[ via Rohit Khare ] Peter Maass spent time with a U.S. Army Special Forces officer, before and after, his unit spent time in Afghanistan. The unit’s exploits are an exciting and terrifying read — friendly fire and misadventure accounted for several of that units casualties.
Mixed in with the stories of chasing al Queida and Taliban irregulars, is interesting stuff on Special Forces training, and combat stress. The units drill like olympic atheletes, looking to make moves that’ll keep them alive into habit:
Haralson’s training — or, as [Dave] Grossman might describe it, his operant conditioning — helps explain why he had the presence of mind to instantly fling himself to the ground when his grenades were thrown back at him. Ordinary soldiers might freeze for a split second, and this could cost them their lives. Then Haralson, amid the violence, was able to calmly figure out, as though fine-tuning a tennis stroke, that he needed to hold a live grenade in his hand for a couple of seconds before throwing it, and then do just that.
The article goes into the questions about this sort of training, and how do the Reily’s of the world adjust to civilian life. And the Special Forces soldier, who has to switch roles from diplomat to hellhound in a instant, probably has an advantage over a regular infantryperson who has gone through the sort of ‘operant conditioning’ Dave Grossman talks about in On Killing.
