I was under the impression that Special Forces became its own branch mainly so its personnel wouldn't be discriminated against by their primary branches--perhaps the Aviation branch was brought into being for the same reason. At a Hail and Farewell in Germany as a lieutenant I sat next to the father of one of our lieutenants. He was an unassuming guy and I asked him whether he'd been in the Army, and he said yes, he'd retired as a major. Callow youth that I was, I wondered what he had done to screw up and only go that far. It was several years later when I was out of the Army that I read that Major Clyde J. Sincere of Special Forces had been awarded the DSC for his performance in a firefight in Vietnam.

Before First Manassas Thomas Jackson fought his first engagement as a brigade commander not far from where I live in the vicinity of Martinsburg. My impression of the "foot cavalry" aspect of his operations is that it was something he had learned before the Civil War as a light artilleryman. The modern field artillery has the acronym RSOP for reconnaissance, selection, occupation of position. Jackson had his mapmaker Jed Hotchkiss and he also had his staff make him tables of distances between various points in the Valley. Thus he was planning the routes of march of his command with the same attention to detail that an artilleryman uses to plan the movements of his battery.