50 Fun Facts About Special Forces

Why did founder Richard Marcinko name his new Navy counter-terrorism unit SEAL Team Six in 1980?

The name was meant to fool Soviet spies into counting SEAL teams that did not exist. The Navy had only two at the time.

How did the first Green Berets in Afghanistan after 9/11, portrayed in the film 12 Strong, travel into battle?

They rode on horseback because their Afghan allies' mounts were the only transport suited to the mountains. Only the team's captain had real riding experience.

Which TV survival host served as a trooper with 21 SAS before a skydiving accident broke his back?

Bear Grylls spent three years in the reserve regiment, then climbed Everest just 18 months after breaking three vertebrae when his canopy failed over Zambia.

Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in a 2011 helicopter raid on a walled compound in which Pakistani city?

Abbottabad is a garrison town, and the hideout stood under a mile from Pakistan's military academy. One of the raiders' stealth helicopters crashed inside the walls.

What do Navy SEAL candidates call the five and a half days of near-sleepless training early in BUD/S?

Hell Week gives each candidate about four hours of sleep in total while running more than 200 miles. It arrives in only the fourth week of the course.

The British SAS first came to public attention in 1980 by storming which country's embassy in London?

Iran's embassy had been seized by six gunmen, and the soldiers abseiled from the roof to end the siege in a 17-minute assault shown live on television.

Which US president championed the green beret as official headgear for Army Special Forces?

John F. Kennedy visited Fort Bragg in 1961 and asked the soldiers to wear the beret, which a post commander had banned five years earlier.

Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles in 1976 to free hijacked airline passengers held at Entebbe in which country?

Uganda's dictator Idi Amin backed the hijackers, so the raiders drove up in a black Mercedes like his to deceive the airport guards.

British SAS desert patrol Land Rovers, stripped of doors and windscreens, were famously painted which colour?

Pink proved effective desert camouflage, and the long-range patrol vehicles became known as Pink Panthers.

Which riot-control device was first used in action by the British SAS counter-terrorist wing in the 1970s?

The stun grenade, or flashbang, was thrown by two SAS men in 1977 to distract the hijackers as German commandos stormed a Lufthansa airliner.

Which US president ordered Operation Eagle Claw, the failed 1980 mission to rescue American hostages in Tehran?

Jimmy Carter later blamed the failure for his election defeat that year. Eight servicemen died when a helicopter struck a transport plane at the desert staging area.

The 1993 battle retold in Black Hawk Down pitted US Rangers and Delta Force against militia in which country?

Somalia's capital turned a raid planned to last an hour into an overnight battle once helicopters were shot down over the city.

Which motto is worked into the cap badge of the British Special Air Service?

Who Dares Wins has since been borrowed by other units, including a French parachute regiment that traces its roots to wartime SAS squadrons.

Cairo, the dog that went with Navy SEALs on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, was which breed?

A Belgian Malinois, Cairo was there to track anyone who fled the compound and to help search for hidden rooms and doors.

Which Hollywood star co-directed and starred in The Green Berets, a 1968 war film made with Pentagon help?

John Wayne turned down a part in The Dirty Dozen to make the film, which he planned as a tribute after visiting troops in South Vietnam.

Which Arizona Cardinals safety left the NFL after the September 11 attacks to become a US Army Ranger?

Pat Tillman had once refused a $9 million offer from another team out of loyalty to his club. He was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004.

Which spy novelist, then a naval intelligence officer, proposed Britain's 30 Assault Unit of commandos in 1942?

Ian Fleming wanted commandos to go in with the first troops and grab enemy codes and equipment. He later drew on those men when he created James Bond.

Bill Millin landed with Lord Lovat's commandos on D-Day armed only with a small knife and which instrument?

Bagpipes were banned from the front line, but Lovat told Millin the rule came from the English War Office and that both of them were Scottish.

Who issued the secret Commando Order of 1942, under which captured Allied raiders were to be shot?

Adolf Hitler had only 12 copies made, and some commanders, including Erwin Rommel, refused to pass the order on to their troops.

How does a candidate formally quit the Navy SEALs' BUD/S course, a ritual known as Drop on Request?

He rings a brass bell three times and leaves his helmet liner beside it. A significant number of candidates reach that point during the first phase.

Which officer founded the SAS in 1941 after slipping into Cairo headquarters on crutches to pitch the idea?

David Stirling was nicknamed the Phantom Major by his German enemies. Captured in Tunisia in 1943, he tried to escape so often that he was sent to Colditz Castle.

Which US Army colonel created Delta Force after serving as an exchange officer with the British SAS?

Charles Beckwith led an SAS troop on jungle operations during that tour, and caught a disease so severe that doctors did not expect him to live.

Whose 18th-century rules for frontier raiding are quoted on the first page of the US Army's Ranger handbook?

Robert Rogers wrote his 28 Rules of Ranging during the French and Indian War, then raised a ranger unit for the British side in the American Revolution.

Which scar-faced SS officer did Nazi propaganda credit with the 1943 glider raid that freed Mussolini?

Otto Skorzeny had insisted on going along: paratroop officers planned and led the mission, and he then overloaded the tiny plane sent to fly Mussolini out.

Which future Israeli prime minister wore a woman's disguise on a 1973 Sayeret Matkal commando raid in Beirut?

Ehud Barak, the unit's commander, went ashore as a brunette because planners feared that a group of men walking the city at midnight would raise suspicion.

A British commando raid rammed an explosive-packed destroyer into the dry dock gates of which French port in 1942?

St Nazaire was hit so that the battleship Tirpitz, if damaged, would have to sail home for repairs. The hidden charges kept the dock out of use until 1948.

Royal Marines dubbed the Cockleshell Heroes raided Bordeaux harbour in 1942 after travelling upriver in what?

Folding kayaks launched from a submarine carried the raiders up the Gironde after dark. Only two of the ten men who set out came home.

Norwegian commandos trained by Britain's SOE blew up the Vemork plant in 1943 to deny Nazi Germany which substance?

Heavy water was vital to German nuclear weapons research. After the raid, resistance fighters sank the ferry carrying the last stocks to Germany.

Which pen name did the SAS patrol commander use for Bravo Two Zero, his account of a doomed 1991 Gulf War mission?

Andy McNab is really Steven Mitchell. Two other members of his eight-man patrol later published accounts of their own that disputed his version.

On D-Day, US Army Rangers climbed ropes and ladders up sheer cliffs to attack a gun battery at which headland?

Pointe du Hoc's gun pits held no guns when the climbers arrived. A patrol found five of the guns hidden nearby and wrecked them with thermite charges.

Navy SEALs nickname their gold Special Warfare trident badge after which American beer brand?

Budweiser is the Navy community's name for the pin, an eagle clutching an anchor, a trident and a flintlock pistol. It is awarded only after BUD/S and a further qualification course.

The British SAS cap badge is nicknamed the winged dagger, but what are the so-called wings on it meant to be?

Flames wreathe a downward-pointing sword on the badge, which was designed in 1941 and is usually said to show King Arthur's Excalibur.

What is the nickname of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the helicopter unit that flies US commandos?

The Night Stalkers were created after the failed 1980 hostage rescue exposed a shortage of Army pilots trained for low-level flying in the dark.

Which Russian term, a contraction of two longer words, is used for Russia's special forces units?

Spetsnaz, short for the Russian for special purpose, is not one unit but a label shared by elite troops answering to several ministries, including defence and internal affairs.

Which French unit stormed a hijacked Air France jet at Marseille in 1994, killing all four hijackers?

GIGN operators stormed the Airbus in an assault broadcast live by news channels. Nine of them were wounded, and every remaining hostage survived.

The counter-terrorism unit GSG 9 was founded weeks after a botched hostage rescue at which city's Olympic Games?

Munich's police had no one trained or equipped for such a rescue in 1972, so West Germany formed a specialist unit that later freed a hijacked Lufthansa airliner.

Which nickname did the First Special Service Force, a joint American-Canadian commando unit of World War II, earn?

The Devil's Brigade left cards on enemy dead warning that the worst was yet to come. American and Canadian special forces both trace their heritage to it.

Britain's Chindits and America's Merrill's Marauders both fought far behind Japanese lines in which country?

Burma was where Orde Wingate's Chindits pioneered long-range jungle raids. The American unit was modelled on them, and its lineage passed to the 75th Ranger Regiment.

Which wartime American agency, a forerunner of both the CIA and the Green Berets, ran sabotage and spying missions?

The Office of Strategic Services was drawn up by William 'Wild Bill' Donovan at President Roosevelt's request, with Britain's MI6 and SOE as its models.

Navy SEALs trace their roots to which World War II units that scouted and cleared invasion beaches?

Underwater Demolition Teams were formed after landing craft grounded on the reef at Tarawa in 1943. By 1983 they had been re-designated as SEAL units.

Green Beret candidates finish training with Robin Sage, an exercise set in which fictional country?

Pineland covers 15 rural counties of North Carolina, where local residents take roles as its citizens and resistance fighters. The exercise has run under that name since 1974.

What did Green Berets find when they stormed North Vietnam's Son Tay prison camp in 1970 to free American POWs?

They found nobody to rescue: the prisoners had been moved four months earlier, possibly because flooding had fouled the wells.

Operation Jaywick saw Z Special Unit raiders from Australia sink Japanese ships in which occupied harbour?

Singapore was reached in a captured Japanese fishing vessel renamed Krait, after a deadly snake. The raiders sank three ships and damaged three more.

The Fairbairn-Sykes dagger issued to British Commandos was devised by two men who had policed which Chinese city?

Shanghai's streets schooled William Fairbairn in close combat, and much of his body was reportedly covered in scars from knife wounds.

Which country's divers rode manned torpedoes into Alexandria harbour in 1941, crippling two British battleships?

Italy's divers placed charges under HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Valiant. One captured diver warned Valiant's captain only minutes before the blast.

The name Special Air Service was picked in 1941 to convince the enemy that Britain had which troops nearby?

It hinted at paratroopers who did not exist. Deception planners were already inventing a phantom airborne formation, so the new raiders were labelled as a detachment of it.

The regular British SAS regiment grew out of a scouting unit formed in 1950 for jungle warfare in which conflict?

The Malayan Emergency drew in a volunteer squadron first raised for Korea. It joined 'Mad Mike' Calvert's scouts, who were renamed 22 SAS in 1952.

Which Ireland rugby international and founding SAS officer is played by Jack O'Connell in SAS: Rogue Heroes?

Paddy Mayne was also an amateur boxing champion and a qualified solicitor, and he won the Distinguished Service Order four times.

What is the primary mission of US Army Green Berets, the task that sets them apart from other elite units?

Training guerrilla forces behind enemy lines was the job the first group was built for, in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Recruits must also learn a foreign language.

In the drown-proofing test at Navy SEAL training, candidates must swim in a pool under which handicap?

With hands and feet tied, trainees rely on a floating technique devised by a Georgia Tech swimming coach, whose college once made it a graduation requirement.