At such a young age, what was the impetus for you to want to attend West Point Military Academy?
There’s a variety of reasons, and a lot of young people choose a military academy for a variety of reasons, so you have to put my decision in the context of the times. I graduated from a very small high school in 1971, in the Florida pan-handle. Most of the kids that attended this school grew up on farms. It was also on the tail end of the Vietnam War, which as you know ripped this country apart, and the military wasn't popular. But for me, I had just always had this feeling that I should somehow serve my country, it didn't have to be in uniform, but I felt that I should somehow try to serve for a period of time. My Dad had done a short hitch in the Navy after he had gotten out of high school in the 1946 to 1949 time frame, and he had his cracker jack Navy uniform hanging in the closet when I was a kid. But he always emphasized that he wanted more for me than he ever had the opportunity to have, and insisted that I plan on going to college.
So we talked about the Naval Academy, and at that time you couldn’t get into the Naval Academy if you didn't have twenty-twenty uncorrected vision. Which I didn’t have. But West Point did allow you to come in with less than perfect vision as long as it was correctable to twenty- twenty. And I did have that, so I went through the whole application and testing procedure which was quite lengthy and sometimes arduous. So for me, one, it was an opportunity to get out of small-town U.S.A. and go to a prestigious institution with a lot of history, and get a very high quality education. I didn’t go in with the intention that I would make the military a career- I really didn’t. I didn’t know enough about it. But I was the first member of my family to attend college, so this was an opportunity like no other.
So it was a mix of things for me- I did want to serve, I wanted the chance to do something special. And I actually was able to get into the academy, so the four years there was probably more difficult getting through it than it was getting into it, but I managed to do that.
One of the lines in the Ballad of The Green Beret is “One hundred men will test today. But only three win the Green Beret.”
What was it about you that made it so you were amongst the select few able to pass the training and be in Special Forces?
Well, first that is just a song, and I don’t think there are any statistics, but certainly the selection rate is very small. So before I answer your question, if I could, the selection and training for U.S. Army Special Forces has changed over the years. At one point in late 1983, I was a Special Forces instructor in charge of phase one Special Forces Qualification Course. It was thirty days in North Carolina, we would typically get four-hundred candidates, who were a mix of enlisted and officer. And by the end of the second week, of the four week phase one, I would be down by fifty percent of students for one reason or another because most of them just couldn't hack it.
And then by the end of phase one of the two-hundred that were left, we probably passed forward one-hundred and thirty into phase two. So there was this constant process of people dropping out. Sometimes they were injured, some of them had recycle opportunities, and some of them just didn't have the mental attitude. We used to call it “The thinking man’s ranger school” because it was physically tough, but the emphasis is that the most important distance on the battlefield is the six inches between your ears. It’s about the mental over the physical, even though the physical is really tough.
"Clips from Discovery's Two Weeks in Hell, which was done of SFAS (Special Forces Assessment And Selection) in the US Army at Camp McCall, North Carolina. I don't own the program or any rights."
These days, they have Assessment and Selection course that you go to, just to see if you can pass into the training pipeline. So the attrition rate beyond that is not as bad because there is a vetting and filtering process. And it certainly is a lot more efficient because back in my day when I went through it and even when I was a trainer, they would allow some kid to enlist in the Army for Special forces, so he would go to Basic, Infantry AIT, jump school, and be assigned to Fort Bragg for SF training, and then he would fail. And then you ask, what do you do with him now? And we were funneling a lot of troops over to the 82nd.
Every night a young soldier would come outside my office, come in and say “Sir, Private Schmidt, desires to terminate training”
And I would ask him “Okay, why do you want to terminate?”
“Well Sir, this isn’t what I expected.”
“What did you expect? What do you know about Special Forces?”
“Well I saw Rambo…”
“Okay… So you expect this to make you Rambo?”
So I would give them a pep talk about being a good soldier, and if he wanted to come back later to come back, as long as he had a good attitude.
Special Forces Motto- To Free the Oppressed
But for me, I was always just drawn to the Ranger operations and Special Forces, and I would have to admit when I saw the John Wayne movie, The Green Berets, it influenced me a bit. It was about the challenge. I wanted to be among the best of the best, and wondering if I had what it took. So you go through the training, you do the best you can, you don’t quit and you keep a good attitude.
It’s mind over matter. It’s just having that goal of succeeding. And honestly when you get through all of the training, and you actually receive your Green Beret, and you become recognized as a Special Forces soldier, at that point you’ve learned a lot, you’ve demonstrated a lot, but what you really have is a license to go and learn more. When you get to the groups, and you get on the teams, it is a continuous learning process and you have to re-earn it every day.
"A bronze sculpture of a Green Beret Special Forces non-commissioned officer from the Vietnam War stands from a height of 22 feet in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s Memorial Plaza at Fort Bragg. He is alert and at the ready with his finger above the trigger of his M-16. His hand is extended, and his foot crushes a snake to represent the end of oppression. The statue itself is 12 feet of bronze, standing atop of a green granite pedestal. Inside the statue’s base is a time capsule with a Spacial Forces uniform, a Green Beret, John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Green Beret soldiers, and a bust of JFK. The platform that has an inscription. The statue faces an American flag and the USASOC Memorial Wall Marker, which has the names of soldiers killed in combat."
You deployed to El Salvador during their civil war, in a time of great civil unrest. Can you tell me about that experience?
At the time I was assigned to Third Battalion, Seventh Special Forces Group in Panama. And we recognized what was happening in El Salvador- there were no easy answers to any of it. President Carter was still in office, and I took a small team of Special Forces Communicators into El-Salvador in the summer of 1980, to sort of do a survey, if you will, of their communications capability from a strategic to tactical level. We did that, which required us to travel all over the entire country, and in that process we saw a lot of what the Guerrillas were doing, what the insurgency was doing, the quality or lack thereof of the military, which allowed a lot of corruption, nepotism, you name it. And of course, the Death Squads were already starting up.
We were asked to come back for a couple of months, with President Carter still in office, and provide some training in the communications area to the El-Salvador military. But as a part of this, obviously, we travelled all over the country and observed what was going on. When I came back from that I was asked to personally brief the United States Southern Command Commander at the time, Lieutenant General Wallace Nutting. And we had a one on one conversation, and he asked me what I thought, and I said “Sir, this is just my opinion, but I think El-Salvador will probably fall to the communist guerrillas in less than a year unless they get some type of assistance.”
Fast forward to March of 1981, President Reagan is in office, and we start getting orders to go into the country to provide what they call “lethal training”. The gloves were coming off as far as what we could do. So I took a team in on a six month mission to train one of the Immediate Reaction Battalions, although there was nothing immediate about their reaction. Their capabilities were minimal, again the corruption was there. There was this oligarchy that sort of controlled the country so we were very aware of everything. So there was a strategy that was developed, and that was that we were going to be patient, our goal was to train the military from a tactical to a strategic level, and develop a professional military that is responsive to a democratically elected government. So in the long term, we were successful. It took about eleven years for that to come about. The guerrillas came to the negotiating table, and they’ve participated in a political process ever since.
US Soldiers in El Salvador
I can tell you for the mission itself, I was the first ODA (Operational Detachment Alpha) Team Leader, to take a team into that war. And it was like the wild-wild west. We were initially restricted from carrying a long-gun, we were restricted to only carrying side-arms, and there were firefights around us all the time. I protested that order and was told to shut up and go color. But it was a classic Special Forces mission- working with and training the military, but they had these huge expectations. They gave us a list of what they wanted going in. They wanted to be trained in military freefall operations, they wanted to be trained in SCUBA, they wanted all of this highly technical, highly specialized training, but yet they didn't even know how to zero and properly maintain their weapons. So we had to design a training program from scratch that started at the lowest possible level. And this is all while the unit is rotating in and out of combat operations.
So there was a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty on the part of many people in the U.S. Government. We got a lot of visitors, I got challenged by a certain congressman who didn't want us there. And I was asked “What progress are you making? Why is this taking you so long? Have you observed them torturing any prisoners?”
“No Sir, I have not.”
“Well I think you're lying to me.”
It was those kind of things, but at the end of the day that part of El-Salvador has the senior U.S. Army guy on the ground, Special Forces Captain- I was the United States Government as far as the local people were concerned. You think about a young officer and some NCOs carrying that strategic responsibility, and having to think about what you say and what you do really having an impact. It was an excellent mission in many ways, it was very frustrating in many ways, and I think that can describe any mission anywhere.
"Colonel James Steele of the US Army, a special forces adviser to the Salvadoran Army"
We got shot at, we got rocketed, and my team was on an assassination hit list for the whole time we were there. We think the hit list was from the ultra-right death squads, not the left. So you had to be very careful about who you thought your friends might be. Again, just a classic Special Forces mission, we worked with these guys, we didn't have a lot of free time, we also had to be very careful about guarding ourselves, so we had an escape and evasion plan, on and on. Very often, the more senior military people at the U.S. Embassy just didn't understand what we were doing or why. We developed a medic training course, because they were losing so many of their soldiers on the battlefield, because they had no medics. And I was told that standing up and training some medics is not part of your mission. And I said “Show me where it’s not part of my mission. I’m supposed to train this battalion to be effective in combat, and this is part of it, and they need to know they have some medics that can help them out.”
We taught a select few how to detect and disarm IEDs (improvised explosive devices), although we just called them booby-traps.
Photo from The Salvadoran Civil War
It was definitely an interesting and a challenging time, all the way around from the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Government, down to the fact that I learned that a few of the officers that were a part of our training were affiliated with death squads. I suspected it then, based off some of the things they were saying and I had the opportunity to report that. Earlier in 1980, during some of the communication things I spoke earlier about, part of the army decided to pull a coup, and the signal center we were working with was a part of that. So for three days, myself and another NCO, were the only Americans that were allowed inside this rebellious part of the Army. And we would sit and drink coffee with them, chat with them, watch what they were doing and ask them questions, and obviously we would go back to the embassy and report everything. So we were pretty much the primary source of reporting on what was happening at a national level for a while.
Photo from The Salvadoran Civil War
I was just a captain, but I got called in and was told that someone wanted to interview a guy that was on the ground. So I had to arrange to get in, and I went to the ambassador’s house and sat by the pool with the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Latin America, Bing West, former Force Recon Marine, he’s very prolific today in his writings. He sat there and talked with me for an hour, along with his aid, and he asked me “I’m going back, and I’m going to personally report to President Reagan how things are going. If there’s one thing you could tell President Reagan, or ask him for, what would it be?”
And I didn’t hesitate, I didn’t say let us carry long-guns, because we were already doing that, we were just doing it very surreptitiously and quietly. I said “We need to be allowed to train these guys at night, outside their headquarters. Guerrillas move, re-supply, and evacuate their wounded at night, and these guys just hunker down because they're too afraid to do anything at night. We have to train them how to conduct operations at night. Otherwise, they’re never going to win.”
And sure enough, two weeks later, a cable came down to the embassy though the State Department, saying we were authorized to train at night. Also, as this interview was finishing up, the U.S. Ambassador came out and invited me to stay for dinner with the president of El-Salvador. So he had me sit directly across from the President, and asked me give him a briefing on how I thought things were going and my impressions of the unit we were training. So there’s an example of a young SF officer interfacing with a head of state and a U.S. Ambassador and Assistant Secretary of Defense in a matter of a few hours, and being listened to. And that’s pretty neat.
You have thirty-six years of combined active and reserve duty. What is it in particular that has made you so committed to service? at what point did you make the choice that military could be a career?
Between my sophomore and junior years at West Point, I had the opportunity to attend Ranger School. They had a program for a few years back then, where some West Point Cadets and some ROTC cadets could attend Ranger School in the summer. The course was actually extended for a week then for the cadets, because the ROTC cadets had to qualify with weapons, so that was another week of suck if you will.
For me, at the end of sophomore year at West Point, which had been very challenging academically- I had twenty-four semester credit hours in one semester, which included nuclear physics, bio-chemistry, differential equations and probability, English, history, on and on. I mean it was just killing me. I didn’t have any problems with discipline or the military part of things, but I was just beat down, and I was questioning myself as to whether or not this was something I wanted to continue to do.
Then I had the opportunity to attend Ranger School, and I said to myself, this is supposed to be one of the toughest schools in the entire military, why don't you give it a go? And the TAC officer that was in charge of my company, saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself, he pushed for me to be selected to go- and I was. So I went through Ranger School, at the age of twenty, and graduated without being recycled, and came back to West Point with my Tab. And right then and there having experienced Ranger School, I knew what I wanted to be and what I wanted to do, and I wanted to be Airborne Infantry, Ranger, Special Forces, all that stuff. It just motivated me to serve.
For a variety of reasons, at the nine year point of active duty, I decided to leave full-time active duty and stay in the reserves. And I was in the CIA for a while, and then worked at SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and other parts of DOD (Department of Defense) and intelligence community as a civilian, but I kept getting recalled back to duty because I was a Special Forces guy. Time just kept going on, I would get picked up for another promotion- I never expected to be promoted past Lieutenant Colonel, but for some reason I was. I can tell you that a part of it was that you feel a commitment to the people that you’re with. The camaraderie, you serve with a lot of good people, and sometimes you see some examples of some not so good leaders and not so good leadership. And you say “These Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines, deserve better leadership than I saw this person give. I am going to make sure that at least the one’s that I am in charge of and responsible for get better leadership than I’ve seen some others give."
So to me it was more of a commitment to the people, and recognizing that that expanded to basically trying to make the Army and actually the military a more quality, better place, and by extension, help secure the nation. So it kept rolling along, and the next thing you know I’m a two star. I never expected it, but I just loved being around soldiers, especially young soldiers. I’ll tell you, the American GI, no matter what service, deserves the best leadership that can be ever given, because they come from a free country and they are used to trying to understand why they are doing what they’re doing. Sometimes in the heat of combat, you can’t say “I want you to go over here, and do this because…”
You just have to say “Go take care of it.” And you have to develop a lot of trust with those you’re responsible for. So over time you start recognizing that you’re kind of good at what you’re doing. And taking care of people while accomplishing the mission was something I did very well. So I just said “I think I should stick with this.”
You started Decisive Edge LLC. Can you tell me about what it is, and what the motivation was for you to create it?
First of all when I retired I went to work for a large defense contractor, and I stayed there for two and half years and I was the vice president for developing business strategies for the special operations community, intelligence community, and other business development and marketing. I learned a lot, but I also learned I prefer to be my own boss. So in Decisive Edge LLC, I am the one and only employee. I’m everything from the janitor to the CEO, the travel agent and the secretary. Essentially I do consulting as the primary thing. I’m also asked occasionally to come speak to people about leadership so I do that. I did have a website, but I took it down because I wanted to reconstruct it. I’ve had a variety of clients, and I like working with small companies and because they are sort of flexible, responsive and highly motivated and a little bit easier to work with than some of the larger companies. They don’t pay as well, but I do enjoy it.
The motivation was to try to do something on my own, and also to continue to contribute, because I only represent clients that have either a service or a product that I think brings value added to the special operations or intelligence communities- otherwise I don’t represent them.
Photo Credit: The Green Beret Foundation
Click on the photo to see their website
For the people who don’t know- what is your job within the Green Beret Foundation?
Well I am the Chairman of the Board of Directors, which makes me the senior guy for the foundation. It’s not full time and all of my time at the foundation is volunteer time, as is every member on the Board of Directors. Like any other organization, the Board of Directors has fiduciary responsibility and is also responsible for making sure the foundation is pursuing its mission, charter and doing business in accordance with our bylaws. So we provide oversight to the day to day operations of the Green Beret Foundation where we have a full time executive director and a very small staff that fluctuates a little, but we have about seven members who are full time. But do I do something with it every day? Yeah, just about. I have emails or phone calls, or I’ll be down at Fort Bragg later this week and part of my trip is for business and the other part is for the Green Beret Foundation.
Of all the charities that exist to support the United States Military, what is about the Green Beret Foundation that stood out to you?
Simply because it supports my regiment, the Special Forces Regiment. And I’ll tell you something, Special Forces are known as the quiet professionals for a reason. They don’t seek a lot of publicity, they just go do what they have to do, and they do it a lot. The deployment rate for U.S. Army Special Forces is very, very high, and the casualty for Green Berets is the highest per-capita of anybody in the United States Military. And that is because of the nature of their mission. When they deploy, their primary mission is not to kick down doors. Their primary mission is to train others how to kick down doors. In order to do that properly you have to understand the language as much as possible, although we have to use interpreters obviously in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. You also have to understand the culture- and you have to live and eat with these indigenous personnel and you have to be prepared not just to train them and send them out- you train them and go with them. And because of that you are constantly exposed, which leads to a higher casualty rate.
That’s something the foundation does, if we have a wounded Green Beret, we are alerted, and we immediately cut a check to the wife or whoever the next of kin is, to help them. Then we start tracking what’s going on with that wounded Green Beret. We offer them assistance while they’re in the hospital or wherever they are for the short term. If they have long term care issues that are not covered by the VA or some other medical institution, we try to cover the gaps. We also recognize the stress on the families, so we try to offer support to the caregivers like the wives or the mother's.
One thing that makes us effective in what we do, even though we’re not a large foundation, is that ninety percent of the funds we raise go directly to our programs to support the troops and the families. Another is that most of the board and many members of the full time staff are former Green Berets. So we know what it’s like. A typical Green Beret is not going to come ask for help. So we learned how to track things that are going on, and we know how to talk to them and we know how to help them.