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I am an experienced soldier with combat experience in several corners of the world. I have a distinguished service record. The only units I've ever known are Special Forces units. I've operated in several tiers of the community. I was medically discharged following injuries sustained in combat operations. You deserve a better account than M provides. Please understand some detail must be left out. I am not an academic any more than M or his psychologist. It's important to include the psychologist that asserts violent personality disorder outside of the DSM. There are a lot of guys like M floating around special operations (the community) but perhaps many of you do not understand the community. The special operations umbrella is pretty large depending on how you classify. To simplify, there are several degrees (tiers) divided by purpose and specialization. The degrees might look like a pyramid if you represented them by the number of soldiers in each. M would be near the bottom of a special operations pyramid, meaning he's a highly proficient infantryman, probably supporting a higher unit. A good guess for M would be Ranger Battalion. He mentions Special Forces (Green Beret), which is at least branch consistent. M wouldn't make it at a higher level of the community. The community would correct the matter if he did. In special operations, psych evaluations are routine. There are evaluations for aptitude and there are evaluations for disposition. If you are a sociopath by clinical standards, you will not climb the pyramid. You will be told that this is why you were denied ascension. At lower levels of the pyramid, a clever man can influence the evaluation but not considerably so. At higher levels, the evaluations are much harder to 'game' because they are conducted over time in a range of dynamic scenarios. The higher tiers need a pool of exceptional candidates to use as a baseline. In a class of elite SOF operators, the higher tiers are looking for standouts. Those standouts are further evaluated. M never made it that far, which is why he thinks there are no heroes. I'll only discuss the lower tier to address M's depiction. It differs considerably at higher tiers. One of the many problems with M's depiction is the misrepresentation of the community. An FNG is much more common in a line unit than in a proper special operations element (furthering my suspicion that M came from a support element). There are no FNGs in the community. Each SOF operator, regardless the branch, spent 18-24 months in a pipeline training specifically for special operations costing the government more than $1 million per candidate. If they complete the training, they go to a team a 'cherry'. They need real world experience as an operator and they need advanced training beyond their generalized training. This does not mean walking point in a mine field. This means developing the training plans for the rest of the team, coordinating cross training with the senior members, and accounting for equipment. The entire experience prepares the cherry for the demands of sustained operations far from the flag pole (built up bases) during a deployment. The cherry is one of maybe 15 men who are going to be fending for themselves throughout the deployment. The sensation is nothing like sex but your first fire fight is a lot like losing your virginity. You'll always remember. The adrenaline dumps. Your senses heighten and you become acutely aware of your 'anchors'. Cheek, pad of your trigger finger, your shoulder pocket (where your long gun is firmly tucked) or maybe your elbows. Whatever your problem points were during exercises. Between engagements are lulls, mag changes. You move. You communicate. You decisively engage yet you hardly think. Hours go by before the engagement is over. You feel exhilaration. Consider the state you are in emotionally, chemically. And at this moment you have your first coherent thought in hours. What do you think about? Does it suggest anything about you? I wish I felt something for the people we expired in my first fire fight. I didn't. This isn't sociopathy. This is pragmatism. We are all going to die. In that moment, the person most likely to die is my adversary. My training is superior. My firepower is superior. I have the strategic advantage. In order to achieve success in the objective that brought me to the patch of earth I meet my adversary, I must first know that one of use will expire- the one that is least present. You accept mortality so that you can control your emotions during the engagement. Why fear death when you can elude it? At the conclusion of the fire fight, you don't have time to think. The end of the fire fight is not the end of the day. Are there any casualties? Do you have all of your equipment? You have to establish communications with command. They may have guidance for follow on actions. They may have intel of a quick reactionary force descending upon your location. The avenues of approach and egress from your location may have been rigged to blow while you were engaged. Command mind know a better route for exfil. There remains a tremendous amount of work before you'll be in a position to reflect. It could be hours. You'll probably sleep first. When you wake up, the feeling is gone. You remember the exhilaration. You remember the triumph. In my first deployment, this was the routine every other day for three weeks before we were pulled from the area to decompress. My thoughts were, "keep calm" My emotions would only ever cloud my judgment and performance. It was crystal clear to me that they were useless in a war zone, including malice. The situations that I have encountered have been horrific. I would not propose that we expose the youth to these horrors. Help us all if we ever go down such a road. We should focus on effective management of a crisis. For me it is perspective. For others it might be something else. Nothing could have prepared me for my first fire fight. That, like losing your virginity, is something you must experience to ever really understand. The rest of the horrors of war are handled through live tissue training. If you understand basic medicine and tissue trauma, you'll be able to stomach what you'll see along the way. To suggest that video games should more realistically depict war is to suggest that we should practice applying a condom to a dildo rather than a cucumber. It doesn't prepare anyone to lose their virginity but it does increase the comfort with going down that road. Teach children stronger critical thinking skills and you'll prepare them to avert more conflict in the first place. Failing that, you'll prepare them to handle the horrors of the conflict. |
The Army SF guys (and the higher level people, who I didn't spend as much time with, and who you can't really talk about; the tier 2 missions were largely public like training, medical outreach, etc. and sometimes had reporters when they could get them...) were among the most mentally balanced, generally respectable, and moral people I met in the military. They were also a lot older than the majority of line infantry -- 28+. (Generally, Army SF, medical, and aviation were the people I found most intelligent, sane, and worth being around, but the medical people were in a lot of cases barely thinking of themselves as military, just as doctors who happened to be deployed.)
Some of the biggest dirtbags were the support troops assigned to SF (I think for JSOC/tier-1, you get tier-2 and some specialist JSOC parts for support, or Rangers when they need a large blocking force, but for tier-2, you would get a wide variety of detached troops as cooks, mechanics, etc.); and these guys acted like they were operators, and were a lot more likely to get in trouble. It was pretty hilarious.
The weirdest thing is that Army SF doctrinally has the Foreign Internal Defense mission (training local troops), which requires a high level of cultural sensitivity, etc. Yet, in a lot of Iraq/Afghanistan, they picked rank-compatible line units for that mission (i.e. an O-6 from an infantry unit advising an ANA general running an infantry unit), and often from the National Guard (where they were more "local" in their NG recruiting area, and thus even less culturally aware than regular army), and used even Army SF for direct action type missions. Then brought in contractors to do the direct mentoring mission, wtf.