they were a welcome sight, even at “oh dark hundred” on those January mornings.
The exchanges over coffee also served a purpose. They gave us an opportunity to live our cover assignments as Department of the Army civilians. It wasn’t easy, and we could tell they weren’t really buying our story.
The daily runs paid off in another way. They gave us a leg up in the PT we would be taking for the duration of the paramilitary course. Our instructor, Burt Courage, also lectured on other subjects.
A big, strong guy, Burt impressed us with his one-arm pull-ups and push-ups. We may have been in good shape, but he outclassed us. We liked and respected his quiet and unassuming manner. It helped get us through the strenuous calisthenics that always ended with a several-mile run.
Like Burt, all of our instructors were highly skilled. Each man had accumulated several years of military experience, and many had served the agency in the field. Each taught a specialty, the collective goal of which was to familiarize us with a wide range of military abilities we could use later in our careers.
Military officers controlled governments in many parts of the world. Or, they were deeply involved in politics. So learning military terms and concepts could be vital in helping to recruit these men as intelligence assets.
The training also helped prepare us for the paramilitary programs the agency was running in several countries, such as Laos, where qualified officers were needed. But the sessions were blunter than tradecraft; paramilitary operations are not an art.
Another important training component covered the use of weapons. Over the course of four months we used a wide range of firearms manufactured in the United States. We tried out rifles, pistols, machine guns, rocket launchers and mortars. We also examined and fired weapons made in Russia, China and Czechoslovakia.
I had won a Marksman medal in the Army with my Ml rifle. Even so, I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with this block of instruction, because I never liked guns. But I tolerated it, because learning how to hold a weapon and fire it in training surely beats having to learn about it in the midst of a life-or-death situation—something I would discover later in Laos and the Congo.
We spent a lot of time studying small-unit tactics. Our instructors presented theory and described the actions of guerrilla fighters and revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung—as it was spelled using the Wade-Giles method at the time, instead of Mao Zedong, under the pinyin system followed today. We used standard U.S. tactics as our guide and spent many days in the woods and swamps on the base practicing what we had learned.
One simple but standard exercise involved following compass courses. The trainers would give us a list of moves—150 yards northwest, 60 yards south-southwest, 200 yards west, and so on—with the objective of reaching a designated target. To this day I question the value of what we derived, not from the efforts but from the idea of wading waist-deep through cold, muddy water in February and March.
When we inevitably complained the instructors’ standard response was, “It builds character.”
Maybe it did help us to get tougher, and the program encouraged leadership. They rotated us as platoon leaders in the practical exercises. Everyone did well, because we helped one another plan and execute the assignments—and we knew that each of us would be taking a turn.
Even with the best of intentions, though, things can go wrong.
One day we conducted a simulated raid on an enemy camp. We had held two planning sessions to work out the timing, deployment, weapons and personnel for the operation.
We thought we had prepared for everything. We would hit the camp at noon while the enemy fighters were eating lunch. At 11 a.m., the instructors dropped us off about a half-mile from the target site. From there we approached, carefully. We had studied the coordinates and terrain on our maps that morning. Up and down a couple of ridgelines and we would be there.
We moved up and down a couple of ridgelines. Then up and down a couple more. Then we retraced our steps. Then we sent out small patrols.
We never did find that damned camp.
We couldn’t have missed it by much, but we missed it. In retrospect we had allowed the terrain to fool us. Everything looked the same, so in taking our bearings it was easy for us to veer off course little by little over each ridgeline. Whatever the reason we felt embarrassed as hell and the instructors wouldn’t let us forget it for the rest of the course.
We spent our next block in parachute training. The lecture period was short, because there isn’t much to say about throwing yourself out the door of an airplane at 2,500 feet.
Again the instructors were excellent. All had logged hundreds of jumps. They intensified our physical training, including more running along with sessions teaching us the PLF, the parachute-landing fall. We spent hours jumping into a sawdust pit from a 6-foot platform.
Next we jumped from a 60-foot tower, a standard exercise intended to instill confidence and condition us to obey the jumpmaster’s commands. It was no fun and few of us liked it, but we knew it was necessary.
We descended a cable attached to the tower just inside the jump door. Each man strapped on a parachute harness and latched it to the cable. Once out the door the jumper slid down to a soft landing about 50 yards from the tower.
It sounded simple, but it wasn’t.
The first tower jump was the worst. We jumped in sticks—the military term for parachuters in a line—just as we would from a plane. Four men to a stick, I was second, and I remember thinking that I’d rather have been first and gotten it over with. I climbed the tower unenthusiastically, resigned to the idea that it had to be done. At the top we waited in a small room with corrugated sheet-metal walls.
The jumpmaster stood there waiting for us, understanding our reluctance. He also knew the exercise previewed what we’d be doing on the plane, so he used the same commands. We strapped on the parachute harnesses and stood in line.
“Hook up,” the instructor called out.
We complied, hitching our chute-release lines onto the cable leading out the door.
“Get in the doorway,” he ordered, and the first man shifted to the opening, putting a hand on each side of the doorframe. Knees bent in ready position, the jumper waited for the next command. It always seemed as though minutes passed.
“Go!”
Out the door he went. I watched as he took the initial shock of the cable then slid down to the landing point without a problem. In a real jump the four-man stick would go in quick succession, but in the tower we went out one at a time.
Next it was my turn. Almost robot-like, I shifted to the doorway and grabbed each side of the frame. Then I did start thinking, because I could plainly see the ground 60 feet below and realized I did not want to do this. I tried looking at the horizon, as I had been instructed, but my gaze kept returning to the ground.
Stop it!
My self-coaching didn’t help. As if waiting for the pilot’s signal that we were over the drop zone, the jumpmaster hesitated for eight or 10 seconds, which seemed like forever. I crouched, frozen, in the doorway.
“Go!” he yelled in my ear, pretending to shout over the noise of
