Yellow Green Beret : Stories of an Asian-American Stumbling Around U.S. Army Special Forces Read online

  Copyright © 2011 Chester Wong

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 146352949X

  ISBN-13: 9781463529499

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61915-815-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011909060

  CreateSpace, North Charleston, South Carolina

  for

  Jasmine

  —with me every step of the way for the first and last drops of ink and tears—

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Story I Tough Actin’ Tinactin

  Story II Korean Airlines

  Story III The Ear

  Story IV Wily Filipino Cell Phone Thieves

  Story V The Pizza Incident

  Story VI Johnnie Walker Brown

  Story VII The Chow Thief

  Story VIII A Stroll through Sadr City

  Story IX The Expendables: The Purgatory Days

  Story X The Expendables: The Moment of Doubt

  Story XI The Expendables: Assuming the Helm for Horatio

  Story XII Meeting the Man Named Robin Sage

  Story XIII The West Point–Smith College Korean Club Love Connection

  Story XIV Drunk Austrian Pilot

  Story XV The Invincible Rabbit

  Story XVI Hell’s Address: Fort Knox, Kentucky 40121

  Story XVII A Blind Puncher’s Chance

  Story XVIII Dr. Dre

  Story XIX The Sunday Market

  Story XX Selection

  Story XXI The Red Beast

  Story XXII Sniper School: Extending the Range of Personal Lethality

  Story XXIII The Last Son

  Epilogue

  INTRODUCTION

  I am not a war hero. This is really important for you to understand.

  Even though I was a decent officer in the U.S. Army Special Forces,1 I am telling you, I was a really average one—well, for Special Forces. I was an average dude in a special group of people. I feel like I should start off with this open admission, because I am incredibly embarrassed to be publishing a book that revolves around me, when I consider myself to be so unrepresentative of the amazing people who exist in the Special Forces organization and continue to serve so selflessly. Honestly, I feel like the only people who really should be writing anything resembling a “war memoir” are actual, real-live, shock-’em, knock-’em-dead heroes. And that’s not me, so I feel like I should address something about that and how this book is different. I have no illusions about who I am—if anything, my experience in the Army and combat taught me my own limitations. So, don’t think of this book as a “war memoir,” but more just of me musing about my own random experiences and observations of the road to becoming a combat special operator. That all being said, I’m not blind to the fact that not everybody has had the experience of being a West Pointer and Special Forces officer, and I’ve come to realize the value of sharing my observations from a road less traveled, whether they are well received or not.

  When I left the United States Army after twelve years, I laughed at the idea of having difficulty coping with the transition from military to civilian life. For the entirety of my adult life, I had dreamed about being free of the rigid military hierarchy and having complete discretion on where I could live and how I could act and about living places other than some of the lowest-valued real estate in the United States (and other remote and austere locations around the third-world community of countries). When I chose to head off to Taipei for a year to study Chinese, I thought I’d never look back and just drown myself in Grey Goose and Johnnie Walker at the hottest nightclubs downtown in the Xinyi District.

  But, funnily enough, difficulty coping did hit me. In the beginning, I have to admit, nothing felt different. I just thought I was on another extended solo trip overseas and the Army was still watching me and the length of my haircut. I still conducted myself, talked, and acted like I was a U.S. Army Special Forces team leader, despite the fact that I had virtually no contact with my former colleagues in Okinawa.

  After about five or six months, when I became tired of the nightlife weekend after weekend and pretending to be friends with various people on the club circuit and grew sick of seeing the same party girls at the bars and even weary of studying Chinese, the realization of truly having walked away from the only thing I had really understood for almost the entirety of my life finally hit me. It also rudely slapped me in the face when I began noticing that I was running out of money for the first time in my adult life. As soon as I became bored with all the freedom, I panicked and suddenly realized that maybe the greatest things that I would ever do in my life were already over. And I was only thirty years young.

  Prompted by an editor, my fellow classmate Paul Mozur2, who was also painfully studying Chinese at National Taiwan University, I started to write, just to record my stories before I forgot them, for my family and for myself. To be honest, over a late night of beers at a smoky dart bar in the Zhongxiao Fuxing area of Taipei, Paul asked if he could buy me a bottle of scotch and just one night have me rip through a bunch of my best war stories from Iraq and the Philippines. He would write articles in the New York Times and feature a Green Beret’s trepid experiences and adventures abroad in strange lands, meeting hostile men, wild women, and rabid, disgusting, flea-ridden dogs.

  Even though I wasn’t that interested in having my life put out in public at the time, one of the things that immediately appealed to me about Paul’s suggestion was my strong desire to leave my stories behind for my descendents. Both my grandfathers were great men in the Chinese civil war, and I feel so fortunate that one of them wrote three books in his twilight years before he passed away, which I take with me every place I move to. One is kind of a long babble about how Chinese culture is supreme and when it spreads through the world and everybody assimilates (like back in the day when the Mongols would invade), the world will be at peace. Right. Never got off the third page on that one. The second book is a collection of his best poems, none of which I can even begin to understand. I can’t even understand children’s poetry in English, let alone classical Chinese poetry. The third is his account of how he raised my mother and her sisters and brother. This last book is the one that shows his personality the most, his views and thoughts, and it’s an amazing feeling to read his words and feel like he is talking to you from beyond the grave. While I haven’t finished my grandfather’s book yet, it’s my fervent desire to translate it myself into English someday, so that my children and my children’s children can read and understand what one of their ancestors was like and how he chose to live his life. It’s incredible to discover that he actually viewed many things in life the same way I do today, despite the fact that we never really had a real conversation because I had limited Chinese ability when I was growing up.

  So, when I started writing, I wanted to do the same. However, it was still hard for me to start writing, mostly because of the embarrassment. There’s an unwritten rule in the military that the only kinds of people who normally write about themselves are some kind of amazing war heroes who were shot ten times in the chest and then carried twenty people out with one arm while slaying the Persian horde as they came at them. My contributions to the war efforts in Iraq and the Philippines were average-to-good at best; I certainly never had any personal acts of heroism, and maybe even guys I led would say that I was a barely passable commander. For these reasons, it took me awhile to get off the ground and up and running with writing because I didn’t feel like I deserved to write anything. Oddly enough, it was actually when I went back to Los Angeles to meet up with some of my old running crew from my days as a young buck lieutenant in Korea that I really started writing at a faster pace and eventually put out enough material for a book (actually, I have enough for three books and am just putting out one volume initially).

  When I was in the Army, I caught on to the Xanga blogging craze, along with my Asian friends, and started writing quite a bit to stay in touch with friends back in the States in this pre-Facebook era. It was just a blog, but I always tried to put a lighthearted spin on daily life. I guess my life was a bit more interesting because I was doing Army stuff at the time and traveling all over the world. Because I wrote with a humorous twist on all my blog entries, I actually ended up garnering quite a large following and would receive random messages from strangers about how funny they thought I was, how interesting, how many children they’d like me to spawn with them, stuffed “furry” animal fantasies…you know the drill. And one of the guys who loved my blog was hanging out with my old running crew from Korea back in Los Angeles! A guy who wanted me to spawn children with him! Just kidding. Alexander Won is a hilarious guy, and we had a great night meeting over some of Los Angeles’s best Korean barbecue and drinking that omnipresent crappy soju liquor in the little green bottles available at all Korean restaurants. He was so energetic and emphatic about how much he liked my old Xanga blog, when I got back to Taipei, I decided it was just the inspirational ticket from a stranger for me to get over my post-Army blues.3 So, I started writing and found it to be an incredible gateway for me to transition back into normal life by crystallizing my thoughts and experiences into words.

  At first, it was easy. I have some key stories I con
tinuously tell over drinks, meeting new friends, anything—I call it a holdover from my days doing anything I could to schmooze foreign military generals and commanders when I was working my Green Beret voodoo magic on them in faraway lands. I just wrote the funniest stories that I normally told. I wrote the ones I used on the girls in the bars and clubs to get their attention and the ones I used with the guys so they wouldn’t be so hostile and let me talk to their girls. But as I continued writing and began to run out of these popcorn-type stories, I started recalling some of the more serious things that I’d experienced and maybe some of the deeper lessons I’d learned, and that also came out in my writing over time. Maybe you’ll agree with my observations, and maybe you’ll be offended. At a minimum, I believe that I’ve explained clearly why I’ve steeped myself in certain beliefs from my experiences, and you’ll just have to take that at face value. In any case, this was an intensely cathartic experience, and it was a great process to really break down key watershed events and observations in my life and see how they shape what I believe in today.

  I should also admit something…I never wrote sober. That probably makes me sound like an alcoholic, but I’m actually not. Of course, my writing has been edited the hell out of, but it’s all borne out of downing a small bottle of scotch or wine and then drunk-writing to myself. Better than drunk-dialing ex-girlfriends or even worse for today, drunk-Facebooking people on their wall, right? It’s too embarrassing for me to set a time during the day to sit down and begin writing about myself. It’s literally a feeling of shame for me to do it—again, the feeling of being undeserving to say anything at all. But, with a good bottle of wine, drinking straight out of the bottle, which was wrapped in a brown paper bag, like a hobo, like how I rocked it when I was working in Kurdistan, I could tell my stories and share my thoughts and viewpoints.

  Being Asian American is a core theme in my writing, and I’ve prominently called attention to it in the title of the book. Is it because I’m so racially self-conscious? Maybe. Or it could also be that I realized how racially unaware I was until I left my Asian bubble in California and experienced how the mainstream American and the international community really views Asian Americans over my extensive travels and experiences around the world. And having had a chance to live all over the United States and in nine countries around the world as an adult, I think I have a few thoughts on the matter of being Asian American that maybe not everybody has, and it might be value added.

  When I was growing up, the stereotype of Asian Americans was that we all were super smart and were going to be doctors and lawyers. We even believed it ourselves. To me, it seemed like that was the destined peg for all of us eager and ambitious young Asian kids, and we all generally pushed and struggled in that direction, competing with each other for the limited number of slots available for Asians due to the negative effects on us of affirmative action. Out in the Bay Area, when we reached high school and discovered how difficult it would be to compete against all the other Asians trying to get into pre-med and pre-law programs, most of us less-talented Asians realized the best option maybe was becoming computer engineers. It was safe. Meanwhile, our counterparts out on the East Coast were getting the jump on finance and trying to climb Wall Street in New York.

  I suppose what I’m getting at when I talk about publishing this book to raise awareness of the increasing diversity of Asian Americans is the sense of just trying to call attention to an Asian guy who doesn’t fit your classic brainy stereotype of a banker, lawyer, doctor, or computer programmer—we can be pretty dumb as well! And we are also varied and starting to spread out and be part of American society in more than just a few niche professional areas. I’ve called this book Yellow Green Beret, but don’t think that I’m the only one. There are more than a handful, and I hope that nobody takes my book title as a claim that I represent all the Asian-American special operations guys out there. The title is just how I view myself. So, there are more of us out there—a scary realization that there are other Asians who actually do more than these typical white-collar high-education professional jobs.

  I felt like I had to explain all of this after I told an acquaintance that I was publishing a book. He asked, “Oh yeah? What’s it about?” And I responded, “Uh, it’s about me.” He looked at me like I was the biggest douchebag ever, and I pretty much felt like one. I mean, it sounds intensely douchey. Try telling somebody that someday. That is why I’ve written so much about the specific reasons why I’ve published this. It’s not because I thought I was badass—far from it, as you’ll see in the stories. And it’s definitely not for the attention, as I’ve published under a pen name and referenced all people by pseudonyms and acronyms and changed up years and months in an attempt to preserve some measure of anonymity.4

  On the topic of anonymity, one of the other reasons I decided to write under a pen name is because I felt like I could share everything with the public about my experiences that I wanted to with my family and myself without fear of repercussions. There’s a strong sentiment in the military officer culture to stand behind your word—if you do not have the courage and guts to put your name behind a statement, you don’t deserve to make it—and I completely agree with it professionally. I hope to be able to claim that I was one of those guys who used to put my face and word out there to stand for what I thought was right for the most part. But in terms of sharing so many aspects of my personal life, I just didn’t want myself hanging out there. I’m still a young guy with an unknown future career, and I don’t want to walk into interviews and job environments where everybody has access to so much of my background and controversial private thoughts.

  But maybe even a deeper reason is that I feel writers who put their name out with military writing either hold back on opinions, or even more commonly, they go overboard. They try too hard to stand behind their name and take an even more extreme or biased stance on an issue that they were possibly kind of ambivalent about just to take a position for taking a position’s sake. Sure, as you’ll find in this writing, I make some bold statements and accusations during my recounting of a so-called special operations life, and I leave myself open to criticism that I did not even have the balls to put my real name behind these strong words. But, in this sense, I feel that writing behind a pen name allows me to be as honest and transparent as I can be about my experiences in the military and my personal thoughts and observations. If you don’t like or question the pure veracity of the material—well, to be honest, I do not care. I wrote this for myself and my family, not for you.

  Also, just to add another wrench into my adversarial stance to the reader right now, some of the stories I’ve altered slightly by adding a very small element of “nontruth” to help alleviate any concern about revealing classified information. This is not a history textbook, and any discrepancies can be attributed either to my poor memory or to my purposely altering small details. I think my points and the message of the stories are all unaffected by the slight changes. When my editor Paul was asking about this issue, I told him a story about a funny experience with classified information in Special Forces. When I was in Baghdad, I was having trouble teaching one of my Iraqi counterpart lieutenants to calm down and stick to some very basic tactical ideas during our raids against insurgents. So, I sat down, got onto PowerPoint, and built an instructional briefing on slides that I planned to present to him in a one-on-one class. When I finished it, I printed it out and felt like it was that time of the month to kiss my boss’s ass, so I showed him the slides.

  When he finished reading the slides, he said, “Chester, this is brilliant! I’m going to forward this to our headquarters as an example of the innovation we’re doing down here…oh, but wait…crap, this is classified. We can’t show this to the Iraqis!” When I had made the PowerPoint presentation, I had forgotten to delete the header “SECRET” on the top of the slides because I had opened a secret PowerPoint presentation to use its formatting as a template. But nothing I had written in the presentation was secret. I had just made all that shit up in the last ten minutes. Despite my explanation, my boss became wrapped around the axle on this point and said that we had to submit the presentation up several channels to some kind of intelligence approval authority, and the turnaround could have been weeks. Annoyed at this sudden complete obstacle to my objective of trying to teach my Iraqi counterparts something very simple that I had personally just thought of out of thin air, I just went back onto the computer, deleted the word “SECRET,” reprinted it, and then took it to the Iraqis and taught them what I had originally planned to teach them. I never submitted the presentation to my commander again, and he forgot about it.