I got the job as a tactics instructor because they asked me if I wanted to go to the 197th Infantry or the Infantry school. I was just coming back from Germany where I was in the worst unit in Europe. The 197th Infantry is an "Ash and Trash" unit which spends most of its time supporting the Ranger course, Infantry school and airborne training. I was in no mood to go to another bad unit.

I was well trained in my job but couldn’t figure out how the Army decided that I should be a tactics instructor. I was a Staff Sergeant at the time so I was in the right grade and I suppose that was enough for the Army. I asked them to assign me to the Infantry School. I got orders but had to interview with everyone and their brother, before they would send me to instructor training.

Instructor training was really more like another very long interview. At one point I had to give a forty five minute class covering everything I could about a chair.  How it worked, what it was made of and anything else I could come up with.

I found out what my class was going to cover twenty minutes before I had to present. It was kind of stupid but the standard line around the infantry school was they would pull an instructor out of the hallway and put him on stage. The instructor would look at his first slide and then discover what he was teaching that day.

It wasn’t that bad but it was pretty close. We trained the advanced Infantry course, NCOs (Platoon Sergeants) and Officers. (Office Candidate course) Basic (Lieutenants) and Advanced (Captains and Majors) The classroom was easy and although I was pretty nervous about testing my wits with Senior NCO’s and Officers I quickly found out that I knew a lot more than these guys. My story of the Anti-Armor Ambush illustrates this.  It doesn't show how smart I was but rather how stupid they were sometimes.

We settled into a normal routine of training our guys when one day we were told that we would be training  officers from the El Salvadorian Army. This was pretty controversial at the time, the rebels had been pretty successful and we had already sent advisors down to El Salvador to help them fight. It wasn’t going well but being a soldier not a politician I really didn’t care. If the United States Army wanted me to train El Salvadoran troops I’d be happy to do it.

Most of these guys didn’t speak English and I can only order a beer in Spanish so we would be using interpreters for the training. If you have ever taught using an interpreter you know it takes a lot longer. Interpreters also have a tendency to play fast an loose with what your saying especially if they can’t follow what your saying or if they disagree.

We learned that there was some big cultural differences between the US Army and the El Salvadoran Army. We were training in Georgia in August so it was hot, not El Salvadorian hot but pretty hot with 98% humidity. The US Army lines everyone up every hour or so and forces them to drink a quart of water. The guys we put in charge confiscated their soldiers canteens and told them that they wouldn’t get any water until they finished digging their foxholes. We ended up stopping that practice when the medics had to send one of their guys to the hospital with heat stroke.

I asked the student commander what he was thinking of when he withheld water from his troops. He told me it would make them work harder. I chalked it up to Latin machismo. We were trying to train them on how to “Win the hearts and minds” of the El Salvadorian people but they were not even able to win the hearts and minds of their own troops.

We did a lot of night training. These guys hated the night. They liked to attack in force in the daytime with a lot of airpower, tanks, and artillery. This doesn’t work against guerrillas The regular Army would return to garrison every night and the FMLN forces would return to the countryside.  This would go on for a couple of weeks then Government forces would declare victory, sort of like we did in Vietnam, and withdraw.

The FMLN were a mean bunch of guys and when they took back a town they made sure that the local people understood they were in control. The government troops we were training could be pretty nasty as well, and I’m sure that if they were not from privileged family’s some of them would have been fighting with the FMLN not against them.

I also started to understand them better. They had a very strong class focus it had a lot to do with who your family was. It was very strange for a soldier, we are very rank conscious, you can look at a guys collar and see if you out rank him or he out ranks you but it is not class structure. No buddy cares who your daddy was.

In the beginning of the training we would give them a warning order for a patrol and then let them put together the plan and executed. We would wait and go to the area of operations and we would never find them. We knew that they were not so good that they could be hiding from us. We later discovered that they were going a couple of thousand meters into the bush and then bedding down for the night.  They really hated the night. We followed them out one night and rather than bitch at them we spent the night with them. We figured that these guys were going to be the leaders not only of their Army but because of the way things work down there they would be the leaders of El Salvador.

That night we learned about how everyone of them had paid some tremendous price because of who they were. One young Lieutenant told me how the rebels had broken into his house killed his mother and raped his fiancée. Another told me how the rebels had ambushed and killed his father. They told me sitting around the fire a couple of thousand meters into the bush that they didn’t understand all this, “Winning the hearts and minds crap.” I thought about losing my dad or mom and it was hard to argue with them. It makes good military sense to be as compassionate to your enemy as you can. They give up easier.

The American Army is trained to be aggressively violent, attack with overwhelming firepower and then to switch to accepting surrendering troops with compassion. It isn’t because we are nicer than the enemy it is just more efficient. Of course we haven’t always done it and it is hard to accept the surrender of the guys you think may have ambushed your dad, killed your mom or raped your fiancée.

We were trying to convince them that they should move away from large unit tactics and to small squad tactics. We broke them up into small fifteen-man night patrols that could find and fix the enemy. They needed to run these patrols in rebel territory. They understood the concepts and did alright during the day but they still couldn’t pull it off at night.

We decided to stay with them all-night and force them to do the patrols the right way. It took awhile and we had some hiccups because we tried to move them along too fast. We would promote guys into leadership positions and because they were not from the right families we caused real trouble. It didn’t work that way in El Salvador you got promoted because of who you were not what you could do. It would haunt their Army for a long time.
Since we were doing all of our training at night I didn’t see much of the base during the day or much of my wife.

We ended a training cycle and our guys went off to an “Escape and Evasion” course. I’m not sure they needed this training since the rebels didn’t take prisoners, but it gave me a couple of days out of the bush so I was happy.

I had not been watching the news much since we spent some much time in the field so hadn’t heard about a couple of Catholic Nuns that had been killed by a government death squad. It wasn’t any of our guys since I think we made a difference. I wasn’t sure if our guys tracked down the guys that killed their family members that they would  have let them go unharmed but these guys weren’t killing Nuns.

I was driving onto the base that morning and was stopped by a bunch of protesters. Carrying signs and screaming slogans. I really didn’t care they were off the base and that is the reason we have an Army in America, so people can carry signs and scream slogans about what a bunch of baby killing Nazis we are. I worked my way to the front of the line and just before I could get on base, a young guy and his girlfriend stuck their heads in my car and screamed at me, “How can you teach these sons of bachelors to kill Nuns?” I might have paraphrased the “you” and “sons of bachelors” but you get the idea.

This is such a perfect setup for an old Army line and since I had real affection for the guys we were training, I decided to answer, “It’s easy you just tell them to lead them less.” I am not sure if the line about leading them less because Nun’s run slower went over their heads or they were just too shocked to respond but they pulled their heads out of my car and the guard at the gate waved me through.

I don't know if we really made a difference, I'm not even sure we did the right thing but I know I did my job and I was proud of the guys we trained.   They didn't come to us as soldiers or leaders but the left Fort Benning as both.