yes, sir,” I said in a confident tone. I could tell by what the sergeant major said if I didn’t pass that training, I would be thrown out of the army for “disobeying an order.” I didn’t want that. There was a Special Forces member in our unit, so I asked him what I should expect from the course. What he was describing to me sounded a lot like British commando training.
I could feel a knot start to form in my stomach. If you aren’t at least a little gung-ho, you probably wouldn’t make it through the training. I was a little lazy by nature. I felt like there was no way that I could complete the training and graduate from it. But I wasn’t ready to be sent back home.
Commando Training
Before I completely accepted my fate, I decided I’d try one last thing to get out of the training. To take the Special Forces training, I needed to pass a mandatory physical so I went over to the flight surgeon’s office to take care of that. I was in generally good shape, weighing 190 pounds at 5'10". The only thing that might prevent me from passing my physical was my lungs.
During the Vietnam War, napalm was dropped. Each time I had to go through a smoldering, burning jungle, I had to breathe what was leftover of the napalm lingering in the air.
I had taken a physical before joining the army for a second time. In the X-ray they caught scarring in my lungs from the napalm. I was able to join the army again with my lungs scarred because I received a waiver from one of the doctors. He passed me because I’d already been through the required basic training before that time, but I figured that a waiver wouldn’t help me get through this one.
I mentioned this to the doctor hoping that it would make a difference. He gave me an X-ray and inspected the photos for a while. I sat there in silence waiting for him to tell me that I would be unfit to take the course.
“You’re A-okay, Bravo,” is what the doctor told me.
I went back to my barracks and spent the rest of the evening packing up my belongings. On Monday morning I reported to the training barracks for orientation, which also happened to be on the same base I was posted at. When I got to the room for orientation, I sat at one of the many desks in the room. It was a large room that could hold one hundred people.
After waiting a little while, the Special Forces captain walked into the room. He was a tall man, about six feet one, whose posture made him seem even taller than he was. He had a deep voice that echoed throughout the large room when he spoke.
“Hello, soldiers. You are here because you will be taking Special Forces (SF) training for the next eight weeks. This is a very demanding course. It will stretch your physical and psychological limits, and if you don’t pass our course, you will not receive your SF badge.”
He spent the next hour going over the details of the training. Each time he added something new I could feel the knot in my stomach growing bigger and bigger.
“From this moment on, everyone will be considered a private. I don’t care if you’re a sergeant or an officer. If you have an issue with taking off your rank, then the door is over there. Am I understood?”
He gave everyone a few seconds to collect themselves. Taking off your field grade was no small things to some men in the army. One of the majors in the back stood up in protest and asked, “Will I also have to remove my rank as a field officer?”
“Especially you, Major. You currently outrank me, but if I holler, ‘Trainee! Come here,’ I expect you to follow my direct orders. We do not want to be disrespectful toward anyone, so we will not salute. There is no saluting in this camp, not even to me. The only time you will salute is when you are called to see me personally. If you want out, now is the time to take your leave. You can say that you wouldn’t take your field grade off.”
The major stood up and promptly left.
“Is there anybody else?” the captain said loudly.
He gave the crowd a minute to gather themselves. No one spoke, and no one stood up.
“All of you commandos will now go and assemble outside. From this point forward, my cadre and I will be addressed as ‘Sir,’ but you do not have to salute, only when you must report to me individually. Starting now we will begin a simulation as if we were in combat. As soon as I leave the room to go downstairs, you will come down and stand in formation.”
There were eighty of us when orientation started, but with the major gone, there were now seventy-nine of us left. We shuffled downstairs and formed as a company in front of Captain Perry. The captain looked down at the watch on his wrist and said, “You’re late, ladies. Go back up to your desks, and we will speak upstairs.”
We all shuffled back upstairs unsure of what was going to happen next. When we got back to the room, the captain was already there waiting for us to take our seats at our desks.
“I called you ladies because I expect ladies to form like that. When I tell commandos to get in formation, we do it with haste!” the captain explained to us once we were gathered up again.
A trainee raised his hand and asked permission to speak. “You may speak, soldier.”
“Are you aware that it goes against our safety to rush down the stairs so hastily?” the young trainee spoke in defense.
“I’m giving you one minute to make it downstairs. You need to figure out how to get down there. While we are training here, we will have to perform a great number of dangerous maneuvers. I do not consider this to be one of them,” the captain continues. “You will be trained on how to carry out all of these maneuvers properly with the cadre leading by example. They will ask you if you think you can do it before they show you. They will be testing your spirit of core.”
It wouldn’t be until later that I would really grasp what he had meant by just how dangerous the training was and what he meant by spirit of core. Immediately after the talking was done, we went on a three-mile run. This would become a part of our daily routine, and with every week that passed, we added one mile until we got to six, running as far as Bad Toelz. We visited the range often where we qualified for a spectrum of weaponry from a .50 cal to a bazooka. It felt great to shoot a M16 on fully automatic again, even if it was just at targets. Most of us already knew how to handle these weapons, so the shooting range was a breeze.
During the second week, we swam two miles with a weapon, eventually learning how to use covert rafts to traverse down rapid rivers. I was sent to go get the rafts before the training and was driving with a Puerto Rican named Carlos, who bragged about being a daily toker of marijuana and hashish. On the drive back, while we were going down a road that hugged a mountain, I noticed that we were trailing very closely behind one of the cadre members.
I could see the captain looking back at us and mouthing for us to stop, so I turned to Carlos and said, “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Our breaks don’t work. I have to stay close to him, so we can use him to slow down and stop when we get to that turn down there!” he said as if it was no big deal.
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“Before we get to that turn, I’m going to roll over him, and his jeep underneath me is going to slow me down.”
I was dumbfounded. This crazy fuck was trying to kill me and the captain. “Have you tried using the parking brake?” I asked him with urgency.
“No, we can try that. Hold on,” he said as he reached for the parking brake.
We slowed down significantly, but it wasn’t enough. So I took the brake and pulled it as hard as I could and told him to start downshifting to slow our speed. We came within a foot of bumping the captain’s jeep over the edge. If we had hit him, he would’ve rolled off the mountain side, plummeting to the ground far below.
“We made it,” he said while letting out a laugh.
“Are you fucking crazy? What would have happened if we would’ve knocked off the captain?”
“Que se hola.” He shrugged. It meant “Fuck