The event was long remembered as Yarborough's "Talk in the Woods."
"As long as I'm in charge of Special Forces," he told them, "the rules are going to change. There'll be a new start.
"First, there will be no womanizing, no drunkenness, no wild parties, no adultery. There'll be no troublemakers. No wild men. From now on all that stuff is out — and there will be no deviations. There will be moral standards, there will be disciplinary standards, there will be appearance standards.
"Second, all officers will go through the Q Course. No exceptions. No matter what his rank.
"Third, everything I'm saying applies to all ranks. No exceptions. So you're going to make it all clear to every one of your NCOs.
"Finally, if you don't like it, you can deal with it in two ways. You can end your career. Or you can come to my office and request to be transferred out. Otherwise, if you want to stay in this unit, there will be big changes."
The worst got out. The best stayed. And Yarborough moved on to the real work that remained.
Meanwhile, Special Forces officers and NCOs began to find promotions coming their way. If you got into Special Forces, and you could cut it, you could expect to get promoted very quickly and look forward to a long Army career, if you wanted it.
So Special Forces stopped being the end of the road for wild men, misfits, and has-beens. It became the place you wanted to be. It was the place where the action was.
Soon after the Kennedy administration had identified "counterinsurgency" as an official instrument of United States foreign policy, it became clear that some of the major weapon systems needed for counterinsurgency would have to be forged from among the resources specific to the behavioral and social sciences — psychology, anthropology, political science, economics, history, and international relations. The problem would be to integrate these disciplines with more direct military functions to produce an effective instrument in the murky environment of actual counterinsurgency campaigns.
The Special Warfare Center had to explore this new field.
Bill Yarborough was himself a scholar and an intellectual, and his experience in intelligence and counterintelligence had taught him a great deal about how to go about understanding ones adversaries (and one's friends). He knew where and how to look for sources of knowledge and inspiration.
He went first to Roger Hilsman, who had already played a major role at the State Department and White House in promoting the concept of counterinsurgency and the convoluted world of irregular warfare. Hilsman came down to the Special Warfare Center on several occasions, and provided Yarborough and his staff and students with background information and insights.
Yarborough and his staff also studied positive and negative examples: Positive in the case of the British, whose triumph in Malaya pointed the way toward a workable counterinsurgency doctrine — a combination of sophistication about native cultures and a willingness to be uncompromisingly brutal in infiltrating local insurgencies and then uprooting them from the people. Negative in the case of the French defeat in Indochina and their phony victory in Algeria.
Others who regularly gave him counsel included experts like Charles M. Thayer, the head of the U.S. military mission to Yugoslavia during World War II and who later headed the Voice of America; Dr. Jay Zawodny, then professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who had fought with the Polish underground in Warsaw during the Second World War and later authored numerous works on irregular warfare and psychological operations; and several others of equal expertise.
Some of the sources consulted and studied were controversial. Yarborough was not afraid to shock his students. Conventional thinking was not going to get the job done.
The left-leaning French soldier-writer Bernard Fall, for example, was a frequent lecturer at the Special Warfare School's irregular warfare classes. The author of the now classic history of the French war in Indochina, Street Without Joy, which was used as a text at the school, Fall was sharp-tongued, abrasive, and contemptuous of American efforts in Southeast Asia, and more often than not sparked heated reactions from his soldier audiences. "On his side,"Yarborough writes, "were facts, figures, history, and personal experience. On the students' side were usually emotional distress stemming from hurt pride and an inadequate database."
Eventually, Fall's contempt for American policy in Vietnam brought his appearances at Fort Bragg to the attention of "those guys there in the Pentagon." This brought Yarborough a telephone call from Washington: "The Frenchman Bernard Fall is no longer welcome at the Special Warfare School," he was told. But when Yarborough demanded that this order be put in writing, the demand was withdrawn, and Fall's catalytic presence continued to shake up the young Green Berets at the school.
Another controversial source of insight on irregular warfare was a larger-than-life Air Force colonel named Edward Lansdale — a real-world character who had seemingly leapt out of a spy novel. His story, in fact, inspired more than one novelist; he was the model for Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Lederer and Burdick's The Ugly American (their character also contains elements of Roger Hilsman). Though controversial — his conduct in Vietnam was questionable — his accomplishments were real. During the '50s, Lansdale was loaned to the CIA and assigned to the Philippines, where he gave the Agency its greatest victory against Communist insurgents there, called the Huks.
He did this in several ways. First, he promoted an undeniably great man, Ramon Magsaysay, as an alternative to the Communists. Magsaysay, arguably the Washington and Lincoln of the Philippines, became president of that country, but was killed in an air crash after too short a time in office. Second, Lansdale had a kind of mad genius for the art of what later became known as "black" psychological operations — lies that damage an enemy. For example, he had the rumor spread in rural villages that men with evil in their hearts would be food for the local vampire. He then had his people drain the blood out of a dead Huk, punch holes in his neck, and leave him in the middle of a well-traveled road. Word got around very quickly that the Huks were vampire bait. But third, and most important for Bill Yarborough's delvings into the heart of irregular and political warfare, "Ed Lansdale made me understand," he writes, "the relationship between what we clumsily call Civic Action and the ability of a regular army to function among the people. This insight was responsible to a great degree for the effectiveness of the counterinsurgency operation in the Philippines. It made the people feel that the military were not oppressors. Rather, the man in uniform represented the government; and, if they were eager to assist and help the people, then the government must be of the same frame of mind." The good acts of the men in uniform argued to the benevolence, right intentions, and honor of the government.
"Later on in my research, he continues, "I discovered that Ed Lansdale was not the author of this concept… but Mao Tse-tung. Mao was the greatest modern proponent of this philosophy.
"In studying Mao's campaigns leading to the expulsion of Chiang Kai-shek from mainland China, I found that, in the beginning, the Nationalist armies were very much greater numerically than the Communist forces. But as Mao withdrew along the route of his long march, his soldiers treated people very generously and kindly, and with great respect. And so instead of fleeing to get out of the way of the Communists, in the normal way of civilians and armies, the people welcomed them.
"This behavior goes back to Mao's Nine Rules of Conduct, which his Red Army troops were made to memorize (they were even set to music and sung daily). These rules were strictly enforced. A man who violated them was severely punished, perhaps executed."