Here's a sample:
• There shall be no confiscations whatever from the poor peasantry.
• If you borrow anything, return it.
• Replace all articles you damage.
• Pay for everything that you purchase.
• Be honest in all transactions with the peasants.
• Be courteous and polite to the people and help them when you can.
This meant practically, Yarborough continues, "that the ordinary rules soldiers were used to in the field did not apply. Civilians were not kicked out if they got in the way. A soldier was encouraged to share his last crust of bread with a peasant. If a door was taken off a house for a soldier to sleep on, the custom in China, it would be replaced before the troops left. The best place for a gun position might be in the center of a tomb. Even so, the Red Army would respect the people and place the gun somewhere else.
"In consequence, the Red Army swelled, while Chiang Kai-shek's forces lost the confidence of ever greater numbers of people."
Careful study of Mao, as well as other Communist authorities such as Che Guevara and the Vietnamese Vo Nguven Ciap and Truong Chinh, rounded out further the picture of multidimensional warfare. (It should be noted that such study was not exactly encouraged by "those guys at the Pentagon.") Their brand of irregular warfare, Yarborough's studies revealed, featured the following ingredients:
Patience to withstand protracted conflict. "Time works for us. Time will be our best strategist.
— Truong Chinh.
• Political awareness on the part of all ranks.
• Intensive wooing of all the "little people" to the side of the insurgent.
• The weakening of the enemy's morale by constant propaganda and terrorist harassment.
• Constant offensive action against enemy personnel and sensitive points, but only when tactical advantage is on the side of the irregulars.
• The avoidance of pitched battles with equal or superior forces.
• Defense only when it is essential to survival or to aid another element to withdraw.
• The consideration of the enemy's supply system as your own — making him haul the materiel to dumps, then seizing it from him.
• Constant striving to grow undercover forces into regular forces, ones capable of meeting the enemy on his own ground when the time and circumstances make victory certain.
With these studies as a guide, the new direction of Special Forces became clear.
If their job was to teach armed forces of a threatened nation how to combat a local insurgency, then their first task there was to demonstrate carefully thought out and executed military and nonmilitary actions that would allow those forces to win and maintain the support of the people. All of this would require the highest level of discipline on the part of not only the Green Berets but also the local forces. Such discipline would ensure a high level of conduct and moral behavior among the people in politically sensitive areas.
Though conventional soldiers don't normally concern themselves with the civilians who find themselves caught up in the tides of war, when it became obvious that the political and psychological fallout from this lack of concern could negate a brilliant battlefield victory, military leaders had to seriously adjust their thinking. In the U.S. Army, the Special Forces were the first to be taught this lesson officially and put it into practice as a principle of war.
Before long, Green Berets, using an American version of Mao's "Rules for Conduct," began to have a powerful impact on the lives of "little people" in Third World nations living in remote, often jungle, areas. Previously, such people did not much figure in the overall scheme of military maneuver. And for their part, the "little people tended to be suspicious of foreign soldiers in their midst. However, a combination of personal qualities and soldier skills soon began to increase cooperation and mutual trust, and these came to grow into admiration and friendship.
The Green Berets paid attention to all kinds of little things that other soldiers rarely cared about. For example, they helped a villager increase his water supplies by showing him a simple well-digging technique. They worked side by side with him to build a log bridge that would save a half-mile trudge around a swamp to reach his primitive patch of farmland. They showed him how to dig an irrigation ditch. They gave him seeds that grew into better vegetables than he had ever imagined possible. But strangest — and most heartwarming — of all, they paid attention to the villager as an individual. They could speak to him in his own dialect — maybe not fluently, but enough. And they shared the lives of the village people. They ate their food and drank their drink; they sat around their fires in the evening and chatted with them; they slept in huts like theirs.
Once friendship had been established, the military task of defending the village began. Green Berets traced village fortification outlines, and villagers placed row on row of sharpened stakes in the ground, angled toward approach routes. With Green Beret help, they dug protective shelters inside the village perimeters. They set up an alarm system, using an old tire rim or an empty artillery shell case, to warn of attack. During all this time, Green Berets worked alongside the villagers, and when attack came, they fought side by side with them.
Green Beret A-Detachments have always featured medical expertise — two highly trained medical specialists, with each of the remaining eight troopers cross-trained in medical skills.
The justification for this expertise came out of the original Special Forces mission, which was to organize and train guerrilla and insurgent forces. During their early days, guerrillas are exceedingly vulnerable. To protect themselves while they grow in strength, they must hide in difficult-to-reach areas such as jungles, swamps, or rugged mountains. Under such conditions, day-to-day survival is often a triumph in itself. If a guerrilla is sick or wounded, he has no outside help on which to rely.
Here is where Green Beret medical skills enter the picture. Green Beret medics could provide the medical knowledge to keep guerrillas going as functioning fighters.
Those skills were put to similar use in the villages, which were scarcely less isolated than the guerrilla bases, and provided even more reason for friendship and trust. Often for the first time, villagers had access to basic dental care, prenatal care, antibiotics, vaccinations, and nutrition and disease-prevention advice.
Training for these missions was intense, difficult, and as realistic as possible. Green Berets returning from foreign missions were sucked dry of information, and they helped train the men replacing them. Replicas of villages were constructed, accurate to the finest detail. In order to prepare for a mission, the Berets lived exactly as they expected to live in the field — food, shelter, work, language, everything.
As a training aid, Yarborough had a portion of a Vietnamese guerrilla village constructed at Fort Bragg, complete with artifacts, livestock, and escape tunnels. On one of his later trips to Vietnam, Yarborough was both amused and gratified to find a replica of his replica village being used by the Vietnamese army at their Infantry Training Center.
Bill Yarborough's devotion to intense Special Forces preparation also included uncommon (for the Army) attention to specialized personal equipment, such as clothing, medical kits, and rations. Predictably, the "big" Army monolith had a hard time handling this.
Bill Yarborough takes the story from here: