"Demise of SF"

Gentlemen, with great despair I continue to read about the conceptual if not all to real demise of SF in the future. The recent article featured in Military.com clearly shows that the senior leadership of the U.S. Army as well as USSOCOM have already begun the surgical procedure. How did we get here you might ask? Well to tell you the truth this is actually a self inflicted wound! We did this to ourselves, as usual. We “hired on” senior officers and NCO’s who truly weren’t SF, they truly didn’t believe in SF, and were essentially the “wolves in sheeps clothing” from the Ranger Bns, JSOC and the regular Army who were all to happy to sign on to the “good deal of the day” back in the early 80’s when the promise of rapid promotion and being in the “happening crowd” was opened up to them following the slaughterhouse of post Vietnam. Who did we pull in to be our commanders and command sergeants majors? We all know, they were the shining stars from OUTSIDE SF! Since then we have continued to do it with the all too heralded fiasco which held out the shingle “the quiet professional”. These same senior officers must have loved that mantra, not only was SF becoming more conventional all the time, but they were also duped into believing that keeping their mouths shut about what they were doing and how well they were doing it was a hallmark of professionalism. The truth is that while we were all keeping our mouths shut, the regular army was trumpeting at the tops of their lungs, and hanging medals on all their soldiers, while we did what? I shall tell you what, we did absolutely nothing for our soldiers, we always said, “it’s no big deal, we are just doing our jobs”, and we already know “we are better than the average regular soldier” and more and more bullshit like that. After all of our deployments did we take care of our ODA’s, of course not, “we aren’t in this for the money or medals”, well guess what, the regular army is! So we year after year came home to Green Ramp, and other places in the middle of the night, greeted by nothing more than chilly darkness and the U.S. Customs Service, and the monthly piss test, doing total baggage dumps to show what we did and didn’t have, because everyone knows SF cannot be trusted! During Just Cause in Panama, I personally was proud to have contributed no less than 6 urine specimens in 8 months, and I was in the BN staff, now please! Did we hang anything on our soldiers breasts for doing great things? Of course not, because we always thought we were above that. Panama is a classic example of this, the 3/7th came home months later after all rest, after the parades, after the awards ceremonies, and “snuck back into Ft. Bragg in the middle of the night”. Why did we do this to ourselves, why did we cut our own throats so we could expire into history? The answer is easy, because we were stupid and arrogant enough to allow it to happen. Our Cdr(s) thought it a mark of pride NOT to award anything to their men, the Bn that truly laid the groundwork for the removal of the Noriega regime came home virtually unheralded and unnoticed by anyone except our families! This self inflicted wound is why our NCO’s and Officers went to promotion boards with ARCOMS while their peers from the Rangers and 82d Airborne went to those same boards displaying Bronze Stars with valor devices and OER’s that actually said great things, not the “ho-hum” bullshit we were used to writing about ourselves. We practiced the lowest form of professionalism stupidity given the system we existed in, in our arrogance about believing we were so great, we wrote our OER/NCOER’s with the sense of “in our own special way, we are just doing special business as usual”. This is how it has all come to pass, we are victims of our own stupidity and arrogance. So please do not sit confused and wonder how this has all happened SF, look into the mirror you shave in and admit that all our OWN officers did this to us! We were so “above all that” and in the process we have kicked our proud legacy to the proverbial curb! JB in MT