How to go Special Forces: Earning the Green Beret | Tactical Rifleman

I hate gents welcome back to the tactical rifleman you know I read all your comments and we actually get a lot of questions about ie how do I go Special Forces now you got to take this with a grain of salt because I'm old I'm a [ __ ] former action guy and I actually went Special Forces quite a while ago I actually joined the army back in 1985 that's how old I am I want that to sink in most of you guys were not even sperm yet right so um I always knew I wanted to be a Green Beret what do I mean by that was a lot of high school kids don't know what they want to do with their lives I saw the movie the Green Berets it's old John Wayne movie came out when I was I think junior high school and what I loved about it was even though this guy was the the engineer or he was a weapons guy or he was a medic didn't matter who it was these guys were all very well-rounded tactically sound they were all awesome and willing to go above and beyond do whatever was necessary to accomplish the mission and that just kind of stuck with me so I've always been blessed that I knew what I wanted to do with my life so now today we have the 18 X ray program basically after the Global War on Terror Rumsfeld uh created Secretary of Defense told Special Forces to double the size of the Green Beret world you can't do that there's just not enough people in the military but so what they did was they started something they did back in Vietnam where basically you could come straight off the street and go straight to being Special Forces they called the 18 X ray program now that is a very very high attrition rate very very high failure rate and what they found was most of the people that pass it now I've got at least two years of college under their belt why does that matter it matters because they're coming in much more mature now talk to the guys that are actually Green Berets with these 18 X rays showing up at group and even after they earned their green beret and they show up at a Special Forces Group they have a very very high attrition rate now they've earned the Green Beret but they end up getting booted out of the unit because they're still not mature enough one or two they just don't have enough actual military experience so back when I went Special Forces again this is late 80s mid late 80s you know when I joined the army back then you could not go straight Special Forces you had to be a sergeant or basically a e4 promotable in order to go Special Forces why is that it's because when you show up at the team yes they may choose you to be a engineer the demolition expert okay they may choose you to be the medic or the comma guy but because you could come from any background in them in the in the army yes most were infantry but I had guys that were mechanics I had guys that were communications satellite imagery guys I had guys coming from all different parts of the army and what they brought to my a team was even though the guy was an engineer because he was a diesel mechanic in the Regular Army we now had a guy that when our Humvee broke down in the middle of the desert he had that that background that skill even though I was a medic because my previous time in the Army was in a recon platoon I was a master of land navigation small unit tactics things like that I had a lot more experience doing it because I had all that time the Regular Army where the weapons guy that only learned tactics in the Q course I actually had more experience than him so when I went when I first joined the army I decided I wanted to be a Green Beret now I couldn't go straight to be a green beret I had to start in the army they were trying to push me to go be a helicopter mechanic because that's what the army was short at the time well that's not gonna help me become a good Green Beret so I wanted to be a not just a good Green Beret I want to be a great Green Beret so how do I set myself up for success I need to learn tactics I need to be good with weapons so I I personally chose to go infantry first which was a good thing because honestly I was not ready for Special Forces my I was smart enough my dad run at random physics labs at UConn I had free tuition I was a smart cookie but I was a juvenile delinquent there's no way I were to cut it in Special Forces I barely got to stay in the army all the trouble I was getting into so I started off with infantry infantry is basically basic training like everybody else but then you do what's called AIT advanced infantry training I learned all your infantry weapons all the small unit tactics stuff the saws the m60 machine guns the m2 of threes all that stuff law rockets 84s what we also learn tactics now the tactics we were learning were entry skill level one stuff shoot move communicate yes but also individual movement techniques how to IMT hi hi crawl low crawl three to five second rush all this stuff that we take for granted now but if you've never been showing it you just you just don't know that stuff my first duty station after graduating I went to Korea and from there I'm supposed to be in a regular infantry unit but they came by asking for volunteers to go to the recon platoon they said we train harder we do much longer hours and nobody wanted to volunteer I jumped at the chance I really did so I've actually never served any time in a infantry line company all my time is in a recon platoon started recon platoon in Korea we actually had the old Willys jeeps back then m60 machine guns on then we moved over to Humvees while I was there the Humvees were new just coming online but part of our recon platoons job was to use demolitions explosives and blow bridges while the North Koreans were coming across the border I got to do my tours up on the DMZ designated marksmen all that stuff so I learned a lot about demolitions I learned a lot about sniper ops I went to a sere course they're put on the Air Force and first group so it got introduced to all that stuff helicopter ops sling loading our vehicles and connexes underneath helicopters I got exposed to a lot of stuff to him because Korea was a unaccompanied tour we trained a lot we trained hard every day and I packed a lot of training in there from there I went to the hundred and first Airborne why didn't I try to go Special Forces honestly I had seen so many bad sergeants in my career up to that point and I just didn't want to be a bad sergeant so I wanted to learn everything before that happened so I got that one hundred and first tried to stay in a line company and immediately got drafted to recon platoon and one of the infantry battalions there because they didn't have vehicles it was all infill by helicopter and move your little scout sniper team all over everywhere we went well the other units would go to the field for 18 days and dig foxholes and everything we basically maneuvered and set up hide site and every 18 days at a pop 18 days for a pup I got to be a master of land navigation and terrain Association went to Ranger School obviously because its 101st airborne Air Assault Division I got very familiar with helicopter operations landing zones everything else I have repelled out of helicopters fast roped out of them all that stuff we did a lot of survival training having to learn to live out of not just our rucksacks but just what we would carry on our bodies we would go out for days with just what we had on our individual load-bearing equipment a lot of that actually earned my expert infantryman's badge because it was what everybody had to get now funny part is right after getting that bout a year later enter Desert Storm we go over to Desert Storm my little scout sniper team out in the middle of the desert guys I didn't shoot a single round against a bad guy there they would insert us by helicopters before everybody else came in and then we basically just sat in our hide sites till the feel the tanks passed by us but one thing that did happen was well I'm sitting there now if they'd say air war and I'm in my mop suit rain just coming down my sniper hide sack filled up with water we're supposed to be guarding this road I had a tan SUV come driving across the desert this is right on this Saudi Iraqi border before the ground war started and I had the upside-down black v painted on the door so I knew this was a coalition guy he drove right up to my height set where me and my three guys were standing there looking like wet kittens and he powered down the window and said hello to us and he held out a Pepsi with ice crystals all over the outside of it and as I'm grabbing this Pepsi the guys got the rainbow mirrored oakley sunglasses on he's got a Kaffir wrapped around his head he's got a red beard very American he's got a seven rank on his chocolate chip camouflage uniform he's a special forces guy from 5th Special Forces Group he looked at me and he said hey are you from 100 and first I said yeah I am and he asked to see my rifle my camouflaged rifle and everything and my scope mounted on it and he said hey you look pretty squared away when you get back to Fort Campbell I want you to go Special Forces then he turned around and he drove off across the desert and I thought about it and I was like you know I looked at my guys I said it's time for me to go Special Forces and I'm gonna cover that next right after you tube slaps you in the face with one of these commercials I'll see you back in just a minute all right welcome back I hope you enjoyed that commercial as much as I did all right so I got back from Desert Storm and they pinned on my combat infantryman's badge so now I had both the expert infantryman's badge and the combat infantryman's badge you can only wear one at a time by the way I went to Special Forces assessment and selection sfas I can't tell you what SSA s is like and now but what I can tell you starts with the swim past PT test all that stuff first week is basically land navigation they're just trying to push you push you push you you you always have your 45 pound rucksack on without water you you're always patrolling with your rubber duck I had an advantage here because I was good doing cross country navigation terrain association but you were allowed to walk on the roads it's just I would save time going through the woods sometimes but there are other times I could look at the map and know the map said that terrain was too messed up and then I would walking around on the road meanwhile other guys that didn't know any better they're like well instead of going all the way around I'll just go through the woods they got hung up in the brambles and the drawers and a lot of times I was the first one done doing land of night land nav at night Dale and I have during the day it was a cakewalk for me second week was what they called a team week where you're working together as a 12-man team doing weird things and babies you got to carry like a hundred sandbag you and your team you know do you carry three on top of your ruck one in each hand you can do that once work together as a group some guys are carrying - while I'm carrying four you want to get pissed at them but you got to remember it's not about how tough you are it's how well you can work together as a team smile help each other out some days people have good days some days people have bad days but you need to be able to work together as a team that's why they don't cut the official name is a Operational Detachment alpha that team of Green Berets we don't call it that we call it an A Team you know teamwork is very very important so as I end up passing selection and it goes everything from a two-mile run all the way up to a 25 mile road march and everything in between and they don't tell you what your next thing is they just say hey come outside with your sneakers on and you're gonna run well how far is the run just do the best you can okay how much time do I have just do the best you can so you don't know so the matter of fact it bit me in a tail one time I thought one of the other guys that was a recycle he had already done selection once he told me he said hey this is the three-mile run okay so I took his word for it like an idiot I took off running as fast as I can I tried to break my heart I wanted to be the first guy done and turned the corner around the gravel road turn past everybody except there's one skinny little white guy in front of me and I kept running kept running pass take the next corner the next corner it turns out this was the 7 mile run and I ended up breaking my heart I finally saw the finish line never did catch that guy find out later on he was on the all-army track team but come running and I could see dr. deaths suburban the red suburban the medic so I am pulling up about 50 feet past the finish line and as I'm running to the finish line I started getting black around the edges I started getting tunnel vision and it went but I blinked when I opened my eyes I'm laying on the ground and everybody's looking down at me and I ran past the finish line I ran right into the open door of the suburban Nestea plunge on the ground and there all the instructors just laughed at me long story short I passed selection and I wanted to be a either weapons guy or engineer they said you're gonna be a medic I don't want to be a medic they're like well you can be a medic or you can go to Korea all right medics lead the way so I got back to Fort Campbell and because 5th Special Forces Group is right there with the hundred and first they allowed me my unit allowed me to go to fifth group to do OJT on-the-job training when I got the fifth group they saw my background and I wanted to go to an a-team and do all the fun stuff and they said you're not gonna have any problem with the tactical stuff what you're gonna have problems with because I was in 11 Bravo remember Ranger school all that stuff and they're like you're gonna have a hard time with the medical part of it so they made me spend six months working at battalion mad drawing drawing blood doing physical exams all kinds of stuff hindsight being 20/20 it helped me out a lot so I moved my new wife down to San Antonio Texas today all of the medical course all the Special Forces qualification courses at Fort Bragg but at the time that I went through the first half of the medic course was in Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio move my family down there I started the first nine months anatomy physiology pharmacology trauma veterinary skills dental skills lab work we had to learn all that stuff they actually double-booked my class you supposed to have 99 students in the class and instead we had a hundred and ninety eight people show up for the course hardest PT test you ever took in your life they redid everybody's medical records found little here's a typo they bumped people out we still end up having like a hundred and fifty people in my class long story short they degraded as hard and when we got through the three trauma one trauma two trauma three there was only I think 18 of us that ended up going to Fort Bragg first time through everybody else recycled back either now the class behind us was already full so a lot of those people that recycled back were actually they had to do six more months at at Fort San Antonio I was one of those lucky guys that got to go straight to med lab at Fort Bragg start records and reports and goats my aid bags through my whole career said GA PT on the outside of them goats are people too you still learned all the trauma you still learned everything else but now you were learning it on live tissue shooting chambers whole nine yards I learned a lot from there and there were recycles back into our class so we had a full class guys that have recycled that med lab when I graduated med lab I want to say there was probably 20 of us total that went on to it's called small unit tactics they now take people from the medic course the weapons course the engineer class and the comic course the commo guys had extra time learning Morse code brought us all together and now we were divided up into basically a Ranger school size platoons little teams we had to do all these small unit tactics stuff I had already been through Ranger School I had my whole recon background it was very easy for me matter of fact some of the instructors would comment that I was a little bit too cocky we get to the final test which they call Robin sage Robin sage has done up in you worry forests out in the mountains of North Carolina it is a part where they have been doing this same test all the way sense of vietnam-era a lot of those people there have been literally the families the locals the farmers and everything have been doing that literally generation to generation to the point to where you could take Pineland dollar bills and today I could go into a gas station there used Pineland dollars monopoly money buy a pack of cigarettes or a Pepsi and they'd give me a little wink as I went out the door great story but I'm gonna save it for after another one of these YouTube commercials I'll see you guys in just a minute I welcome back so Robin sage take my little 12 man a-team we do mission planning there it can't McCall it back up Fort Bragg mission planning what we're gonna do our 12 man a team is going to perish you in and then we need to move cross-country we need to link up with our bundle we need to link up with our guerrilla force everything's gonna be awesome so we did we parachute in hi fog rain everything we get our bundle we recover all of our stuff we start moving out now we're having the cross electric fences every this is not on any military installation which is hilarious because my point man weapons guy name um he was from Cambodia and he kept like me and him would take turns being point man he would hold the branch back deliberately in the dark and then let it go and it would whack me right in the face I hated this little guy so much that I loved him well we're skirting an electric fence and which he had never seen an electric fence before key you can imagine how he met his first one so we're skirting a a different electric fence announced my turn to be up on point I actually held that branch back to whack on except when I let go of it it whacked him threw him against the electric fence and actually held him up against it hilarious stuff uh if you're watching I love your brother just not that much we actually linked up with local partisans and they tossed us up in the back of a feed trailer smuggled us across the international border and we infill through the woods and we found our gorillas that we were supposed to link up with we sent the command and the acting team sergeant in again we had a couple captain's on the team now actually one was a major from secret army of Virginia mr. Ben Clark was his name if you've ever read the Tom Clancy books Ben Clark was a I Spy was not a seal he was a skinny guy with the largest mustache you've ever seen Ben I love your brother we gained rapport with the medics we gained rapport with the guerrillas they welcomed us into their camp this was wintertime we have freezing rain coming down you've got snow a couple times we had to bring him in I had to do medical examinations on everybody we had a couple females we had to set up like a little private areas with Poncho's slit trenches we would they would parachute in supplies we had to take them train them we would the commo guys would have to go up go off miles away to do their combo shots back to be a SATCOM and everything we ran this as though it was real guerrilla warfare with us behind enemy lines then we started doing reconnaissance missions with them and actual attacks raids ambushes and it was awesome awesome training now we would drink water out of the rivers we would drink water we actually drink water out of a cow pond once we had to treat the water properly nobody likes using iodine tablets we're three weeks into this and here's why you need to treat your water properly I actually came down with a histolytica little amoeba so I made it through the course and actually graduation where we earned our Green Berets I was on all kinds of drugs to kill all these amoebas and me at graduation I had to actually get up twice during the ceremony to go take a dump because I literally had I had feces coming out both ends of me it was terrible dehydrated IVs at night but I made it through earned my Green Beret thanks mom for coming down for graduation enter language school because I wanted to go back to 5th Special Forces Group so my wife could live in her hometown I volunteered for fifth group I ended up sending me to learn Egyptian now why did we learn Egyptian and started instead of modern Standard Arabic I appreciate you asking we learned Egyptian because you can remember you're Saudi dialect versus your Iraqi dialect versus your Jordanian dialect the dialects of Arabic are all different the worth for example where one might say Iowa for yes another one would say Nam for yes I'm just using that as an example but all of them understand Egyptian why they understand Egyptian because that's where all other soap operas are filmed - believe it or not it's all their soap operas are filmed in Egypt so they would consider it ghetto slang for example but they all understood it whether they wanted to learn it or not so I get to 5th Special Forces Group I get put on my first a team I have earned my green beret now I want you to understand that your schooling does not stop there as soon as I got there one of my first missions was to go train the Kuwait ease how to use their new m1 Abrams tank so they sent my a team to the m1 Abrams tank commander course I went to MBC school nuclear nuclear biological chemical warfare school I went turned my expert field medical badge so now I had my expert infantryman badge my combat infantryman's badge and my expert field medical badge which is hilarious because I also got my combat medic badge when we invaded Afghanistan so I had all four of them with the paramedic school I went to hazmat school I went to this school I went to that school I went to sodic Special Operations target interdiction of course now called the you the Special Forces sniper course which that happened to be my third or fourth sniper school up to that point about that same time fifth group started their own SIF company or Crypt company it's called now which is basically a hostage rescue unit they asked they needed a medic on the halo team that was also a sniper qualified they asked hey you want to go to halo school and sephardic that's our hostage rescue school like who doesn't want to do that so I got drafted down to the SIF company brand new company got to go to halo school another school got this go to sephardic that's our hostage rescue school I do all kinds of back-to-back schools mirror-image where you actually learn to be a terrorist so that you can think the way the bad guys do but I'm with the dozens and dozens of other shooting schools and my point of saying that is you're never done your schooling alright I'm towers fell the global war on terror and now it's real world experiences back to back combat deployments but even between them you're doing more schools but even before the towers fell we were still deployed just as much a Green Berets are always gone there are Green Berets in over 60 different countries today and so anyways if you are interested in going to go be Special Forces basically I got no idea how the pipeline is right now but one thing I will tell you is once you start schooling and you start going down that path your schooling never ends but what I will tell you is I do not regret it one a bit best job in the world better than a rock star and I love it because I got to do all the fun stuff that you see in the movies I got to play army and more importantly I was surrounded by some of the greatest Americans to my left and right I consider them my brothers and I wouldn't have traded a day for it so anyways that's all I've got for this week here on tactical riflemen you know the deal your comments below and I'll see you next week y'all take care of shoot straight if you liked this video make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe also make sure you follow us on Facebook Instagram and Twitter so you don't miss out on anything

Channel: Tactical Rifleman

Views: 319,205

Keywords: Tactical, military, training, skills, survival, prepper, how, to, special, forces, karl, erickson, techniques, conceal, carry, 2nd, amendment, hunting, hunt, green, beret, join, army, navy, seal, selection, difficult, earn, get, through, tough, physical, best

Id: 2_FX76AYkYQ

Length: 28min 32sec (1712 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020