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This is in line with my experience (I spent a bunch of time with tier 2 SOF (Army SF) and other parts of the military) -- the people who seemed like the mentally unhinged were either in line combat or combat support units which experienced a lot of combat, not the SOF crowd. 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. |