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Adventures in Special Forces

“Old soldiers never die. They just fade away,” according to Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Nah, old soldiers — and old sailors, airmen and Marines, too — keep going, and their memories never fade, especially memories of their transition from young men to warriors.

When he qualified for Officer Candidate School, which would require an extension, he remembers someone saying, “There’s a mule they keep in this camp for parades. He gets more respect than a second lieutenant. Eats better, too.” But turning down a shot at a commission isn’t good for a career, even a short one.

Fitzgerald solved the problem by volunteering to join a new outfit, one intended to be the “most elite fighting force in the world.” One of his buddies promised it would be weeks and weeks before he was killed.

First, he went to Fort Benning, Ga., where he jumped out of airplanes and earned the right to wear bloused boots with his Class A’s. But the Special Forces training was different. First, nobody pulled rank. If one soldier screwed up, the team shared the blame.

His accounts of a monthlong survival exercise and an even longer exercise in harassing an enemy from behind its lines are dandies.

The defenders in both cases were members of the elite 82nd Airborne Division, but they were unprepared for the utterly unorthodox tactics of the fit, highly motivated and innovative Special Forces.

They fell from the sky, hid, attacked and hauled ass. They lived on the run, sometimes among moonshiners whom they were allowed to recruit to fight against forces representing the government — not a hard sell. They spent enough time in a rattlesnake den for one guy to make half a dozen belts. Sleep, if any, was done on the run or standing up. Often they kept going until they were giddy.

“Giddy” must been the reason one of them came up with the idea of stealing a truck filled with live chickens for a Sunday dinner. The story is so preposterous it has to be true, especially the naked truck driver who chased his truck of clucking chicks as they pulled away. The survival exercise was designed to keep them on the run, and several teams dispersed over a wide area were required to search for provisions dropped by parachute each day. Any team that didn’t find theirs went hungry. One guy on Fitzgerald’s team analyzed the drop pattern and figured out in advance where each day’s cache of food would be placed. So they spent the exercise relaxing near a lake and simply walked to their provisions and back to the lake. .

The leaders knew something was wrong. When questioned, his group admitted they had figured out the pattern and taken advantage of it. They were commended: Improvisation was expected from Special Forces. And that’s the way it was — and, I suspect, as it should be.

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Bank’s Bandits: The Untold Story of the Original Green Berets By Ed Fitzgerald. Self-published. $20.95

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Keith Taylor retired from the Navy in 1970 and can be reached at KRTaylorxyz@aol.com.