The Guerrilla Factory: The Making of Special Forces Officers, the Green Berets by Tony Schwalm

Author:Tony Schwalm [Schwalm, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2012-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

DAY TWO OF ROBIN SAGE started cold, with the sun offering little in the way of warmth as the light filtered through the leafless trees. My legs cramped from the slightest contraction. Ramos was the acting team sergeant, and he went from man to man, checking with each one. If the intent of the monster rucksack movement had been to make one of us quit, it had the opposite effect. The team was now as tight as any group of students could possibly get. With camaraderie established, we had one mission and one mission only until we achieved success: build rapport.

From link-up to the first combat operation, everything we did with the guerrillas was about building rapport. “I’m from the U.S. government, and I’m here to help.” With that said, expecting big smiles and spontaneous celebration from the indigenous population was not part of this training scenario. Any student preoccupied with thinking about how much fun and adventure could be had, as a barrel-chested freedom fighter running around the world with a license to kill, now understood how reality falls short of fantasy. Trigger-pulling skills were now secondary. Our objective as a team was to win friends and influence combat operations as we trained and equipped our guerrillas to bleed resources from the occupiers. Like armed Dale Carnegies, not James Bonds, we had to persuade the Pineland guerrillas that their fight was our fight. They had to accept us, and they would only accept us if our words and deeds resonated true, legitimate. The game Jordan had devised to test us in this effort was diabolical.

Sometime that morning, a guerrilla came to me and said the G chief needed to see our medics. The pair grabbed their empty rifles and aid bags, about twenty pounds apiece, and headed to the blazing fire. A few hours after their departure, a guerrilla brought us the bag with the ammo and maps, but he offered no explanation as to why the items had been returned.

I guessed our medics were doing something right.

While the rest of us sat in our perimeter, we discussed everything that had passed over the last twenty-four hours and looked for meaning in our rejection by the guerrillas like jilted lovers.

“What was that about?” was the general question on our minds. None of us had ever heard of a day-long infiltration on foot over a distance that long. I kept asking myself if I had done the right thing. What was the right response to surrendering our ammo? Should I have said, “No, we’re not walking any farther until we’ve rested”? While my legs and feet would have gladly greeted such a pronouncement, I remembered the team that had refused to do the telephone-pole drill in SFAS only to be told that they were out of the course if they didn’t get their asses in gear and start hauling logs.

Every hour or so, one of the medics would come to our circle and give us an update on what was happening.

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