SFOD-D Selection
I was searching the net and I came across this article which I don't think has been posted on here yet:
Section of article regarding SFOD-D:
In 1979, I had volunteered for the Selection and Assessment Course for 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment – Delta. Delta Force. I was working as an interim platoon sergeant at 2nd Ranger Battalion in Ft. Lewis, Washington, adjacent to Tacoma. I was in superlative physical condition, and had added onto an already demanding physical training program, conducted each morning and augmented by the nature of rangering, evening three-mile runs with a 50-pound rucksack on my back and two five-pound ankle-weights over my boots. We were only beginning to understand about stress injuries to the joints, so I was unaware that I was paying in advance for my future debilities.
When I arrived in Camp Dawson, West Virginia in March there was spring snow on the ground. Heavy-bodied whitetail deer routinely grazed on the airfield at dusk, and the Cheat River crawled with a kaleidoscope surface from between the blue-gray mountains of a leafless Appalachia. There was no shouting by the cadre, who were in civilian clothes with relaxed grooming standards. In fact, there was a quiet icy distance maintained by them. Verbal instructions were monosyllabic and studiously without affect. Most instructions and a schedule were posted daily on an easel-mounted chalkboard.
The whole environment was designed to break with all markers of familiarity we knew from our regular army units. We spent hours idle in the billets for the first three days, left to wonder whether we were already being observed, and to wonder for what exactly the cadre might be looking in each of us. The unit was highly secret, as were the performance standards for selection and assessment, and therefore steeped in the mystique that grew up in the official silence, fed by hints and rumors.
The only standard we had for performance, in a course we all knew would only select around 20 percent of those who came, was to do everything as hard as we could. Save nothing. Do not pace yourself. Give everything and see what happens.
One day, we took an eight-hour battery of standardized psychological tests. We were exhausted from coloring in the bubbles on sheets reading (a) through (d), to record whether we strongly agreed, agreed, didn't know, disagreed, or strongly disagreed with statements like, "I have black, tarry stools," "I like tall women," and "For the most part, people understand me."
After supper, we returned to the barracks, where we were instructed to report to formation with 45-pound rucksacks at eight that evening.
With perfect precision, at exactly eight o'clock as we stood in formation puffing little clouds out into the night chill, the cadre rolled up with eight covered military pickups, parked them exactly the same distance apart, and emerged from each. In turn, each driver called out the roster numbers of his passengers and we mounted up. They then zipped the covers closed around us without another word, and the convoy pulled out of Camp Dawson. The only sensation was that of switching direction and climbing.
Then we stopped. The zippers were opened, and we dismounted. Sergeant Major Cheney, looking like a lost hunter in the dark, directed each of us to tie an activated plastic chemical light to our rucks, prohibited us from using flashlights except in a medical emergency, instructed us to follow the markers and signs on the gravel road, and to go until we were told to stop.
We all burst down the road like marathoners. Within moments, we could hear the first grunts as top-heavy men careened onto the patches of ice and crashed.
Everyone fell, a lot. No one knew how far we would go, but the rumor was almost twenty miles. Chemlites (plastic chemical lights) marked the route. The chemlites would partially blind us, making the dark darker between them. Within minutes, I was bathed in sweat. The downslope became the upslope as we tore like half-blind sasquatches over the undulations of the West Virginia mountains in the frozen night.
I don't know when I started to notice that I was gradually passing exhausted men. First there was one, then another, then a pair here and there. I would hear their feet scuffing in front of me, and my own feet scuffing frenetically up behind them. I had emptied both one quart canteens within an hour and could already feel the effects of dehydration. But I kept reeling in the next man. At some point I calculated that I must be among the front runners.
I had learned well how to be both in my body and out of it, over it, above it, commanding it like an abusive father. My boots were soaked from the snow patches, my socks wet, my feet macerated and swelled inside. My shoulders screamed at the insistently increasing pinch of the ruck straps. My leg muscles quivered. My throat burned with panting in the icy air. And I passed more men.
At the end of the event, I stumbled into Camp Dawson, still half-running and on the verge of exhaustion, eighteen miles total, and reported in to two cadre who recorded my arrival on a clipboard and instructed me to go to the barracks. When I went into the barracks, there were only two men there, obviously not long arrived. I was third out of almost sixty men.
I sipped water and let the exhaustion overtake me as I showered in my wet clothes to wash them, threw them into a dryer, treated two blisters, and basked in the experience of watching more men arrive through the night. Our first physical test had passed, and I was among the chosen. One candidate – that's what we were called, candidates – staggered in, having remembered me pass him in moment of supreme exhaustion, and said good-naturedly, "Goff, you're a ****ing animal." I took indescribable satisfaction from that remark, even as I acted dismissive of it. In the military, nothing matters so much as recognition and reputation. Securing them can be a career in itself.
At around three that morning, however, I had sensations in my thighs that were unfamiliar. When I tried to get up and walk to the bathroom, it was blindingly apparent that I had gone beyond pushing myself, and that I had transgressed the real boundaries of my own quadriceps. I was not strained. I was injured.
I went out the following day for collective training to prepare us for the rest of the course. We ended up walking almost seven more miles, and the pain in my quads was so severe by the end of the day that merely climbing the stairs caused sweat to burst out on my forehead.
Rather than make a big production of it, I quietly packed my gear in the dark barracks, and painfully dragged it over to the cadre charge of quarters in the headquarters building. They moved me into a holding barracks out of sight of the rest of the candidates, had me eat in the mess hall after they were gone, and put me on a plane back to Tacoma two days later. I was on physically restricted duty for over six weeks afterward with two torn quadriceps.
Later that year, I reenlisted with a promise to be reassigned to the Jungle Operations Training Center in Fort Sherman, Panama. My marriage – a union between posttraumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia, born in the wake of a frightening drug overdose – had turned psychotically co-dependent, and I had the idea that if we moved away from the site of our latest insanities, things might get better. They didn't of course. In fact, things got a lot worse. My career was going very well, however, because I volunteered for twice the time any of the other school cadre did to endure the harsh conditions of the jungle with the training battalions. In my professional life, the recognition and reputation were nothing but up. I was almost an icon there. But at home, there was an atmosphere of poisonous hatred and recrimination, a kind of mutual sado-masochism that neither of us knew how to escape.
That's not something I'm ready to write about yet. I know it's not unique. I can hardly bear to think of it even now all these years later, or of how my young daughter grew up bearing witness to it.
When the Delta recruiters came back in 1982, I had already made up my mind. I wanted to attend the next Selection and Assessment course. Delta was reputed to stay away from home more than any unit in the army.
My preparation this time became maniacal. I carried twice what anyone else did to the field, and I stayed in the field, sleeping in the jungle, four days a week. I reeked so badly when I came in that I had to undress on the porch so I wouldn't foul the house. On days I was in from the field, I would catch a ride to Gatun Locks on the canal, eight miles from home, and run back… not jog, run. Six-and-a-half-minute miles, with my lungs trying to burst out of my chest as I sprinted the last half mile. I swam with the barracudas in laps around the lagoon. I pushed and jerked the weights in the un-air-conditioned gym, gulping down four and five gallons of water a day.
My fellow cadre looked at me like I was an alien. Officer and enlisted alike deferred to me. The more insane my household became, where my daughter Elan (Laney), then just six, would hear the suicide threats, the accusations of imaginary betrayal, the verbal abuse and counter-abuse… the more obsessed I became with outdoing everyone in everything. Not only did I run faster and farther, carry more weight, stay longer in the field, my classes were more animated and effective, my preparations more detailed, my evaluations more precise, my command of the doctrine and my tactical acumen more studiously developed, than anyone.
When I showed up at Camp Dawson in March 1983, I had never been so single-mindedly committed to anything. All choices had been taken from my body. The mind was made up. Regardless of the outcomes, I would not quit. If the quadriceps failed, if the back failed, if the feet failed, then they would fail even if I was carried off in an ambulance or fished out of a strip mine.
There was far more at stake than episodic escape from the asylum of my marriage. This was ****ing Delta Force, the highest priority unit in the army. This was the pinnacle from which you could look down at the other elites, down on the Ranger tabs and green berets. This was where you would be exposed to the darkest skills of power projection. This was the secret world into which one could disappear, then re-emerge with recognition and reputation that was whispered and hinted. And inside the man, there is a boy who is scaling the treacherous wall of his own self-doubt.
For a month, the course progressed. The actual "selection phase" lasted for around two weeks, in which each person, alone, would navigate overland with map and compass from point to designated point, using no roads, never knowing how far he would go each day, or when he was at his last rendezvous point (called RVs). Some days, we would go merely seven or eight miles, some days as much as 25. Each night, we would be directed to a camp near our last RV, to begin again anew the following morning. Each day, there were fewer of us. People fell behind the (unknown) time standards, or they became injured, or they quit. At night in the camps, where the cadre forbade us to talk about the course, we would quietly try to compare who'd been seen.
We had all heard the rumor about the final movement: a 40-mile trek that finalized the physical portion of the course.
One night, we were all collected together at one camp. There were only about 25 of us left of the original 60. The cadre handed out new flashlight batteries, and checked our HF emergency transponders. Be prepared to move out at midnight, they said. Everyone pretended to sleep.
At five minute intervals, we were given our RV coordinates and released, and told this time we could use the roads. I departed at around 1:30 AM, with a rucksack that weighed 55-pounds before I added the water, according to the instructions.
At each RV, the rucksack was weighed. I had passed four RV's and covered around thirteen miles when I pulled into an RV not far from Bear Mountain. The scale showed my rucksack weighing 54 pounds. I assured the cadre that it had weighed out correctly, and at 56 to 57 pounds at each time. One of the two cadre instructed me to open the rucksack, then placed a large flat rock in it.
"Don't lose this," he said. It took my ruck weight to 64 pounds. We were also hand-carrying fake M-16s made of metal rods and hard rubber that weighed around eight pounds apiece.
I was still angry miles later, not about the weight, but at believing I was the victim of bad scales, and about the delay, when I failed to double check the turn in Bear Mountain Trail and followed the sign. Forty-five minutes later, I realized I had been ascending when I should have been descending. I checked my map. I had gone three miles the wrong way up Bear Mountain Trail.
****!
As I jogged back down Bear Mountain Trail until I passed the point where I'd made the wrong turn, telling myself the whole time that I had just failed selection on a stupid rookie error after all this ****. But the prime directive kicked in. Don't quit.
As I continued downhill alongside a turbulent mountain stream, I noticed that my feet began to ache – not the usual ruckmarch aching, but something that felt like the bones were trying to push through the flesh of my feet. Don't quit.
I encountered an RV at a swinging bridge, where I blathered on about a wrong turn to the taciturn faces of the two cadre who looked ominously at their watches.
I crossed a highway near Parsons, West Virginia, I think it was, then tried to take a shortcut off-road through a mountain laurel thicket that chewed me up and spit me out onto an RV at the top of a mountain. Two cadre were listening to the radio, and Alberto Salazar had just finished the Boston Marathon in under 2 hours and nine minutes. I exclaimed with admiration while my ruck was being weighed, and was exposed to my first humor from anyone in the Delta Selection cadre.
Don Feeney, that cadre member, said, "He just did in two hours what it took you all day to do." Haha. If that was the 26-mile point, I had gone 32 because of my little six mile detour on Bear Mountain. He had just told me I had 14 miles to go.
At the top of a large flat mountain nearby, there is a huge shallow swamp sitting in the miles-wide dish that makes that concave mountaintop. Through the middle of that swamp, a swamp that was not called a swamp on the Universal Transverse Mercator maps we used, is a soggy path called Plantation Trail. To this day I don't know how long that trail is, but I remember that it soaked my feet with every step and transformed the sensation of the bones trying to stick through the flesh into a bright-hot pain that made every step like a hammer slamming into an anvil that vibrated from my feet all the way into my memories. In a kind of delirium, I slogged across Plantation Trail with a folk song I remembered Emmie Lou Harris singing. The song was in my head, about a mill worker that said, "Me and my machine, for the rest of the morning, for the rest of the afternoon, for the rest of my life." In my head, the song became, "Me and my RV, for the rest of the morning, for the rest of the afternoon, for the rest of my life." By the time I stepped onto dry ground from Plantation Trail, I was singing my new song aloud to quiet the anvil in my head that reverberated from my feet.
Don't quit was no longer a brave self-challenge; it was just a monotonous noise like a cardiac monitor in an ICU.
I was staggering down some gravel road at dusk. The pain in my feet had merged with the pain in my shoulders and back from the rucksack. I had become pain. My only purpose in life had become to chip-chip one silently screaming foot in front of the other. I almost walked into the next RV with my head down.
Captain James Knight and Sergeant Major Don Cheney said I would be allowed to use my flashlight for the rest of the course, and that they wanted to check the batteries. No, I told them. My flashlight was fine, but if I removed my ruck long enough to get out the flashlight, I was afraid my muscles would freeze up. Cheney became angry and ordered me to give up the rucksack. I was arguing with him when Knight smiled and shook my hand. I was then sure that I was disoriented.
"Congratulations," said Knight. "You have just completed the endurance march." I had walked forty-six miles.
"Will you let me have that rucksack now?" asked Cheney.
"Sergeant Goff," said Knight. "Would you like a beer?"
"Sir," I said. "I'd suck your **** for a beer."
Fourteen of us made it. Terry Gilden, an old associate from 2nd Ranger Battalion, had finished with stress fractures in both shins. He would be killed in Beirut in two years.
At Delta, I finished what was called the Operator's Training Course, and was assigned to B Squadron – now well-known to military aficionados who have read Eric Haney's book, Inside Delta Force. My first assignment was to Tommy Corbett's team of assaulters – people who specialized in close quarter battle inside buildings, aircraft, trains, and the like. One of the team members was a man named Marshall Brown.
Marshall adopted me.
He was small and wiry like me, and like me he had a great deal of nervous energy. We were very compatible in that regard. Marshall was one of the most dedicated, one might even say obsessive, operators in Delta. He had plenty of good recognition and a fine reputation. He was a very fast medium distance runner. He practiced his every skill religiously. And he was one of the finest pistol marksman and "practical" shooters in the unit.
I was an above average marksman, even in Delta where marksmanship is the single highest training priority there. On the weekends, Marshall would take me to the McKellars Lodge, the Rod and Gun Club pistol range at Ft. Bragg, with ammunition from the unit, where he would drill me mercilessly and coach me on the fine points of pistol shooting on the match-quality .45 caliber Colts that were standard issue in the unit. It was not unusual, between shooting on the job, and Marshall's weekend sessions, for me to fire 2,500 rounds of pistol ammunition a week.
Marshall was single and lived in a trailer. He also had his own personal pistols at home. Marshall went to International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) competitions every chance he got, and he practiced dry firing, quick draw, magazine change, and position changes when he was at home. He also practiced his lock-picking, his climbing, his various surreptitious entry techniques, and he read his OTC manual constantly to stay abreast of his tradecraft and explosives. This was his peculiar intensity. When I first came to the team, he took me aside and told me, "This unit is at war. Never forget that." He was a former Golden Knight freefall parachutist, and had participated in the failed raid in Iran in 1979.
Marshall was a Texan. I didn't know it at the time, but he was raised by an emotionally abusive father who set standards for his behavior to which he could never measure up. His mother was also subject to the despotism of the father, and by some accounts never intervened. The army was a place where Marshall could work hard and earn the accolades he'd never received from his father, a place where the rules were clearly spelled out and if you really understood them and didn't violate them, you wouldn't get into trouble.
Marshall enjoyed a good practical joke, and would often place Vaseline under doorknobs, turn windshield washer nozzles to squirt people riding on the passenger side of his car, and reach into the shower when your eyes were closed against cascading shampoo and switch off the hot water.
He was always seeking training opportunities. He and I had asked to design a field training exercise, and were riding dirt bikes to look over the training area. We were buzzing over a fire trail, and I had fallen behind him, so I rolled back the accelerator to catch up. When I rounded a turn, Marshall was straddling the bike perpendicular to a deep erosion ditch. For me, it was too late.
My bike dove into the ditch and the front wheel fell short of the far side, launching me over the handlebars to land face-first on the other side. The next thing I remember is looking up at an alarmed Marshall calling my name over and over again. My mouth was full of clay. My neck was throbbing. While I sat up and scooped the clay off my lower teeth, Marshall told me that I landed directly on my face, while the rest of me traveled over my head. He though my neck was broken, and was sure I had been killed. When he had calmed down, he remarked that it was a good thing we did our strength training and that this was what had probably saved my life.
I have had problems ever since with periodic spasms in my neck.
When we were deployed, we would drink. Delta drank a lot. Our punishment for poor marksmanship or errors in training was to buy the Squadron a case of beer. The other favored pastime was marital infidelity, most operators being married men with mortgages. Marshall was not married, didn't chase women, and when he drank with us, it would be an hour or so at a time, nursing maybe half a beer, whereupon he would quietly retire and leave us to our debaucheries.
There were exceptions, of course, a couple of very religious men, including Jerry Boykin who only recently gained infamy with his claim that Muslim resistance to American imperial ambition is Satanic. Jerry used to try and force the rest of us to attend prayer breakfasts at Delta. But Marshall was most concerned with his physical edge, and seemed quite frankly to be rather shy on the subject of ***.
*** was everywhere at Delta though. And Delta Force in those days had one of the biggest collections of ****ographic videos one could possible imagine.
Oh yes. Delta ****.
One of the most odious tasks in the military is charge of quarters, or staff duty. That's a rotating duty to have someone awake and by a telephone in every active duty unit in the military, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
At Delta it was no different, and around once every four weeks, one could expect to be put on staff duty. Delta, however, being closed to the public, behind gates with surveillance cameras and buzzers, there was the kind of privacy where the men could keep themselves awake watching ****ographic videos, one after another, all night long. The joke around the unit was that the wives were asking why their husbands were always so amorous when they finished staff duty.
I watched it too. By the time people started showing up for work and the videos had to be put away, I was almost numb to the images, having often masturbated four and five times throughout the night just to make the time pass, and with the repetitiousness of the images flowing together into a unity of penetrations and ejaculations. I wasn't unique in this, not by a far cry.
I have no idea if Marshall watched the ****o. I actually doubt it. Marshall was squeamish about the subject of ***. At any rate, our teams were reorganized, and my contact with Marshall became less constant. Marshall had fallen under the thrall of a heterodox doctor at Delta who was experimenting with different performance enhancing diets. Marshall would show up at your table at lunch and point to the sugar jar, saying, "That's white poison."
At some point in 1985, Marshall got religion. He'd been hanging out more and more with Lance Fennick, an ex-Ranger who was deeply religious and who attended Boykin's prayer breakfasts with great enthusiasm. One day, Marshall and I got into an argument when I said, in whatever context it was, that it's better to tell your daughter about birth control than not. He launched into a tirade about how that was giving them permission to sin, telling me I was on the road to becoming an irresponsible parent.
I was, but in no way having to do with Marshall's outburst.
Then Marshall got married and drifted out of the unit.
Link: - http://freedomroad.org/content/view/163/69/lang,en/
Last edited by DeltaWhisky58; 11-19-2007 at 08:35 AM. Reason: Re-intriduced original paragraphs to make this more readable
Mate if it's posted it's bollocks....Read Andy McNabb and Chris's stuff nothing is detailed nothing is capable of helping the enemy. I have done so many E runs around the Elan and Darkwind it's unreal, I worked Cadre 2005 and there were two SFOD-D chaps go through....E....just as one would expect they were fine but as any chap will know........the real test begins.
Nothing is new or surprising or earth shattering in this article...as you yanks say it's vanilla!
Interesting read, thanks for postings.
wtf the article was very weird and dropped off on a weird note, so i looked at the original source, article called:
Military Matters #25 -- Rape Culture and the Military
from where?
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization
are you ****ing kidding me?
I just skimmed the post but could this be Stan Goff?
Edit: Yeah it is Stan Goff, real deal but off the reservation from what I have read about him. I think he went from batt. to Delta to a SF group and was in Mog around TFR time, I think he got sent home from there for an issue with his chain of command. He does moderate some type of socialist website.
I thought it was a bit of an odd place to have an article on SFOD-D selection on a site about Rape culture and the military.
Didn't understand why an article about SFOD-D is on a site talking about Rape in the military..
The guy's talking about selection and then starts talking about the use of **** in Delta
Strange...I only found it interesting when he talks about selection...
The site doesn't mention the source of the article so I don't know how legit the article is.
I just thought I'd post it as other's may find it interesting to read
Well ,so to say, interesting read in the begining but in the end it goes hell knows where... Anyway thanx for posting, had a good time reading the first part of it
well its interesting to a point but if you post it all in its entirety it gets very weird. i actually went to the original link because the story dropped off so i wondered if there was more. well, there was more. he goes on to describe how his friend Marshall went nuts and became a serial rapist etc. i doint know if any of this is true but he seems to be grinding a hard bias throughout the entire writing that pops up at very opportune moments:
Later that year, I reenlisted with a promise to be reassigned to the Jungle Operations Training Center in Fort Sherman, Panama. My marriage – a union between posttraumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia, born in the wake of a frightening drug overdose – had turned psychotically co-dependent, and I had the idea that if we moved away from the site of our latest insanities, things might get better. They didn't of course. In fact, things got a lot worse. My career was going very well, however, because I volunteered for twice the time any of the other school cadre did to endure the harsh conditions of the jungle with the training battalions. In my professional life, the recognition and reputation were nothing but up. I was almost an icon there. But at home, there was an atmosphere of poisonous hatred and recrimination, a kind of mutual sado-masochism that neither of us knew how to escape.
That's not something I'm ready to write about yet. I know it's not unique. I can hardly bear to think of it even now all these years later, or of how my young daughter grew up bearing witness to it.this guy is just a ****ing kook.There was far more at stake than episodic escape from the asylum of my marriage. This was ****ing Delta Force, the highest priority unit in the army. This was the pinnacle from which you could look down at the other elites, down on the Ranger tabs and green berets. This was where you would be exposed to the darkest skills of power projection. This was the secret world into which one could disappear, then reemerge with recognition and reputation that was whispered and hinted. And inside the man, there is a boy who is scaling the treacherous wall of his own self-doubt.
I stopped believing the story when he said he masturbated five times a day.
Do you stopped reading at the end of the article? :POriginally Posted by wild_wild_wes
this guy is crazy. Lived in the field for days at a time before selection, trained till it was overkill, the rape part was pretty scary, never expected that to happen, jerked off many times a day ...
chain lightning?This was where you would be exposed to the darkest skills of power projection
Now this is an extremely interesting article...
Has any one read the book Killing Zone, by Harry McCallion? Its a life story of a Brit who goes through the Para's, the South African Reeces, the SAS and the RUC.
The reason i am bringing it up here, is because during his SAS service, he met a Delta Force bloke who posted in Hereford in about 1984, named "Marshall B", who was an excellent pistol shot. He was also a Texan, and a born again Christian.
Eventually it is revealed in the book that he was eventually arrested in th US for over 30 counts of Rape, and is now in Jail serving several life sentences.
Coincidence?
I believe it. If anyone can masterbate five times a day they've got to have the stamina that is required to be SFOD-D.
Same scumbag obviously. He was also the basis of a fictional novel by an ex Group guy a few years ago strangely enough.
Anyway- Delta ****... I think this thread's gone as far as it can.
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