Nor was it easy to go into somebody else's home and set their house in order. Sovereign states consider internal subversion a very touchy matter. They are not eager to give foreigners access to the mechanisms that support it. In fact, the governments of these states are often themselves diseased. The cure proposed by the revolutionaries may well be the wrong cure, yet their cause may be just.
This meant that if American Special Forces were going to do any good at all in a counterinsurgency situation, they would have to be able to walk a very thin and risky line. They would have to act toward the local government with great care and finesse, based on the direction they'd been given by their own commanders and government, while developing more than a skin-deep rapport with the native peoples.
In view of this very sensitive psychological and political environment, it became evident to Bill Yarborough that the criteria for Special Forces would have to include far more than just expertise in guerrilla warfare. Personal character became extremely important — the judgment, maturity, self-discipline, and ability to work harmoniously with people who were culturally very different from Americans.
What kind of soldier operates effectively in such an environment?
First of all — and this is as true now as it was in 1961—it is one who thinks in ways that conventional soldiers are not expected to. Like all soldiers, Special Forces men work under a chain of command, but unlike the others, they may not always have direct or even regular communication with their superiors. That means that at times they need to act on their own, which means they inevitably make decisions on their own — though based, it is hoped, on a clear understanding of their commanders' and their nation's intent. At times these decisions have an impact far greater than those that more conventional soldiers may be called on to make. They may not only radically change lives or lead to deaths, they may also affect policy decisions going all the way up the chain of command to the President.
At the same time, tough problems come up that only Special Forces soldiers can solve. Many of these problems are practical — a Special Forces soldier might be required to deliver babies, extract teeth, or design a bridge and supervise its construction. Others are psychological — Special Forces soldiers may well need to persuade, cajole, or manipulate a not-very-friendly local leader to work for goals that may be in the United States' interest but not obviously in his. Either way, the problems are typically unexpected, complex, and open-ended, and there is no guarantee of help from above.
In addition, Special Forces soldiers cannot focus their individual tactics, techniques, capabilities, and thinking on a few specifics. They can't simply rely on well-honed soldier skills. They are taught, and arc expected to think, in the broadest terms. When they work a problem, they are not merely trying to solve it in the best way for their team but in the best way for the United States. They need to be able to see and handle such problems in all their complexity.
Soldiers are called "special" in part because they can be trusted to make such decisions.
Empowered though he was by the President to make those soldiers, Bill Yarborough had a big job ahead of him. He had to take the "old" Special Forces and turn it into the "new" Special Forces — and not all of the "old" wanted to become "new." He had to grow the small and marginal outfit into a force of significant size with greatly increased output, yet bring into the force the very best recruits. This meant "raiding" the rest of the Army for people nobody in the rest of the Army was willing to give up (he was empowered to do so, but at the cost of much resentment). He had to weed out those who did not make the mark, while educating and training to the very highest standards the picked and tested men who remained, and then he had to fill these men, individually and collectively, with pride and self-esteem. Meanwhile, he had to study the nature of the enemy and the ways others had learned to combat such an enemy; he had to do it to a depth rarely — if ever — accomplished by a military organization; and he had to find ways to make his Special Forces not just learn these insights, but incorporate them into their blood and sinews. And finally, he had to continue to sell his always fragile and vulnerable Special Forces to the "big" Army and to the American people.
A NEW KIND OF FIGHTING FORCE
Bill Yarborough faced a big job, but first he had to clean house — which involved raising the bar.
Not long after he took over Special Forces in 1961, Yarborough came to realize that a significant portion of the SF old-timers did not measure up to the standards his new fighting force required. These old guys were a rough lot — fire-breathers and flame-spouters. They were extraordinary soldiers, but not all of them could be counted on to operate well in politically and psychologically sensitive situations.
"The ones 1 was especially anxious not to retain in the Green Berets," Yarborough remarks, "were the 'old jockstrap commandos,' the Ranger types. And I must say there were considerable numbers of those in Special Forces.
"I'd fought with Rangers during World War 11, and I had known and admired them for their best qualities: They were gallant 'bloodletters.' They were fighting machines. They were anything but diplomats, and rejected any suggestion that they ought to be. And they paid little attention to what we might call the more humane qualities, like compassion, pity, and mercy. If such things suited the occasion, all right; but if they didn't, that was all right, too. They were there to cut a swath. Wherever you turned the Rangers and commandos loose, boy, there they would go. There wasn't any question about it.
"Well, some of my Army colleagues in key positions in the Department of the Army continue to look upon Special Forces as a kind of commando. They have never been able to understand why we had to get rid of so many of the old jockstrap guys, or why later we had to have such a high attrition rate in the Qualification Course. They couldn't understand the attrition rates for judgment, or for inability to understand humanity…. A guy who wouldn't get down on his belly alongside a Montagnard and show him the sight picture [in aiming a weapon] was no use to me.
"We continually got called to task about our high attrition rate, but as long as I had anything to do about it, we didn't bend one inch, and I would back to the limit every man who came out of that cauldron, out of that system."
Some of the old SF guys were a rough lot off-duty as well as on — and that presented Yarborough with yet more problems.
Because Special Forces was a marginal outfit where promotions were scarce, the best officers tended to avoid the assignment if they could. In those days, the level of SF training for officers was also low; the Q Course, for example, could be waived for field-grade officers, and often was.
For various reasons, the future for good Special Forces NCOs was brighter, and NCO quality tended to be higher. The NCOs' expertise also tended to be high (many of them were World War II and/or Korea veterans with considerable experience in the field; most had been shot at), and Yarborough wanted to make the most of their expertise in teaching his younger soldiers. But they also tended to act as though they had carte blanche to do things pretty much as they pleased. They tended to run a bit wild when they were out there with the younger guys.
They had to be reined in.
The officers, though, were a bigger problem. There were outstanding exceptions, but too many officers looked at the assignment as a place to park and have macho fun — drinking, wild parties, womanizing, playing around with other guys wives.
That had to stop.
Early on in his command, Yarborough took his officers — captain and higher — out into the pine woods on the base and told them straight what he expected of them. He was not gentle.