U.S. GUERRILLAS: With Knife & Strangling Wire

FREE-WORLD historians may one day record that victory over Communism was won not by the conquest of space or the big bomb but by the rapid-fire rifle, armed helicopter, the knife and the strangling wire. The U.S.. at least, is betting so heavily on that possibility that guerrilla warfare training has become the nation's fastest-expanding field of military activity.

This new U.S. zeal for an ancient art stems mostly from the impression made on President Kennedy by Nikita Khrushchev's flat declaration that Communism will seek to expand through nasty little undeclared "wars of national liberation." Explains Defense Secretary Robert McNamara: "These wars are often not wars at all. In these conflicts, the force of world Communism operates in the twilight zone between political subversion and quasi-military action. Their military tactics are those of the sniper, the ambush and the raid. Their political tactics are terror, extortion and assassination. We must help the people of threatened nations to resist these tactics."

In That Twilight Zone. To this end, the U.S. is so stressing guerrilla training for itself and its Allies that a top Army general recently warned: "If you read everything on the subject and listen to some of our military, you might easily begin to think all our armed forces will soon be going around with knives in their teeth." Such is the pace of the effort that for once the reality has outraced the rhetoric. The services have not even agreed on what to call this kind of fighting. To the Army, it is "special warfare," and its guerrilla experts are tabbed "Special Forces"; the Air Force calls it "COIN" (for counter-insurgency), and has its "Air Commandos"; the Navy terms it "unconventional warfare," is training its "SEALS" for sea. air and land capability. The Marines are inclined to scoff--in public. Says Assistant Marine Commandant Lieut. General John C. Munn: "Some 35 years ago. when I entered the Marine Corps, we were engaged in counterguerrilla operations in Nicaragua. This is neither new nor sensational." Yet the Marines have quietly stepped up their guerrilla training, now require all recruits to spend nearly half their time acquiring the skills of the twilight zone.

In that zone, the fighter is unlikely to worry about nomenclature; he is more concerned about how to avoid catching a bullet in the groin from ambush, or a blade in the back.

The Army. The pine-forested acres of North Carolina's Fort Bragg provide a rugged training ground and home for the 5,600 men of the Army's Special Forces. These men, who wear distinctive green berets, fashion crude villages of thatched huts, canvas and pine logs in the woods, act out roles as insurgents or villagers battling for control. Defenders whittle branches into spikes, set them upright under leaves to lame invaders. To show the "natives" how to treat wounds, a friendly medic snaps the neck of a rabbit, slits its belly open for a blood-and-guts anatomy lesson. "This is the liver." he explains. "These are the intestines."

In the deeply ravined semijungle of Hawaii's Koolau Mountains, some 4,500 G.I.s recently pretended that they had been asked to help a Southeast Asian nation beat back insurgents and bolster a friendly government. The training involved as much diplomacy as fighting, required the soldiers to heed imagined local customs, such as the fact that "it is forbidden to cut the hair on Wednesday or to wash the hair on Thursday" (baldheaded soldiers were warned that by some native superstition, they would be considered ''bearers of pestilence and plague"). Then G.I.s taught the "natives" to use M-I rifles and carbines, negotiated such delicate matters as how close to a local burial ground they could set up mortars. They slipped down ropes from hovering helicopters, whacked away tall pampas grass so that choppers could land.

Special Forces are also stationed in the Panama Canal Zone, on Okinawa and in the Bavarian Alps. There, 26 miles south of Munich, some 300 men occupy a former Nazi SS barracks, live a tough outdoor life in which they become expert at skiing, mountain climbing, parachuting and skindiving. In twelve-man teams, they visit nearby friendly nations to learn the terrain, practice landings from submarines along the coast of Norway and mountain tactics in Greece.

The basic mission of the Special Forces, however, is to teach rather than to fight. This they are doing abroad with little publicity. Last year they sent 63 teams into 15 Castro-shadowed Latin American nations, instructed 3,415 foreign soldiers. In Venezuela, for example, they ran some 1,500 Guardia National security forces through jungle courses in which silhouettes sprang from trees at trainees, who learned to pump at least two rifle shots into the figures within five seconds.

The Air Force. Air Commandos, proud of their Anzac-style hats, live in a strange world of seemingly obsolete aircraft: the B-26 bomber, T-28 trainer, slow C46 and C-47 cargo-troop planes. Instead of supersonic jets, they have the U-10 monoplane, which can slow to 30 m.p.h. without stalling, is ideal for dropping leaflets or broadcasting by loudspeaker to villagers. Says one Commando officer: "A loudspeaker is a lot cheaper than a jet."

At Stead Air Force Base near Reno, Commandos learn to withstand Communist interrogation techniques by spending six hours in an isolation cell, half an hour in a cramped black box. In basic training at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base, they are given a tattered piece of parachute from which to fashion shelter, then left to make shift in a swampy area for 3 1/2 days. In the Panama Canal Zone their jungle training is enlivened by tarantulas and real but friendly Indians, who pursue them, try to steal their hats as a symbol of having slain them. The Commandos learn to hunt, cook and eat the loathsome-looking iguana.

So far, Air Commandos have sent training missions to Saudi Arabia, Greece, Mali, Guatemala, Venezuela, Ecuador and El Salvador, helped the Dominican Republic set up its own Air Commando units. In a spirit of international camaraderie, Guatemala awarded the U.S. instructors its own Air Force wings at a graduation party, required the Air Commandos to down a bottle of local liquor to reach the wings at the bottom.

The Navy. As versatile as any are the Navy's SEALS, who must be underwater demolition experts, parachutists, land survival specialists and, after a fashion, submariners. Two mothballed troop-carrying subs have been reactivated for use by SEALS, who are skilled at making landings from them. The SEALS are trained, for example, to parachute behind enemy lines to locate downed flyers, lead them to the coast, then hustle them aboard a recovery sub. Based at Little Creek, Va., and Coronado, Calif., the two SEAL teams (60 men to a team), train at their bases or in the Virgin Islands.

One of the fastest-growing activities in U.S. guerrilla programs is the use of military units to take on civic action projects in underdeveloped nations. The theory is that guerrillas can operate successfully only when the civilians are in sympathy with them. To win loyalty from native populations and make guerrilla warfare less likely, Air Commandos and Special Forces help truck drinking water into slum areas of Guayaquil, Ecuador, fly medical teams into rural Bolivia, build roads and schools in the Dominican Republic. Most such projects are in Latin America.

Commando Voice. Roughly 3,000 residents around the isolated village of Chiman on Panama's south coast recently were startled to hear a voice from an airplane loudspeaker: "Good morning, friends of Chiman. This is a Commando aircraft of the U.S. Air Force. Mr. Mayor, all towns that have an airfield are able to carry their products to market more quickly and in case of emergency are able to receive assistance promptly. We are able to help you build an airfield if you would like one." Commando planes dropped two strips of luminous orange tape and then instructions to Chiman to make, if it assented to this proposition, an "X" from the stuff on the ground. Next day, the "X" was there. Commandos flew in all of the equipment needed to build the strip, watched villagers complete it in two months from instructions dropped or broadcast entirely from the air.

The U.S. is pushing research on new gimmicks with which to wage the old kind of warfare. It is working on a grenade-thrown dye that would mark raiding guerrillas so that they could be identified under a special light when they posed as innocent villagers. It is seeking explosives that stick to a bridge like chewing gum, and has perfected jungle bedrolls secured by adhesive rather than zippers, so that a soldier can jump out quickly under attack.

In Practice. Much of the accumulated U.S. guerrilla combat knowledge is being poured into the frustrating fight in South Viet Nam, where Air Commandos, Special Forces and SEALS are all advising the Viet Nam regulars. The advisers, in turn, are learning valuable lessons. Already they have found that the new Armalite .223-cal. rifle, twice rejected by the U.S. Army for general use, is ideal because of its light Fiberglas stock and high velocity at short range. They have found that lives can be saved by mounting machine guns on helicopters to protect other choppers as they land troops in pursuit of the enemy. Attention to such details as the development of a plastic container for the highly corrosive fish sauce, which the Vietnamese soldier insists on carrying, has proved a morale builder.

The U.S. guerrilla experts have also relearned some old, old truths--that massive assaults are ineffective against shifting, hidden patrols; that reliable intelligence on the enemy's location and fast action to hit him while he is there are vital. The cost of such lessons comes high. So far, 77 G.I.s have died in South Viet Nam. At a time of nuclear stalemate, however, this kind of war is the most probable of all, and the cost of mastering its techniques seems cheap.

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