A Tiger among Us

CHAPTER ONE

DE OPPRESSO LIBER AND THE ART OF BEING UNCONVENTIONAL

WE’VE GOT A LOT OF NICKNAMES—“Quiet Professionals,” “Soldier-Diplomats,” “Snake-eaters,” “Sneaky Petes,” “Green Beanies”—and a lot of different words have been used to describe us: rogue, independent, arrogant, undisciplined, renegade, prima donnas, crazy.

Maybe we are all of those things at times and, yes, you do have to be a little crazy to be a Green Beret. But in my view, the word that best describes us is unconventional.

That’s because everything about us is unconventional. The way we dress, the way we wear our hair, the weapons we use, the things we eat, the way we train, and even the way we think are often unorthodox. I guess we didn’t seem like a highly disciplined military unit, which may be one reason the regular army folks didn’t appreciate us, but that’s not so. Green Berets were, and still are, highly disciplined and highly trained.

We had to be in order to do our jobs—jobs that included things like reconnaissance, direct action, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, humanitarian and peacekeeping assistance, and our trademark job, conducting and providing training to foreign forces in the use of unconventional warfare.

To do all of those jobs, we had to know how to fight, but we also had to know how to get in and out of places and situations undetected, not a shot fired. And we had to know how to build relationships with people of all cultures and nations.

Most of all, we had to believe that, whatever the job, we had each other’s backs. And we had to be committed to our motto, De oppresso liber, “To free the oppressed.”

But I didn’t know any of that back in 1961 when I signed up to become a member of the US Army Special Forces. I was just bored.

MY NAME IS BENNIE GENE ADKINS and this is the story of how I, a conventional Oklahoma farm boy more accustomed to picking cotton than picking up a gun, became a Green Beret. It’s also the story of how, as a member of America’s elite unconventional warfare team, I ended up in a remote South Vietnamese jungle being stalked by North Vietnamese soldiers and a hungry tiger.

My story begins in Waurika, Oklahoma, on February 1, 1934, when I was born into a large and loving family of six boys and one girl. I was right in the middle of the litter, and we lived out in the country in a one-story house that had four bedrooms, and, for most of my growing-up years, no inside bathroom.

A lot of people would say we were super poor, but we didn’t realize it. We always had an abundance of food because we had a garden and we kept hogs, chickens, and even a few sheep sometimes. And we always had eight or ten Jersey cows that we hand-milked twice a day, every day, so we had plenty of milk to drink and sell. We also grew corn, small grains, and hay to feed the cows, and cotton was our primary cash crop, the short-staple kind that you harvest by picking the whole burr off the plant, not just the boll.

My brothers, sister, and I grew up picking that cotton, milking those cows, and doing whatever else was needed to keep the farm going day to day, year to year. We and our parents were the primary farm labor, so we all had to get up early in the morning and do chores before the school bus came, and it came early because we lived almost eight miles outside of town at the back end of the bus route.

I liked school okay and I excelled a little there. I took a lot of agriculture electives and served as president of our school’s Future Farmers of America club for three years, and was president of my freshman, sophomore, and junior classes, too. I also played some sports—football, basketball, baseball, and boxing—but those took too much time away from my farm chores, which I had to do in the afternoons as well as in the mornings.

There’s a story that goes with that, though. My mother decided I had probably worked enough with the boxing—she was worried I might get hurt, I think—and told me I was not to box anymore. But being about fifteen or sixteen years old, I entered a local tournament anyway. As it would happen, I won the tournament and my picture appeared on the front page of the paper. You might have guessed it, that put an end to my boxing career. And after that I didn’t pursue any sports real heavily, though there came a time a few years later when some of my sports experience was pretty useful to me.

When I got ready to graduate from Waurika High School in 1952, I was thinking I’d go into agriculture. It’s what I knew the most about. But I also knew that finding land was tough. Our family farmed more than three hundred acres, all of it rented, and at the time some big, rich ranchers were purchasing all the farmland at a higher price than I could have afforded. Farming did not look promising to me, and I decided I wanted a different life, a better life, so I elected to attempt some college life.

I first went over to Southeastern State Teachers College in Durant, Oklahoma, more than one hundred miles from Waurika, and I fared okay there—not great, but okay. But it was too far from my family, so I changed to Cameron Junior College in Lawton, Oklahoma, just about sixty miles from home.

I guess I wasn’t really ready for college. My high school had not prepared me well for college classes, since we didn’t have chemistry and other college-prep courses, and, to be honest, I was more interested in the pretty girls than in my schoolbooks. The bottom line is, I didn’t do too well academically and my dad decided maybe he was wasting his money on me in college, so I dropped out and began working at any odd jobs I could find—as a fry cook in some of the fast-food places and that type of work, about all that was available for young people in the Waurika area at that time.

Of course, by dropping out of school, that moved me to the top of the draft list, but when my draft number came up it didn’t bother me too much because it was peacetime and, thinking about my other choices of being a fry cook or a farmer, the military looked like a pretty good opportunity. So when, on December 5, 1956, I was inducted into the US Army and sent to basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas, I was not unhappy about the situation.

I was a green recruit and it showed, especially compared to some of the others in my basic training group who were coming back into the service and had more experience. But I did do well with the physical part of basic training. I guess the sports I’d played in school and the hard work on the farm helped me with that.

After basic training, I did my military occupational specialty (MOS) training to become an administrative clerk-typist, and then the military decided to send me overseas where I was assigned to a US Army Europe (USAREUR) subpost in Giessen, Germany. Arriving there as a young private, I got a security clearance and went to work in the security and plans section (S2/S3) of the subpost, where I stayed until near the end of my first two years of enlistment.

Giessen was a quiet post, not much action, except I did get to meet Elvis Presley when I was there. I actually fingerprinted him. To be honest, I was not really a fan of Elvis’s music, but I always respected him because he served his country. More than Elvis, though, I got to know his father who had come to Germany to spend time with Elvis and who liked to go down to the commissary and sit around. He might have enjoyed a chew of tobacco while he was there, too.

I did well enough when I was there to be promoted early to sergeant, which in peacetime was super fortunate, and since I’d been promoted I decided to reenlist for a six-year period. I also decided I wanted to become more involved in operations work, so I requested a transfer and was sent to the 2nd Division of the 9th Infantry at Fort Benning, Georgia. This was a basic training unit and I worked in the battalion’s S2 (intelligence) section for a while, then changed to a combat support company and worked with the basic trainees on an infiltration range.

On that range, the trainees had to crawl under wire and get some experience with having live ammunition fired over their heads. This was fired high over their heads and the machine gun was braced so it couldn’t fire lower, but they didn’t know that. My job was to operate that course, which I crawled three or four times a day with the trainees to be sure the explosives were set the way they needed to be.

After a period of time, though, this was boring to me, and I knew it was not what I really wanted to do. I had heard about an organization called the Army Special Forces and that sounded more interesting. Looking back on it, if I had really known what I was getting into I might not have volunteered, but once I got started I had too much pride to quit. And I can tell you that, without Special Forces, I would not have made a military career.

That’s because at the time in most of the military, commissioned officers looked down on enlisted men, even if they were as well trained and capable as the officers themselves. By this time, I had figured out that I was not suited to work for someone who might be less competent than I was, but Special Forces was not that way. In Special Forces if you weren’t competent you didn’t last long, and you were respected as an individual for what you could do, not for your rank.

It wasn’t easy to become a Special Forces soldier. I was tested mentally and physically, and it was such a difficult program that even today only about 3 percent of the people who apply make it through. What made it even harder in my time was that the selection process they used to evaluate us was not done by a committee; it was done by the older, more experienced Special Forces people who were going out and training with us recruits. They worked with us on a daily basis and they knew what we could or couldn’t do.

To join Special Forces you had to be a triple volunteer: you had to volunteer for the regular army, you had to volunteer to be a paratrooper, and you had to volunteer for Special Forces.

Of course, I had already “volunteered” for the army thanks to the draft, and I had volunteered for and completed Airborne School at Benning, where I was fortunate to come out of jump school ranked number three in a class of fifty or sixty soldiers. To me, parachuting was just a way of getting to the battle, just like some people commute a long way to work.

So I volunteered a third time to join the Army Special Forces in 1961, and was soon accepted into what is now known as the Special Forces Qualification Course (or informally the “Q Course,” but during my time it was all so new it didn’t have an official name) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was there I began to learn the individual and team skills that set Special Forces soldiers apart from other branches of the military.

My class members and I started every morning in garrison with thirty to forty minutes of calisthenics—the Daily Dozen of push-ups, squats, toe touches, jumping jacks, lunges, leg lifts, and the like. Then we would go for a four-mile run (some of the men liked to think they could do a little better and would occasionally go five or six miles) in formation and in combat boots. We’d try to make the four miles in thirty-two minutes, about an eight-minute mile, which was moving along at a pretty good clip.

After that we would shower and dress for the day’s training, which might happen in a classroom where we learned about things like military history and tactics, psychological and guerilla warfare, planning, logistics, foreign languages and cultures, and that sort of thing. Or we might be outside refreshing our skills or learning new ones, such as the use of various weapons and explosives (including atomic weapons), map and compass reading, and marksmanship.