, and carried authentic- appearing German documents.
The division field CP was the focus of the operation, with the operations center, communications center, and computer center the primary items of interest.
The strike team then remained in isolation /mission preparation at Bad Tolz and planned/rehearsed, according to the information they were receiving from the recon team. This primarily focused on movement by helicopter, rappelling from the helicopter with operational equipment, movement to the objective area, linkup with the recon team, attacking the division CP, movement out of the area, and pickup by helicopter in an isolated area. Again, we also rehearsed snipers to cover the attack and withdrawal from the target.
Finally, the general thought he'd delayed us long enough to keep us from running an exercise against him or one of his units. So eighteen hours before the end of the exercise, he okayed us to run operations. What he didn't know was that we already had the operations set up and cut.
At that time there were storms all over Germany, but we flew the helicopters carrying the strike teams in and out of them, putting the teams about five miles away from the division headquarters. It was all a piece of cake; we came straight through: the command post, the operations center. In fact, the SF guys were taking the maps down off the wall and rolling them up when the assistant division commander came in. Here's this general standing there with a fish-out-of-water look on his face, and here are these three or four other guys, all in black paint and balaclavas, dismantling his CP.
'Well, who are you?' he asked.
'We're Special Forces,' they said. 'We're destroying your division headquarters.' And then one of them turned around and shot him with a blank and said, 'And, General you're supposed to fall down on the floor, becau-se you're dead.'
This next story comes from a strike team member at a nuclear weapons site we'd also decided to take out. 'You know,' he recounts, 'there was this big ol' female lieutenant — she was really pissed off. She was just going wild at the idea that we would take down her little kingdom. I thought we were going to have to handcuff her before we finished. In fact, we did handcuff her. We not only handcuffed, her, we handcuffed her dog — a big German shepherd. We duct-taped his muzzle. I'm sure even today that lady still hates us, because, one, we got in her installation, and, two, we did what we were there to do.'
When it was all over, we didn't actually do anything to the sites. We just went in, left them a card that said: 'We would have destroyed you, ' and left.
At the debriefing, the commander didn't like what he was hearing — at least at first; but as the debrief continued, he began to get very interested and to participate with some energy, particularly when he realized we were just doing what we had been instructed to do by USAREUR and were not laughing at him or his unit.
'We could have done whatever we wanted to do,' we told him. 'We took your CP and weapons sites. We passed through the outside security force like butter, and we took it all down so quickly that we didn't set the alarms off; and that gave us a window of time to do whatever we wanted.'
We then submitted a detailed report to USAREUR, as required by our instructions, and they used the report to make improvements in their operations for real-world operations.
Small wonder that there was friction. Playing 'Gotcha' made the SF guys feel good — and they were doing what they were trained to do — but it's hard to blame the 'big' Army for not welcoming them as brothers.
As a result, Special Forces eventually became a bill payer for the rest of the Army. Pentagon finances tend to be a zero-sum game: Your gain is my loss — a battalion less for me, a battalion more for you. Those who have power, influence, or backers at the Pentagon are happier with their budget than those who are seen as marginal or out of fashion. That was the Special Forces.
When the cutbacks first began to hit Special Forces in the early '70s, they were assigned few real-world missions outside the United States, despite the fact that 'slow-burn' wars, both Communist- and non-Communist- inspired, continued to fester in the Third World. So the Special Forces had to find ways to keep themselves occupied. Major General Hank Emerson, the SF commander, conducted benign real-world SF-type missions inside the United States — missions that had the added benefit of providing needed services to poor and isolated communities, migrant farm workers, prison inmates, and especially to American Indians.
Green Berets parachuted into Arizona and linked up with Indians at Supai. Together they built a bridge across Havasu Creek, which allowed the Indians to take their farm machinery across the creek and into their fields. Later, Green Beret veterinarians checked Indian livestock for disease, gave inoculations, and offered classes in animal care.
Among the Seminoles, Green Berets taught local officers law-enforcement techniques; gave written and spoken English classes for Seminole children and adults; provided instructional programs dealing with drug and alcohol abuse, first aid, and nutrition; and provided increased health and dental services. They provided similar services for the Cheyenne and other native peoples.
None of this was their 'real' mission, but the training allowed the much weakened and reduced Special Forces to keep themselves tuned up and ready for when the call came again.
An example of the kind of challenge they faced came in 1982. The 5th SF Group at Fort Bragg had been given the assignment to support the recently created Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) — which two years later became CENTCOM — in its planning for Southwest Asia. Iran was then a major focus. According to the conventional wisdom, the Soviets could possibly roll down through Iran, grab its warm-water ports, and of course, its oil, thus affording them the strategic position to control the flow of all oil out of the Cuff. The RDJTF's mission was to make sure that did not happen.
Operating in Southwest Asia meant deserts, of course, but as a consequence of the chaos after Vietnam, no one in Special Forces had desert training.
Jim Cuest, then the 5th Group commander, tells the story:
The 5th was a big group. In 1982, we had fifty-four A-Detachments, but our entire training budget was only $350,000. Major General Joe Lutz, the commander of the JFK Center, told me, 'I want you to train your group to go to war in the desert.'
'Yes, sir,' I said. 'I'll do that.'
But when I started checking into the realities of desert training, I realized that nobody in SF had actually trained there. I told General Lutz that we needed a site in the desert where we could start training the troops.
'We don't have any money for that,' he told me. 'But go ahead and do it, and we'll find the money somehow.' And he did.
So we got started.
I sent a major and a couple of captains out west, and they found a post near Fort Hauchucha, Arizona, near Tombstone, where the local desert matched up pretty closely with the deserts in the Middle East; it
