A day in the life of a Green Beret

But the label of dangerous renegades stuck to Special Forces, and for a decade the unit struggled with that reputation and some Army brass hesitated to use them in combat. That changed during the Persian Gulf War, when Special Forces troops collected intelligence and performed combat missions behind Iraqi lines. Perhaps their greatest success has come in Afghanistan, where their ability to innovate allowed them to direct the Northern Alliance and local forces against the Taliban on the ground, while calling in US air strikes to assist in the campaign.

The Special Forces unit traces its origins to the Office of Strategic Services, a World War II operation that fostered opposition to Nazis and their allies in France, Central Europe and the Balkans.

In June 1952, the first Special Forces unit was activated, with a primary mission of training, equipping, advising, and assisting foreign forces. The training was intended to professionalize the armies and defend a nation from internal attack. The unit also trained for missions such as guerrilla warfare, reconnaissance, rescue, and counterterrorism. Wearing green berets as a sign of their special status, many of the first Special Forces soldiers were natives of Eastern Europe, trained to fight behind enemy lines and in the mountains.

Today, there are five active-duty Special Forces groups and two National Guard groups, roughly 9,000 soldiers in all, most of them enlisted soldiers, their average age 31. The Special Forces unit is built around the concept of 12-man teams resembling self-contained armies with weapons, engineering, communications and medical experts. The teams are tight-knit on and off the job, members say. They know the names of one another's children, who call them "uncle," and families socialize together.

Green Berets say they were drawn to special operations because they wanted to work with a more professional group of soldiers, where everything wasn't designed with the buck private in mind.

The soldiers live under different rules, in a gray area between overt and covert operations. In the Balkans, for instance, Green Berets move among the locals without helmets, body armor or visible weapons. They live in houses among civilians, as a sort of tripwire to let commanders know if problems are coming.

Expected to improvise to suit their needs, Green Berets get the Army's new weapons first and modify them to fit the situations they face – such as urban combat at close quarters – something too dangerous for traditional units.

One Green Beret, or a small group, are expected to carry out a mission with little supervision. In spring 1991, for example, after the Persian Gulf War, Sissons and other 10th Group soldiers went to northern Iraq to manage the flood of Kurdish refugees. He and 50 other soldiers delivered supplies to 100,000 Kurds in one camp, organizing what had been a chaotic distribution of food, water, and medicine and setting up camps for the Kurds to live in. The numbers of those dying of starvation dropped dramatically.

One day, as Sissons was walking up a hill, a Kurdish man pulled him into a tent. His wife was about to have a baby. Working with what he had at hand, Sissons pinched the umbilical cord with a paper clip. "And I cut the cord with this knife right here," Sissons says, pulling out a pocket knife. The father named the baby after him.

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