Guerrillas in the Mist: what the Pentagon can learn from the Green Berets.

• Author: Carter, Phillip

In America's wars against the al Qaeda terror network and Iraq, few military organizations play as central a role as the US. Army's Special Forces. Founded a half-century ago, these "Green Berets"--named for the distinctive headgear they have worn since the Kennedy administration, when the Pentagon dispatched them to fight insurgents in South Vietnam--serve as military trainers, political advisers, and unconventional warriors around the world. The iconic image which has emerged from the Afghan conflict remains that of a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha--a real life "A Team"--riding into battle on horseback as if a 19th-century cavalry charge, but equipped with 21st-century weapons and satellite communications gear.

But not much is really known about these elite soldiers, who call themselves the "quiet professionals" Special operations exploits rarely make the headlines except when they succeed or fail spectacularly. Military historians, too, tend to focus on conventional forces and battles. U.S. News & World Report senior writer Linda Robinson helps to fill the resulting void with Masters of Chaos, which offers a rare glimpse inside the secretive world of the Green Berets and their recent adventures. The book pieces together stories from such colorful characters as Chief Warrant Officer Randall "Rawhide" Wurst, whose service record reads like a briefing on the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, to provide a gripping, if sometimes anecdotal and incomplete, history of Special Forces.

The Green Berets patterned themselves after the clandestine and guerrilla forces that operated during World War II, such as the commandos of the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of today's CIA) who conducted missions behind enemy lines and fomented insurgencies in places like Greece after the war. Unlike the Army's Rangers, who trained principally as light infantry "shock troops," the Green Berets focused on unconventional missions, such as training another country's military. The Army's involvement in Vietnam began with the Green Berets, who served as advisers to the South Vietnamese military and later branched out into unconventional warfare missions--the nature of that war making it perfectly suited for such a force. But after America's military withdrawal in 1973, the Army refocused its attention on Europe and the conventional battle it thought it would eventually have to fight there.

Indeed, the Army turned its back on unconventional...