The 160th SOAR, and Me: “Not That Long Ago” …But It Was

It was Branch Week at West Point, the time of year when the Army’s basic branches send representatives–and representative military hardware–to the Academy to promote their branches to the general public, the West Point community, and most importantly, to the cadets. Branch Week is the precursor to Branch Night, which in my opinion is the best thing West Point does, second only to graduation.

Other units that aren’t basic branch organizations send representatives too. There was a contingent from the 75th Ranger Regiment, and some current members of the 5th Special Forces Group here, and a contingent from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. More about them later. Because graduating from West Point, cadets can’t normally go straight to those special operations forces (SOF) formations; those organizations were here doing deep recruiting, helping the SOF community plant the acorns from which, one day, mighty oaks might grow.

I was in the Army for over 27 years. I didn’t go to West Point, but I’ve worked here, off and on, since 2013. So I think it’s fair to say that I’ve spent more time at West Point than most graduates. I commissioned through the ROTC program at Mercer University and came in under the branch detail program, which means I was assessed into one branch, in my case Military Intelligence, but was detailed to serve as an officer in a different branch first. For me, that was Infantry. At Branch Week this year, I checked out the Infantry branch table and the MI display. There was a crowd around each, which is to be expected. Anecdotally, it seemed that Aviation, Infantry, Engineers, and Intel were the most popular branches, year over year, among West Point cadets.

But what really got my attention, what really seems to get most people’s attention, was the helicopter display. This year we had a Chinook, a Blackhawk, and an Apache. But to me, the most noticeable airframe was the MH-6, known colloquially as a Little Bird. As far as I know, there is only one Army SOF unit acknowledged to have that kind of aircraft: the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR): the Night Stalkers.

Once upon a time, for a very brief period, I was a Night Stalker. More specifically, I was the battalion S2 for the second battalion, from around 2005-2007. It was after serving in 5th Special Forces Group, and before going over to the Joint Special Operations Command. As I stood off to the side and watched a group of soldiers from the 160th go about their business with the cadets, faculty, and various civilians who came by their display, a thought came to me almost automatically: It wasn’t that long ago that I was in that unit.

They looked familiar in the way soldiers from your old unit always do. Different faces, certainly. Different equipment in some cases. Slightly different uniforms. But there was something about the way they carried themselves, the casual confidence, the dark humor, the easy interaction between people who spend an unreasonable amount of time together doing things most people will never understand. There are mannerisms that belong to organizations as much as they belong to individuals, and the 160th has plenty of them. Watching those soldiers, I recognized the ethos even though I didn’t recognize the people.

And for just a moment, the distance between us seemed very small.

I could almost convince myself that I had just stepped away for a while. That somewhere nearby were the guys I remembered, that somebody was getting ready for another trip, another deployment, another long night under night vision goggles. The mission. The sense of urgency, and of purpose. The smell of helicopter fuel and and burning waste. The taste of Rip-It energy drink that carried an aftertaste of dust. I could still remember the buildings, the aircraft, the briefing rooms, the smells, the sounds, and the people. Especially the people. Memory has a strange way of preserving certain parts of your life in amber. The years before and after them move along normally, but some experiences remain fixed at exactly the age you were when you lived them.

But then I did the math: it had been more than twenty years.

That realization landed harder than I expected. Twenty years is not “a little while ago.” Twenty years is a career for some people. Twenty years is enough time for a private to become a sergeant major, for a lieutenant to become a colonel, for children to grow up and have children of their own. Some of the soldiers I was looking at might not even have been born when I first arrived in the Regiment.

Twenty years is literally a lifetime for most of the cadets I work with here.

And yet, in my head, it wasn’t that long ago. It wasn’t that long ago for Competition, Call of Duty and Naked Chicks with Guns. It wasn’t so long ago that we lost Irish and Yardbird.

But it was.

That is one of the strange things about getting older, particularly after a long military career. Your internal calendar stops matching the one hanging on the wall. Iraq is still “a few years ago.” Afghanistan is simultaneously yesterday and another lifetime. The young soldiers you served alongside remain young in your memory even when their photographs on social media show gray hair, grown children, and retirement ceremonies. The captains you remember are colonels now. The colonels are retired. But everyone stays the same rank they were when they met you. Some of the people who seemed impossibly senior when you were young have been gone for years. Soldiers who were in my company in the Second Infantry Division in Korea back in 2001 still call me “Captain Faint,” even though I haven’t been a captain in 20+ years, and none of us are in the military anymore. There is comfort in that old familiarity, that old formality.

And some of the people you remember never got the opportunity to grow old at all.

Maybe that is part of why those years stay so close.

The Army has a peculiar relationship with time. When you are in it, you are always waiting for the next thing. The next formation. The next mission. The next deployment. The next promotion. The next assignment. The next school. The next PCS. The next time you get to go home. The next route into that inner ring. Then, almost without noticing it, you reach the point where there isn’t a next Army thing anymore.

Before you know it, you retire. People shake your hand, say nice things about you, give you a plaque or a flag, and suddenly the institution that organized virtually every aspect of your adult life continues without you. That can be a difficult realization, but I don’t think it has to be a sad one.

Coinciding with Branch Week, I had the opportunity to interview the current commander and command sergeant major of the 160th, Colonel Sean Karrels and Command Sergeant Major Julio Santos. Although I had never met either in person, and my time in the 160th was more than 20 years ago, and I was a support guy not a pilot, the conversation was easy and familiar. That treated me as a peer; as one of them. I was grateful for that. To them it was normal; after all, they reminded me, we were all Night Stalkers.

Standing there after the interview with Colonel Karrels and Command Sergeant Major Santos and looking at those young Night Stalkers out on West Point’s Plain, I didn’t feel like I wanted to put the uniform back on. I didn’t wish I were twenty years younger or preparing to climb onto an aircraft with them. I have already had that experience. I was fortunate enough to belong to that organization, to serve alongside extraordinary people, and to carry a small piece of its history with me. Wanting to reclaim it would somehow diminish the fact that I was lucky enough to have it in the first place. I’m happy with what I did when I was a Night Stalker; I’m content with what I’m doing now, helping the next generation to join them.

What I felt wasn’t misplaced nostalgia; instead it was something closer to gratitude.

There was also pride, although not the kind that comes from believing I had anything to do with what those soldiers were accomplishing now. I didn’t. The Regiment belongs to them now. Their standards are theirs to uphold. Their missions are theirs to execute. Their friendships are theirs to build. Their mistakes are theirs to make, and their stories are theirs to tell.

That is how it should be.

Every generation of soldiers eventually discovers that the Army does not belong to them. We are temporary custodians of organizations that existed before we arrived and, if we do our jobs correctly, will remain strong long after we leave. We inherit traditions from people whose names we may never know, add a few stories of our own, and then hand everything to someone younger.

At some point, you become one of the old guys.

I suppose I am one now.

That phrase doesn’t bother me nearly as much as I once imagined it would. There are worse things than growing old enough to look across a formation and realize that the soldiers carrying forward the legacy of a unit you loved belong to an entirely different generation. Growing older is a privilege that military service teaches us never to take for granted.

Still, there was something unsettling about realizing how much time had passed: more than twenty years.

I thought about who I was then and who I am now. The younger version of me would recognize some things. Hopefully he would approve of a few others. He would probably be surprised by how differently I see the world, and perhaps disappointed to discover that age doesn’t provide nearly as many answers as young people assume it does. If anything, experience mostly teaches you how much you don’t know.

But I think he would understand what I felt looking at those soldiers.

Because some places never entirely leave you.

You can take off the uniform. You can retire. Your old unit can change commanders twenty times, move buildings, replace equipment, fight wars you never imagined, and fill its formations with soldiers who were children when you served there. Eventually, almost nothing will look exactly the way you remember it.

And somehow, when you see them, you still recognize home.

I stood there a little longer and watched the soldiers of the 160th doing what Night Stalkers do. They didn’t know the memories they were stirring up in the old retired guy watching from the side, and there was no reason they should. Their attention was where mine once was: forward. Mine, for a moment, was backward.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was one of them.

Except it was.

And maybe one of the strangest parts of getting older is learning that both of those things can be true at exactly the same time.

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Charles served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.