Spec Ops and the QDR

[slapout9]

Bill, didn't mean to piss in your corn flakes, but my comments on the candy stripper's is correct. I was 82ND 72-75. I don't know what S.F. was doing in
79. I was volunteered by my 1ST Sgt (X-SF) to go a a training mission with the 5Th group.

Operation: Cable Alley. Should be an AAR somewhere, one civilian guerrilla was killed during the operation. Should be orders reassigning us (about 20 as I recall) for UCMJ reasons. They lost my rucksack on top of Franklin Mountain, N.C. while I was leading an ambush on a convoy.

The opinions of the program came from some of the team Sgt.'s that we got drunk with after the operation. These were hard corps 2 and 3 tour Vietnam types who did not like the way SF was changing.

G2-they may have been support personnel but they sure told us that they were Q course qualified and after serving a year with their A team they be allowed to wear the full unit flash.

[Bill Moore]

I'm enjoying your song, "so long Texas" in the background as I respond. O.K., you have me by a couple of years, so I'll have to touch base with some of the older timers at the SF association, but I suspect this is what happened:

1. National Guard types during that time frame could get what we called a paper flash, where they attended a very modified hands on course and completed a coorispondence course to get SF qualified. You can imagine the mixed results that came out of that arrangement. They wore a candy stripe until they were fully qualified. I don't know if they had to spend a certain amount of time on an ODA before they were awarded their full flash. The NG is a different animal, even today, so for us active duty folks it remains clocked in mystery. The good news is there is no longer an easy way to complete the Q Course, everybody must go through the real McCoy.

2. Support personnel and soldiers in SF training wore a candy stripe. So the soldiers could have been support soldiers, and it wasn't out of the norm for support soldiers to tell some tall tales of daring do...., or they could have been students supporting the training waiting for their particular phase to start.

3. The Candy Stripe caused a lot of problems, because you basically had young support kids wearing Green Berets getting in all sorts of trouble that reflected bad on the force (not that us regulars in those days didn't cause enough trouble on our own lol). I recall the time line, but SF's answer was to give everyone a full flash and guys who were SF qualified were awarded the SF tab to wear above their ranger tab. This infuriated the force, and I recall a lot of guys in on my team and throughout the Co went to the Iron Brucie statue (Green Beret Statue, relocated now to next to the new USASOC HQs)and burned their berets in protest, and wore patrol caps until ordered to wear their berets again (does this sound similiar to the Army getting issued Black Berets and the rangers protesting? lol). Anyway the higher ups came to their senses and told the support personnel to don maroon berets with the unit flash symbolizing they were airborne qualified assigned to Group, but not SF qualified. The SF Tab still exists also. That is how it is today. All this seems a little child like in retrospect, but then again symbols have meaning, if they didn't what would elite units rally around?

Also, I don't want to give you the opinion that there is a rift between our support soldiers and long tabbers, as we have some of the most professional support soldiers in the world, and we couldn't do our job without them. They are an integral part of our SF family, but there were occassional issues in the past when young private truck drivers and cooks who wore green berets pretended to be something they weren't, and as you mentioned their pretending at times was along the lines of the movie "Deer Hunter" and "Rambo".

We digress, this has very little to do with the expansion of SF, but I thought you would find it interesting anyway. Bill

[BMT]

I went thru SFTG in '64 and there were first term men going thru training!!

BMT