A day in the life of a Green Beret

Sgt. 1st Class Lynn Davis laughs at the way most civilians view his job as a Green Beret.

"People think it's like James Bond or MacGyver stuff where you can make an explosive out of two chocolate bars, a spoon and a little (duct) tape," he says.

The reality is less glamorous, say Mr. Davis, a 10-year veteran of the US Special Forces, and his colleagues, interviewed in Tbilisi, Georgia, their current posting.

Chief Warrant Officer Jim Sissons recalls delivering a baby in Northern Iraq, pulling rotten teeth in Mauritania, and patrolling war-ravaged towns in Bosnia. While it's true that Special Forces train to fight covert commando missions behind enemy lines, that kind of mission may come up once, or never, in a Special Forces soldier's career, these soldiers say. Much more often, they are carrying out missions like the one in Georgia, where Mr. Sissons' unit is teaching the former Soviet republic's army brass how to run their army, American-style.

As the US continues its war on terror, special operations have become a sort of "force du jour" among Pentagon planners. In Georgia, the Green Berets from 10th Special Forces Group are training the Caucasus nation's struggling military, in part to fulfill US hopes that it can hunt down terrorists suspected of hiding here.

In Afghanistan, Special Forces soldiers fought with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Defense experts dubbed it the "special operations war" and "special forces" has become a catch-all phrase to describe military and civilian special operations.

But there is only one unit officially called Special Forces – a small, low-key cadre within the Army that traces its roots to World War II. The elite unit's actions have sparked both controversy, as in several missions in Vietnam, and a fascination with the troops known informally as the Green Berets.

The soldiers typically spend at least six months of the year deployed, in small groups or alone, and are trusted to execute missions with greater responsibility and risk than assigned to the average GI. They study the language and culture of the countries they work in. Sometimes they can't even tell their families where they are going – partly out of security concerns, partly because they don't want to jeopardize their chances of entering other, more covert units, like Delta Force. "If we had our way, we would go in and you wouldn't know until we got out," says Chief Warrant Officer Hurley Gilpin, a Green Beret since Vietnam.

Special Forces launched covert guerrilla missions behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War, drawing accusations that they sometimes killed innocent civilians. "They were fairly unapologetic that they were trying to eliminate communist insurgency in the south," says Tim Brown, a senior analyst with Globalsecurity.org, a military think tank in Washington D.C. The Army charged one Special Forces commander and his men in the killing of a Vietnamese double agent. The killing was part of a CIA program that assassinated thousands of Vietnamese. The charges were later dropped.

Special Forces also had many ingeniously successful missions during the war, Brown says. For instance, soldiers captured North Vietnamese weapons, sabotaged them, and slipped them back. The guns exploded when fired, killing North Vietnamese troops.

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