Green Berets

Who knew that a child of immigrants with limited eyesight, could become an elite soldier and secret government agent leading clandestine operations behind enemy lines, eventually advising U.S. Presidents on covert intelligence? One man made such a plan and accomplished all his missions. 

FAMILY BACKGROUND

The parents of MV were not involved in either military or government careers. His father was part of an Army flight crew, serving as B-17 bombardier and gunner over France and Germany in WWII. After his honorable discharge, he followed a civilian career path. His mother was a homemaker.

CHALLENGE – BORN WITH ‘STRABISMUS’ (CROSSED EYES)

MV was born with an eyesight defect called ‘strabismus’ or “crossed eyes” which caused his brain to process images from only one eye at a time, precluding his ability to see in three dimensions. His right eye was turned significantly inward, which, needless to say, didn’t escape the notice of other children. Five eye surgeries between ages one and nineteen improved his facial appearance but could not give him 3-D vision. 

“Fortunately, my brain found other ways to judge depth and distance. I was also blessed with excellent eyesight – 20-20 in my left eye and better than 20-20 in my right eye,” said MV. 

CHILDHOOD INTERESTS

MV had a strong throwing arm, so his childhood dream was to be a either a pro baseball pitcher or football quarterback. On the diamond, he was a ‘good’ hitter – if the pitch offered was straight, i.e., a ‘fastball,’ (not a “breaking ball” pitch with spin to change direction, such as a ‘curve’ or ‘slider.’) A shoulder injury during football practice in his college sophomore year derailed any professional future for MV in either sport. 

The grandparents of MV were all immigrants, three of whom spoke only limited English. His paternal grandparents arrived from Italy. His mother’s parents came from Slovakia, her father finding work in Chicago’s steel mills. 

MV’s parents raised their children in Los Angeles, in a section which was a magnet for immigrants, including refugees who had fled from Hungary and Cuba, so MV had a lot of early exposure to foreign cultures while growing up. Most of his childhood friends were recent immigrants, which sparked some interest for MV in world affairs.

The family watched the evening news once or twice a week and talked about the evils of Soviet Communism and American’s difficulties in Vietnam. “We focused on international events mostly when we felt our own lives were threatened,” said MV. One example he recalled was during the October 1962 ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ when many thought it was possible that the U.S. was on the verge of nuclear war with Russia, which had been supplying weapons to Cuba. The tension and anxiety of possible war caused MV’s father to stock their “shallow and very porous basement with a few canned goods and a radio, and we practiced taking shelter there a few times. Truth be told, I didn’t think it would do us much good. If nuclear war came, I was convinced our chances of survival were slim to none.”

MV showed some youthful taste for adventure. “As a kid, I often went hiking in (the hills).” When MV was older, he and his friends would “drive out to the desert to shoot our .22-caliber rifles at Coke bottles and tin cans. But I was never a Boy Scout, let alone an Eagle Scout, and had never gone hunting or fishing.”

EDUCATION

MV attended local public schools, where, by his own admission, “I was a superb underachiever academically, graduating from high school with a C-plus average. When I applied myself, as I did my senior year in international relations class, I did very well.”

One day, while sitting in the high school library, MV was supposedly researching a paper for his international relations class – one of the few academic subjects which he found interesting – but was more likely daydreaming about baseball or football. His international relations teacher was a WWII veteran with strong views about U.S. foreign policy, which emphasized the importance of power and the pursuit of U.S. national interests. The teacher was a staunch supporter of the Vietnam war, about which MV had ‘mixed feelings.’ 

Since both the teacher and MV were interested in foreign policy issues generally and the Vietnam War specifically, they often engaged in polite but serious discussions during class. 

In a moment which factored significantly into MV’s eventual adult career path, the teacher approached MV’s library table and placed a copy of that day’s New York Times in front of him, pointing to an article while saying, “You might be interested in this.”

The Times’ news article was a major story on the CIA’s covert (secret) operations in Laos (bordering Vietnam in Southeast Asia). The CIA was employing a secret army of local tribesmen in a large-scale para-military operation against the North Vietnamese Army. 

Reading the article, MV “imagined myself leading secret armies in far-off lands and winning against impossible odds…. Doing things that only a James Bond could do. And, for the first time, at age 17, I thought seriously about becoming a CIA officer.” 

CAREER PATH PLAN IS A STRAIGHT LINE – REALITY MAY CAUSE ZIGS AND ZAGS

At the beginning of MV’s final semester at a community (also known as a ‘junior’) college (because it required only two years to earn a Associate’s degree), MV developed what seemed to him to be a “plausible plan” for his best route into the CIA: first become a “Green Beret” (nickname of the Army’s Special Forces).

A college degree was required to become a CIA officer, but MV didn’t want to wait the two or more additional years of education that would take. Special Forces seemed as close to the CIA, or at least his image of the CIA, as one could get, and he could become a Green Beret soon, having both adventure and guerrilla warfare training and more foreign language instruction (following a year of Russian in college.)

Thus, MV planned to go from chronic under-achiever to multitasking man of action in the blink of an eye. To his nineteen-year-old brain, it seemed like a straightforward path to a glorious future. Reality would be the hard part: first qualifying, then completing the arduous training to earn a green beret, followed by preliminary CIA testing and additional training, strenuous both mentally and physically. 

To carry out his career plan, MV began to read everything he could find about the CIA and Special Forces. He attended a college lecture on government intelligence, by a former deputy director for intelligence at the CIA. The speaker was more ‘cloak than dagger’ (i.e., operating quietly and confidentially behind any field operations by other CIA ‘operatives’) but MV found the talk interesting nonetheless since he didn’t expect any CIA representative to talk openly in public about its secret operational side. 

MV soon went to see an Army recruiter, telling him that he wanted to be a Green Beret and took the Army’s required battery of aptitude tests. But the recruiter kept encouraging MV to enlist in the infantry, get some experience, go to Ranger School, and then try for Special Forces on his second enlistment. MV’s odds of making it would be better that way, said the recruiter, who might have been correct, but MV didn’t want to take that longer route to the CIA, so he walked out the door and went in search of another recruiter.

When MV walked into a different Army recruiting office in a different town, the staff sergeant who greeted him was a friendly, former Green Beret and Special Forces, Vietnam veteran with silver jump wings, a scuba badge and a host of medals adorning his khaki uniform. MV believed that he had found ‘my guy.” MV was invited into the recruiter’s cubicle, where the Sgt told him about Special Forces training, his service as a Green Beret overseas and what MV would need to do to qualify for direct enlistment into SF (Special Forces). MV was well qualified intellectually, having received a perfect 160 out of 160 on the Army’s IQ test and was in great physical shape. 

YOU WANT TO JOIN SPECIAL FORCES BUT DOES SF WANT YOU? 

Not surprisingly, when MV took his physical, the military examining physician initially disqualified him because of his strabismus. MV was devastated. He couldn’t believe his birth eyesight defect would disqualify him, given his current near-perfect vision and proven ability in sports to judge 3-D distance well. Fortunately, he was able to persuade the physician to give him a second evaluation by administering additional tests and when convinced that MV had the ability to perceive depth, the doctor ‘grudgingly’ passed MV as qualified to proceed. 

MV’s experience taking the Special Forces Selection Battery (SFSB) of tests convinced him that he had made the right career choice because on the day he took it, he was the only candidate, which MV decided was a sign that he would be joining a very elite group. 

The SFSB consisted of three timed parts, requiring several hours to complete. MV was instructed to sit at a table in a large, empty room, where he was handed the first booklet: a psychological aptitude test, consisting of more than 100 true-false and multiple-choice questions designed to assess one’s aptitude for unconventional warfare and other SF missions. MV recalled some of the questions: “Did I take risks as a kid and climb trees? Do others see me as a leader? Could I empathize with people with different backgrounds and from foreign cultures? Was I able to master new skills quickly? Was I good at improvising? Did I want to volunteer for dangerous missions? Was I willing to jump out of airplanes? It wasn’t too difficult to see what they were after. You bet, I thought. And it had the virtue of being true.”

The second section tested MV’s attention to detail and his ability to orient himself and determine location. He was shown photographs of farm scenes, urban areas, and terrain shots. The perspective would shift, and he had to decide from which direction a new photo was taken or what was missing from or added to a previous photo. Looking at shadows and other clues in the photos was key. MV described the second test section as “advanced spatial reasoning with an operational bent.”

MV found the third test section to be by far the most difficult, but the one he liked the most: a series of operational scenarios – 88 in all – requiring him to make critical decisions within 10 seconds. MV was given a thick booklet and next, the test administrator pressed ‘play’ on a tape recorder. A male voice described the situation for each problem, within a barrage of tactical details. No pauses or replays were allowed. Ten seconds to rank four to six courses of action from best to worst. For example:

Your Special Forces team has infiltrated Red China. Your team has acquired information about Chinese nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems that is vital to the national security of the United States. Your team’s mission has been compromised. You are trapped in a cave and surrounded by a superior force of Chinese troops that has already engaged your team. Most of your team’s members have either been killed or are badly wounded. You are among the few who remain combat capable. What do you do?

Responded MV within 10 seconds: “I quickly concluded that the best course of action was to transmit the critical information we had acquired. My fictional team’s chances of fighting its way out and escaping seemed to be near zero, but we could accomplish our mission before we were overrun if we could transmit the information we had been sent in to collect.”

“I also found myself wondering about the extraordinary nature of the mission rather than about its grave risks. Was this what being a Green Beret was really like?” “If so,” thought MV, “sign me up!” 

“When I told my parents I had passed selection and was going to enlist, they were alarmed. They were worried I wouldn’t make it through training or worse, that I would get killed in combat. I assured them I’d be fine and signed a contract for the three-year Special Forces direct enlistment option. And as I advanced in my career, I told them less and less about what I was actually doing.” 

(Editor’s notes – Other versions of special forces within the U.S. military include Air Force Special Operators, Army Rangers, Navy Seals and Marine Recon (short for Reconnaissance); all are highly selective with many candidates failing to qualify initially or during early training, either voluntarily quitting or being involuntarily reassigned to a basic unit within that same military service.

The details of qualifying for special forces and subsequent training may change over time but the basics remain, including excellent physical conditioning, self-discipline to withstand stern leadership and conditions, attention to detail, willingness to take risks and ability to make quick assessment of new and different situations, leading to prompt, decisive and correct leadership decisions.)

According to MV, there is an informal ‘division of labor’ among special forces. Seals specialize in direct action and special reconnaissance. Rangers focus on direct action and airfield seizure. Marine Recons probe for weakness in enemy lines, in advance of their main force assaults. For Green Berets, it’s unconventional warfare – working with a resistance force behind enemy lines.

SPECIAL FORCES TRAINING IS A PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHALLENGE

Candidates undergo greater and greater amounts of physical and mental stress as their training progresses. They subsist on long-range patrol rations and “C rations” consisting of dehydrated, “backpack” meals with limited calories. On a seventh “rest” day, if not in the field, candidates received the only hot meal of the week in their mess hall. Sleep was limited to 2 – 4 hours a night during the classroom phase and much less during the field phase. “We took cold showers and slept in unheated tents in Army sleeping bags. We had two hours of guard duty each night, interrupting what little sleep we did get, so staying awake in class was definitely a challenge. If we were caught dozing, we were required to sit on a metal bar swing in the back of our classroom. This happened to me once, though from looking later at my scribbled classroom notes, I must have dozed off multiple times during lectures,” recalled MV. 

Each day began at 4:30 a.m. with 90 to 120 minutes of exercises and a long run, the most painful of which was a four-mile run with a fifty-pound rucksack and an M16 rifle. It hurt like hell after the first hundred meters. We climbed lots of ropes and did lots of push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups. The rest of our day combined instruction with more physical exertion, long marches with heavy rucksacks, swimming in cold creeks and land navigation exercises. I would compare those training days to two-a-day football practices, only much worse.”

“I learned that exhaustion and freezing weather can play funny tricks on the mind. Small morale boosts – like combining little pouches of rice we had been given for dinner with some cream substitute and sugar packets we had saved, was all we had to eat one night, but our concoction was delicious, remembered for years afterward as the best rice pudding any of us had ever tasted.”

“I also learned that failure can be a better teacher than success. I had drawn an unusually difficult patrol, but you’re expected to accomplish the mission, no matter the hardship and obstacles in your path. Fortunately, in training you’re usually given additional chances to succeed. I did well enough on a subsequent ambush patrol and other graded exercises to make it through training, though hardly with distinction. I learned a valuable lesson and got much better at field tactics as the qualifying period and my career progressed.”

Eventually the weapons training course involved use of more than seventy U.S., Western and Soviet bloc weapons. U.S.-backed insurgents might be equipped with any of these, so we had to master them all – memorizing the weapons’ technical characteristics, learning to fieldstrip and do higher level, detailed repairs and master their combat use. 

For some Green Berets, graduation from SFQC is an end but for MV, hoping to join the CIA for special operations, SFQC was just the beginning of his planned career path. He completed the Ranger course, which added to his tactical proficiency, an advanced mountain climbing and mountain warfare course with the German Army, formal training in engineering and conventional, improvised, and atomic demolitions, and training in urban unconventional warfare and clandestine operations. 

MV sought training in language proficiency to make himself a better candidate for eventually being accepted into CIA operations. Language courses offered included Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian and German. MV chose Czech, partially based on where he would then be geographically assigned but also on the hope that adding that a second language to his college Russian language education would be attractive to a certain ‘three letter agency’ of the government which was MV’s ultimate career goal.

C.I.A. CAREER TRAINING PROGRAM (CTP)

The CIA’s CTP was considered by MV to be the most prestigious way to join the CIA as its “West Point” – mostly for officers bound for the Directorate of Operations, CIA’s espionage, and covert action arm where MV hoped to land. Such a career appealed to MV for several reasons:

• The individual autonomy and responsibility which CIA gave its officers; an individual could “move history!”
• The CIA was in large measure the U.S.’s primary instrument in the ‘Cold War’ – While MV had teenage dreams of leading large army formations in decisive battles, the big war might never come. But the Cold War was a war in the shadows. 
• MV thought he would be given greater responsibilities at an earlier age while in the CIA than if he remained in the Army. (This proved to be an accurate prediction.)

The CTP involved more classroom tests, interviews and medical, psychiatric, and polygraph exams plus tests in language proficiency. 

While going through CTP, MV finally completed his Bachelor’s degree in international relations at the University of Alabama’s External Degree Program – twelve years after he had begun his studies at junior college. This involved receiving credits from multiple different colleges and universities where MV had taken courses wherever he had been geographically assigned. Part of this process was MV creating his own curriculum – graduate courses in political and social revolutions, international terrorism, problems of Communism, advanced undergraduate courses in American foreign and national security policy, international relations theory, and geopolitics – all aimed at becoming a CIA operations officer. He wrote his required thesis on U.S. intelligence policy, specifically the state of clandestine collection, analysis, counterintelligence, and covert action. His argument was that in the decade ahead, the U.S. would need to revitalize and make much greater use of the CIA’s capabilities, particularly its ability to covertly influence events abroad. This is what MV hoped he was heading to the CIA to accomplish. Not coincidentally, such a thesis might appeal to whoever at the CIA would be reviewing his qualifications and passion for joining their agency. 

LEADERSHIP MAY BE LEARNED FOR ITS BEST IMPLEMENTATION

During MV’s training he had the opportunity to observe good and bad leaders. Through his personal experience, he developed key principles of leadership he was determined to always follow, as a personal mantra:

“A good leader should derive his (or her) power not from the title of his position or ability to mete out punishment or provide rewards but rather from his expertise and by being the one his followers would select to lead them if they could choose.”

CIA OPERATIONS – AT LEAST WHAT MAY BE REVEALED…

(Editor’s note – Recreating MV’s daily activities to plan and carry out covert and paramilitary missions throughout the world produces a thrilling literary narrative but MV stories within his book which are most relevant to this “Career Stories Project” are factors within his family background, childhood interests and early education which led him to choose and plan his career path. 

To learn and appreciate the details of MV’s career within the CIA and later as an advisor to several U.S. Presidents, please refer to the book written by Michael G. Vickers, “By All Means Available – Memoirs of A Life In Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy.” 

The Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and other elements of the U.S. government reviewed MV’s manuscript prior to its publication to prevent the disclosure of classified information. 

A note about the author: Michael G. Vickers served multiple roles in the Defense Department and Intelligence Community, including as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under President Barack Obama. He also served under President George W. Bush and President Obama as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, low-intensity conflict, and interdependent capabilities, where he had policy oversight of all U.S. military capabilities, from nuclear weapons to special operations forces. During the Cold War, he served as an operations officer in the CIA and as both a commissioned and noncommissioned officer in the Army’s Special Forces.)

CAREER SATISFACTION

MV wrote his memoir, despite spending a lifetime keeping the nation’s secrets, for three main reasons: 

1. Duty to history. MV’s career spanned four distinct national security eras: the Cold War, the brief period of American primacy during the 1990s, U.S. wars with the global jihadists after 9/11, and our current era of great power competition with China and Russia. MV believes that it was time to tell the full story of these and other historic events from the perspective of someone closely involved in planning and carrying out so many significant operations during those eras. 
2. Duty to the American people. MV believes it is essential for the sound functioning of our democracy that Americans possess at least some understanding of intelligence, special operations, and strategy if they are to provide their full and willing support for the U.S. government’s operations on their behalf. 
3. Duty to future special operators, intelligence professionals, and national security strategists. Successful strategies are far more art than they are science, and war-winning strategies are unfortunately much rarer than we would wish. MV felt an obligation to his country’s future operators and strategists to pass on what he had learned. 

Remember now the three reasons MV chose to pursue his career as a CIA operative: (i) CIA provided sufficient autonomy to individuals which might ‘move history;’ (ii) a war ‘in the shadows’ was still a war of battles which could be fought despite lack of public awareness; and (iii) the opportunity to achieve significant, personal responsibility at an early age.

Editor: All Missions Accomplished!

Wrote Leon E. Panetta, former Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA: “In my over fifty years of public life, I have known only a few special people totally devoted to the challenge of protecting our country. Mike Vickers is one of those very special people. His experiences are without equal.”

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This career story is based on a book “By All Means Available – Memoirs of a Life In Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy” by Michael G. Vickers, published in 2023 by Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, NY plus internet research within Wikipedia.