Robert Kaplan - Imperial Grunts

Lee, barely audible above the loud typhoon rain, spoke about each Asian army that he had helped train, with the memory of it lingering in his eyes. He was most impressed with Singapore’s. “They had a state-of-the-art shoot house. Whenever a soldier got hurt in training, there was an investigation and a detailed explanation given to the family. Life wasn’t cheap there. It was valued. Officially, Singapore’s a dictatorship, and people in Washington and New York disparage it. Unofficially, it’s a civil society.

“Their noncommissioned officer corps is real good,” he went on. “Singapore’s a meritocracy; lots of future officers are identified out of the ranks in basic training. Chinese, Malays, Indians, they’re all mixed together in units. I went there with the idea of Big Brother. But you just cross the border into Malaysia or especially Indonesia from Singapore, and you’ll see hordes of beggars and people defecating in the streets and you’ll realize why Singapore has those strict rules. You can walk into a movie theater in Singapore without your feet sticking to the floor. Going into Malaysia and Indonesia put things into perspective for me. After those countries, the Big Brotherisms don’t bother you much. Anyway, people in Singapore get around the rules. It’s not as bad as people write about. You just have to be there.”

One kind of training did not halt at Magsaysay because of the bad weather, and it was the most important. It was the CQC (close quarters combat) training conducted by a Special Forces team for a Philippine army light reaction company.

Special Forces soldiers are generalists. They can do everything from digging water wells to negotiating with diplomats to breaking into a house to save hostages. They can infiltrate by water with scuba gear, or from the air with parachutes. They are often in situations of training for one kind of mission, and then have to perform another. Consequently, there are always units in the military that perform specific tasks better than any Special Forces team can. But nobody rivals Special Forces when it comes to their original, classic function: infiltrate an area, and organize and train the indigenes.

Take Charlie Company at Fort Magsaysay, a cluster of Special Forces teams designated for commando-style raids. Whatever one may think, commando training is not interesting. It’s the dullest form of repetition. The rifle range may be fun for an hour or two. But spend a day there “transitioning”—that is, switching from an M-4 assault rifle to a 9mm Beretta pistol in one smooth movement, while always hitting the target exactly where you want—and you will see how monstrously tedious it can be to keep your reflexes primed, in order to be a hero. That is what Charlie Company did. By the standards of the Army’s Delta Force and some of its Ranger units, of the Navy SEALs, and of the Marines’ Force Reconnaissance units, this Special Forces Charlie Company might have been slightly substandard. But those other units only had to fight. Charlie Company could teach indigenes of different cultures how to fight the way it did.

The shoot house used by Charlie Company was a ruined hospital with indoor and outdoor stairwells, and specially constructed movable plywood partitions overseen by a catwalk. Above the catwalk was a corrugated iron roof on which the rain created an uproar. “All units dance,” said the sergeant over his hand-held commo gear. “Dance, dance, dance. I have control, I have control. Five, four, three, two, one…” Then det cords and flash bangs exploded, breaking down doors with blinding light and smoke, and concussing the air against my chest, as several “stacks” of Philippine soldiers flooded the rooms, firing blue plastic simulation rounds.

The Sim Sit, or simulated situation, was a hostage rescue. The operative concept was DEC (Dominate, Eliminate, Control). To an outsider it looked and sounded like sheer chaos, made worse by the smoke from the flash bangs. But after you observed the same drill a number of times, you began to ignore the sounds and shudder of the det cords and flash bangs, and concentrate instead on the evolving narrative of the rescue, which the sergeant was constantly, calmly critiquing.

Rescuing hostages from an apartment or hotel is a matter of technique, broken down into complex parts that have to be translated into muscle reflex actions. You find as many “breach points” as possible and flood them simultaneously, cutting off escape routes. When you “infil” a room you try to avoid the “bad guy” or hostage who might be directly in front of you challenging you or crying for help. Instead, you go immediately to “the point of domination,” a corner from where you can cover half of the room, while your partner goes to the opposite corner to cover the other half. Only when you secure the two points of domination do you deal with the person in the room, friend or foe, because what’s in front of you is not the problem. The real problem may be lurking in a corner behind the door.

Because this runs against natural instinct, it must be taught and retaught, over and over again. Because two are needed to dominate a room, you do not enter a room until your partner squeezes you on your shoulder, to indicate silently that he is right behind you and ready. “Don’t wave your hand. Don’t say a word to your buddy. Just squeeze him quietly from behind,” the sergeant kept repeating. “Each pair can only take one room at a time. So be deliberate. Let the adrenaline subside and think clearly. On the exfil you reclear each room in the same way that you cleared it.”

In succeeding Sim Sits, I left the safety of the catwalk and followed a stack through the warren of typhoon-darkened partitions. I listened to the sergeant criticize and encourage his Filipino acolytes with a distinct voice of authority.

“That wasn’t too bad. It was pretty good this time. But I still see too much talking and jostling. And when you find a hostage or a bad guy, you may not know who is whom. So don’t just pat him down. Squeeze him all over. Squeeze, don’t rub. That goes for his package [groin area], too. Don’t be shy. Daba? It’s your life, remember,” he said, using the Tagalog word for “get it, understand.”

He concluded with, “And remember, guys. We always win. We never lose hostages. We’re the good guys. We kill the bad guys.”

The clichés were spoken with utter seriousness, without irony. Only to me were they clichés. That’s ultimately why these guys liked George W. Bush so much, I realized. He spoke the way they did, with a lack of nuance, which they found estimable because their own tasks did not require it.

At the end of the day, the sergeant and his Charlie Company team demonstrated what a correct Sim Sit looked like. It was beautiful to watch. They became like streams of water, quickly and silently, with an economy of movement, branching off and flooding several rooms simultaneously, squeezing shoulders and advancing, squeezing and advancing, like one seamless muscle reflex.

Away from his job, the sergeant barely talked to anyone. He perked up only when discussing types of bullets, types of infiltration techniques, and so on. He wasn’t comfortable talking about much else. He was the perfect policy instrument.

Observing him, I was reminded that the job of diplomats who wear expensive suits and communicate in complex phrases in exquisitely furnished settings is to periodically negotiate arrangements, whereby the ultimate aim, though never spelled out, is to get someone like this sergeant, with tattoos and several bench-press records to his credit, to teach others like himself how to do what he does, for the training in that wreck of a hospital with its gangrenous walls represented the fingertip point of America’s security assistance policy for the Philippines.