At the lineup, Stiner was assigned to A Company of the recently activated (because of the Vietnam buildup) 3rd Special Forces Group, and told to check in with the company XO, a diminutive major by the name of LeBlanc, who was wearing — Stiner couldn't help but notice — a Bowie knife strapped to his leg.
When Stiner walked smartly into LeBlanc's office, the major looked up and frowned. Stiner was wearing the standard flat-topped green service hat with a bill, and the XO wasn't pleased. "That will never do," he announced. "But I'll get you straightened out before you see the old man.
"The first thing you are to do is get that flying saucer thing off of your head, and don't let me see it back on your head again as long as you are in this outfit. For if you do, I'll have to stick it where the sun doesn't shine.
"What you're going to do is go down to the supply room and draw you two berets. Understand you're not authorized to wear the flash yet." The flash was his unit colors, and showed he was a real Green Beret. "But you can wear the chocolate bar," a little bar that represented the colors of what would be in the big flash when he earned it. "You'll wear that until you arc Prefix Three-qualified," which meant he had successfully passed the Special Forces Qualifying Course (called Q Course). This normally took ten weeks.
From there, the XO got down to the real business at hand. "What you're here for is you're going to be an A-Detachment commander. That means two things are imperative. One is you've got to learn to send and receive Morse code at the rate of six words a minute. If you can get faster, that's better, but six is the minimum. And you will have to take your turn on the radio and the generator just like each member of the team does."
Though a captain commanding a conventional unit — normally a company of 100-plus men — is expected to be proficient on such equipment as the radio, he is not expected to be an operator in the field. Special Forces A-Detachment captains are different. There are only twelve people on the team, and because there's only so much twelve people can do, especially when they are miles behind enemy lines, everybody has to take a turn at many of the jobs, with no discrimination because of rank. The primary means of field communication in the early '60s was by Morse code on ancient ANGRA-109 radios (pronounced "Angry"). These were powered by a heavy, hand-cranked generator (there were no batteries), and it took two men to operate them. One man strapped the key to his leg so he could send and receive, while the other one sat nearby and cranked the generator.
LeBlanc went on: "The second imperative is that you have to learn the Last Rites of the religion of every man in your detachment, because there won't be chaplains with you most of the time, and you'll have to be able to do them. You can expect there'll be three or four religions and beliefs in your twelve-man detachment, twelve counting yourself."
And that was the extent of his guidance.
"Now go down and get your equipment."
Next came the "old man," the company commander, Lieutenant Colonel Perry. Stiner made sure he was wearing the green beret by then.
"When was the last time you jumped?" Perry asked.
All Special Forces soldiers had to be parachute-qualified. Some obtained the qualification after joining Special Forces, while a few others might not have jumped in some time when they arrived at Fort Bragg.
"It's been about six years," Stiner answered.
"Well, we've got a different kind of parachute now than you used, so you'll have to have a little refresher training. We've also got a policy around here: Your first jump is usually at night — and you will enjoy jumping at night. It's the closest thing to going to bed with your wife."
And then, "The last thing you need to know is we get together every Friday afternoon at four o'clock for happy hour. You're expected to bring your wife; and you're expected to have a 3rd Special Forces Group mug — which I just happen to sell for three dollars." In fact, he had a case of them underneath his desk, and Stiner shelled out for one. "You can either bring it with you when you come," Perry announced, as he handed Stiner his, "or else display it on the wall behind the bar down at our officers' club annex" — a one-story World War II building.
This little ritual of happy hours and mugs might jar people in these politically correct times, but that was simply the way the Army was back then — rougher around the edges, more freewheeling. The social culture in the Army as a whole was far less structured than it is now, and a far greater range of behavior was tolerated. Socializing tended to center on gatherings where everyone drank; Friday-afternoon "happy hours" were the norm, and there were those who drank too much. Today, an officer who gets a DUI might as well hang up his career. Back then, the Army was far more forgiving. "Officers' clubs were anything but bastions of decorum," Stiner notes. "I was never surprised if a fight broke out; there were crap and poker games, and all kinds of teasing, strutting, and showing off — male stuff. It was pretty much the accepted culture.
"I'm not saying that Army life centered on all this. Far from it. It was a very small part of our lives. When we were on duty, we worked long and hard hours, we trained hard, we respected each other and looked out for each other's lives, just as we do now. But we also played hard.
"Remember that we're talking about only a few years after the end of the Korean War. The Army was not as sophisticated or professional as it is now. For example, in those days commanders were not nearly as involved in the training of their soldiers or in the taking care of families. That culture did not really begin evolving until the draft was done away with and we became a volunteer force. After that, the training of officers and NCOs became much more formalized and institutionalized — as did off-duty social events. Except for large unit-level social events, social life doesn't center on the officers' clubs anymore. In fact, very few military installations have even been able to retain centralized officers' clubs owing to financial management parameters legislated by Congress. Instead, commanders tend to host dinner parties at home for the officers and their spouses. It's relatively relaxed and informal, and drinking is limited.
"There are pluses and minuses in all this. We probably don't have as much spontaneity in today's Army as we did back then, and that's a loss; but fewer make fools of themselves, and that's a gain."
TRAINING
Now Stiner had to learn how to be a Special Forces soldier.
In 1964, the Special Forces mission was primarily focused on unconventional warfare (UW), and the chief threat was Soviet expansion in Europe. The entire Special Forces 10th Group was stationed in Europe, and money, weapons, and supplies had been cached in Eastern Europe and in the parts of Western Europe that might be overrun by the Soviets. In the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion, A-Detachments could be dropped behind the lines, or else they could hide and reappear after having been passed over by invading forces, then link up with friendly guerrillas and partisans. Their mission: sabotage, subversion, and organizing and equipping resistance movements. All of this required a high level of independence, analysis, and decision-making.
The Leadership Reaction Course was one of the ways they trained and tested for these qualities. It emphasized teamwork, imagination, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and, of course, leadership, and started with a physically and intellectually difficult puzzle. For instance, imagine a moat in which the water is eight or ten feet deep and the distance from one bank to the other is twelve feet. A team in training is provided with a fifty-five-gallon drum of gasoline and three pieces of timber, two of them ten feet long and the third eight feet. The team's job is to get the barrel (and themselves) across the moat using the materials provided. If the team has what it takes to become Special Forces soldiers, they'll work out a way to do it.