Secret Armies Of The Night

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As easy as the military made it look, Faw was a mission that just 10 years ago the Pentagon would have been reluctant to undertake--and for good reason. The mere idea of choreographing a battle with units from different services--much less with elements of a foreign army and air force--would have been far more dangerous if not impossible in the mid-1980s. That's because for all their box-office power and dazzle, special forces have long been a Pentagon afterthought, an orphan merely tolerated by mainstream generals and admirals but never really loved or understood. Though they have been glamorized from time to time by Presidents--J.F.K. transformed the Green Berets into a tool to fight communism--special forces have always been the runt of the military's litter. To many senior officers, they didn't inspire a lot of confidence.

That view was confirmed over the years in several high-profile missions in which special forces flamed out. In 1980 the ambitious Delta Force rescue mission for American hostages in Tehran had to be scrubbed after one of the U.S. helicopters crashed into a C-130 cargo plane at the Desert One staging site in southeastern Iran, killing eight. Special forces again overplayed their hand in the 1983 invasion of Grenada, where, in what should have been a walkover, commandos suffered unusually high casualties in two separate missions. One reason for their mixed results was that conventional military planners didn't know how to use the units in the first place and were reluctant to mix them in. Many just assumed their best use was as lone rangers, sent off on some long-shot charge all by themselves.

That suited everyone fine for years, because the special warriors, derisively dubbed "snake eaters" by their more conventional counterparts, have always been different. They tend to be older and more specially trained than regular troops. They generally operate only at night, which has fostered their Pentagon moniker, "the Dark Side." Being nocturnal isn't the only reason for the nickname: they carry themselves with a hidden swagger the regulars sometimes resent. They have separate bases, and when they don't, they often live apart and by different rules. And while their unit cohesion is legendary, many of these soldiers tend to be loners, in part because that's always been an element of the training too. Notes Colonel O'Boyle of his colleagues: "They know that if they're shot down, nobody will be there to rescue them. We tell them they'll be executed or become a POW."

The tensions began to ease about 10 years ago, after Congress passed a law designed to end the services' silly longtime rivalries and force them to work together more. But it wasn't until Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon in 2001 after a 24-year absence that things began to really change. Rumsfeld's idea--and he wasn't the first to have it, just the first Pentagon chief to enforce it--was that a few special forces, with the right gear, intelligence and a little luck, could sometimes substitute for the brawn of a 3,000-man brigade. Rumsfeld's views on this point hardened after 9/11. In a world where terrorists lurk, handfuls of commandos can scour the earth much faster and more effectively than thousands of G.I.s moving in division strength. And if you combine the commandos' unusual skills with those of more conventional forces, the results can be dramatic.