Free My Share of the Task by General Stanley McChrystal

seeking his counsel, I submitted my request. The reputation of “SF” at that time was mixed at best, but I wanted to become a part of something that long ago had captured my imagination.
    Just after I left the 82nd, the chief of staff of the Army, General Bernard W. Rogers, stripped the paratroopers of their maroon berets. To rein in other units that had begun wearing various nonstandard berets and other headgear, General Rogers issued a blanket ban. The loss of the maroon beret, the accepted paratrooper symbol worldwide and a badge of pride, was traumatic for the 82nd. At the time it seemed to me as though Army leadership, despite good intentions, was tone deaf to what mattered to the volunteer soldiers of its own force.
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    B y the time the paratroopers lost their maroon berets, I was wearing a green one. In November 1978, I joined Detachment 714, Company A, 1st Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), part of the U.S. Army’s famous—and, in the minds of some, infamous—“Green Berets.” Created midway through the Korean War, the Special Forces were modeled on the OSS’s World War II Jedburghs, three-man teams dropped deep into Nazi-occupied Europe to recruit and lead partisan militias. In Vietnam, the Green Berets played their largest role to date, and stories of their operations and exploits had fascinated me from an early age.
    Assigned to a twelve-man A-Team (Operational Detachment A), I became part of a brilliant concept that remains effective today. Manned with two officers and ten specially qualified sergeants, A-Teams were designed to possess skills, maturity, and cultural acuity. This enabled them to leverage indigenous forces, from militaries to guerrillas, in a wide range of missions in a more discrete alternative to larger, more conventional operations.
    Special Forces’ history was tinged with politics. During the 1960 presidential campaign, members of then-Senator John F. Kennedy’s staff sought to burnish his defense credentials. Other senators had associated themselves withhigh-profile weapons like the Polaris missile or B-52 strategic bomber. Kennedy would adopt the Special Forces, whose soldiers had worn the green berets illicitly until the fall of 1961, when the new president authorized the headgear as “amark of distinction.”
    As he explained on June 6, 1962, to the graduating cadets gathered in the West Point field house, Kennedy envisioned that his infantrymen would likely face small, hot, peripheral wars “new in . . . intensity, ancient in . . . origin,” against the “guerrillas, subversives, insurgents” exploiting “economicunrest and ethnic conflicts.” The Special Forces were the first troops Kennedy dispatched to Vietnam, where they trained the South Vietnamese. As the war escalated under President Johnson, their mission grew and activities diversified beyond training. They became highly publicized, and despite some extraordinary exploits, by the end of the war, controversies dogged the force. Criticisms ranged from being elitist to being “off the reservation” to
Time
magazine’s August 1969 damning description—“enveloped in the sinister”—after the Army investigated the Green Beret commander in Vietnam, along with six intelligence officers, after accusations that they had murdered an alleged South Vietnamese double agent.
    By the time I joined the Green Berets in 1978, they only faintly resembled their Kennedy-era forebears. Traditionally, the Army had an aversion to elite units because such units tended to siphon resources, particularly talented soldiers, from the rest of the force. After Vietnam, that resistance reemerged, and Special Forces were allowed to atrophy. Young officers often received terse advice to avoid ruining their careers by joining Special Forces. “So you want to join the Speckled Feces?” an officer in my