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I was talking to SUT students several years ago.
They were commiserating about how early in the training, what a bunch of assholes they thought the SUT cadre were and how they really weren't anything special either.
Then, on a training event, a charge went off early and some people got hurt.
They said that the biggest cadre asshole of all happened to be an 18D and when the shit hit the fan, he grabbed a bag and went to work treating, stabilizing, triaging, etc. He was a completely different person.
The students said that they all wanted to be like him after seeing him doing his medic magic, and maybe the cadre weren't really as bad as they had thought.
Look up Special Forces and neuropeptide Y.
Neuropeptide Y is a stress buffer that allows people to better deal with stressful situations with less physical and mental performance degradation.
They studied some SERE classes and found that you could pick out the SF students over the others by their NPY responses to extreme stress, like interrogations. It was a nearly complete correlation. The psychs said that they could take the results of the NPY measurements, and make a stack of the highest performers, and the lowest, and the SF students were all in the high-performance stack, and none of the other branches or services were, to include Rangers and 160th.
Basically, as one of the psychs explained it to me, SF guys underperform in no to low-stress situations, and overperform in high-stress situations that would cause normal people to shut down. He drew a little graph that depicted SF performance across a stress event. SF guys tend to be pretty casual and maybe even lazy until the excitement starts, and then their performance goes off the top of the chart while others curl up into a little ball and quit.
Our selection and assessment process somehow found those people with an extreme degree of predictabilitly.
He said that they weren't sure how we did it, but the SFAS program for that time was optimized beyond their improvement for selecting the SF soldiers we wanted.
I guess the point of this is that you can't really judge SF until you are one, and even then, maybe not until you see them in action on a high stress event.
We don't select everyone, and that is good thing for the Regiment, and for the non-selects.
TR
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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - President Theodore Roosevelt, 1910
De Oppresso Liber 01/20/2025
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