Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US Army Major Christopher Brewer, who served as a non commissioned officer for an Army Ranger Battalion and a Special Forces officer. Today will be discussing some of his elite training and his deployments to Colombia and Panama in the late nineteen eighties and early nineties. Major Brewer is also the author, most recently of In the Shadows Between the Wars, Becoming a Special Forces Operator.
Christopher Brewer was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but grew up in countless military communities while his father served in the Army. When he became an adult in the early to mid nineteen seventies, Brewer was interested in the service and in college, but when he saw an opportunity he could not pass up. He was all in in the Army.
Pretty much all I'd known all my life. I started to go into college at North Georgia Military College at that time as a cadet, joined the twentieth SF National Guard to help pay the bills, and they cranked up the first Ranger Battalion in nineteen seventy four reactivated it. I caught the bug, dropped out and enlisted for first Ranger beat and linked up with him during the activation test.
Brewer, who had never jumped out of a plane before Ranger school, says the training was tough, largely due to no nonsense instructors who knew what it took to succeed.
When the Ranger Battalion was reactivated in nineteen seventy four, every NCO in it and almost all of the officers were combat veterans out of Vietnam, most of them survivors of the long Ranger connoissance patrols. So you had about as hardcore, competent, well trained, experienced cadur as you could possibly. Those guys cut no slack whatsoever. They did everything to standard, and you would do it again and again and again until you met that standard or you didn't last there very long.
Brewer was later assigned to the five hundred and ninth Airborne Battalion Team, which was stationed primarily in Italy. While there, Brewer became an expert in free fall parachuting, but he also took part in some very difficult but highly valuable training in Germany at a place called bod Tulls. It was called platoon confidence training.
The German Ranger School does a lot of things, but some of the things they do very well, or long range navigation in short periods of time. The whole philosophy is that the Soviets have invaded and we have to move back to friendly lines, which may involve moving forty to fifty one hundred kilometers. So you get a map. You're allowed to sketch the map, because if you're in that bad a situation where the Russians run the country,
you may not have a map. There may be five of you and only one of you has one, So you sketch key points, you navigate off that for four or five kilometers. They'll give you an asthmuth and a distance which invariably goes across a lake, over a mountain, over a river, some obstacle that you've got to have find some way to negotiate around. But in this case you don't have a map, so you don't know it
till you find it. And other little tricks that teach you land navigation down to a fine art which came in it really helpful. By the time I got to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and actually got to the Special Forces qualification course because one of the events you have to get through is called the Star Course. In our class, out of a class of four hundred people only I think twelve fifteen of us passed on the first attempt.
Now they ran it two more times just to get enough people to make a class, but we still only had one hundred out of four hundred and sixty who made it through that particul or gate. So that served me very well getting that experience.
Brewer explains why the Army put him and others through the grueling selection and assessment tests.
The whole idea is one, are you really sure this is what you want to do and how bad do you want it. They're going to push you to the point where your body and your mind says, I just can't do it anymore, to see what you're going to do when you reach that point, and they basically want you to keep going to your drop, and if you're not in good physical condition, you're going to drop pretty
early in that process. The other thing they're doing is in the selection and assessment phase is they want to see how you're going to interact with the other people on the team. When you're dog tired, you're confused, you don't know what's going on other than you have to do this and you don't know why. And if you don't all to work together, you're just not going to make it. And that's really the whole purpose of selection
and assessment. Get people that are serious, they're in good physical condition, that got good mental endurance as well, and they can work well with team members to accomplish a goal, even if they don't know the intended objective.
A couple of years later, Brewer was back at Fort Bragg and had not parachuted in a while. But it came back to him quickly, which is a good thing. If it hadn't, he likely would have been killed.
I'd come back to Fort Brag and had a jump. There was a round canopy. I hadn't jumped free fall in a year or two, and normal progression they want you to jump a static line first to make sure you can, and then you'll jump out. They call it a hop and pop, and then a five second ten
second to lay. The jump master had rigged the static line incorrectly, so when I jumped out, I had a lucked container container wouldn't open, but it did pull out a lot of the parachute, which is called a horseshoe maufunction. If you have a bad malfunction like that, the normal procedure is you cut it away, you get rid of it. Can't do that when it's locked on you back, and if you pull your reserve, it's going to wrap around
the other part. So there were some midair gymnastics to try and get that under control, wrapping it around, flipping in the air, pulled it down, fired the reserve, got it off clean. By the time all of this had occurred, I'd lost a good bit of altitude and this was enough for brag. So we were over a range and as I'm looking down, I could see all these little boxes with little green things in them. Didn't register at first what it was until I heard this deep booming
voice behind me. Is there anyone down range? Is there anyone down range? Is there anyone down range? Fires will watch your lanes. I was over the target rate, not where I wanted to land, so under the reserve, I'm pulling down suspension lines to slip as hard as i could to get out of the impact area, which I was successful in doing about one hundred feet off the ground by this time, and I'm over trees, nowhere to go but into the trees. So then we had to
execute a tree landing. Hit the top, branches, broke through it, collapse, A shoote I'm hurtling toward the ground. Literally just as my boots started to touch the canopy, snagged on the top of one of those North Carolina pine trees, landed gently, got out of it, went back over, talked to the jump master and said, look, I know I'm supposed to do a static line, a hop and pop, a five second and a ten second delay before I can jump
my own rig. But considering I just did all of that in the last jump with the reserve activation and a cutaway with a horseshoe malfunction, can I please now jump my own parachute? Have I proven my proficiency? And yeah, you're good, you go on ahead.
Not long after that, Brewer faced a difficult career choice. Went faced with many years of being a ranger drill instructor. It's a job he did not want, but there were very few options to get out of it.
When I was in Germany, I got picked up for a sergeant first class E seven with only about seven years in. I was two weeks, literally two weeks in the secondary zone, but I was a section leader for our particular unit out there at the time. So I told all my guys, you're all going to go down and you're going to get your DA photo. And they all said, we're not going to get picked up. We're all just in the secondary zone being a good leader.
I said, no, we're all going to do it because you just don't know, and lo and behold, I got picked up. So I was relisted about that time, and I figured, you know, as an E six, just making E seven, you have to have instructor time. I really didn't want to be a drill instructor, so I thought, I'll reenlist for Fort Benning. I'll go be a ranger instructor. I'll check that block and then I can go back to the Ranger Battalion, or I'll volunteer for s F training,
both of which sounded pretty good to me. Got there, the start major looked at me and said, welcome, boy, buy yourself a house. You'll be here for the rest of your career. No, sorry, Major, come on, man, I've only got eight years in now. I'm not staying here for twelve years, and say, yes you are, since you
are here at Fort Benning. You'll be here in the department for two or three years, but you will be selected to be a drill sergan and we're critically shorter of drill sergeants, so it is currently a five year stabilized tour. So that's seven years right there. You got eight in. You'll be about fifteen by the time you get off the trail. We'll bring you back over here for a couple of years in the department, maybe send you to the Airborne Department to get you twenty. Just
buy a house. You ain't going anywhere, sorry, Major, I'm going back to the range of beds. No you're not. You're an E seven. There's a three year waiting list for the sevens to get there. Besides which that doesn't take priority over drill. Well, I want to be an SF. We keep on dreaming there, chumbling, you're not going to SF either. We're getting rid of SF. All those snake eaters are of no use in the modern army, so we're just working all ready to get rid of them.
And of course you know that how that turned out. But I gots kept looking around, and the only thing that took precedence over drill sergeant was Officer Candidate School. So if the ultimate active betrayal to the NCO Corps, A volunteered to become a second lieutenant as a sergeant first class from the Ranger Department went into OCS with officers, some of whom had been thrown out of Ranger School, which is how they wound up as tack officers at OCS.
Which that was an interesting couple of months there to make it through that, sat through classes in the NCO Advanced Course before I went that were the same classes with the same instructor in OCS, and then to the same instructors, same classes for a third time at the Infantry Officer's Basic Course before I got out and got to go to my first unit.
As a Special Forces officer, Brewer knew that he and his men could be deployed at any time, but he says the biggest challenge was embracing the mindset needed to be in special Forces.
I think the thing that has to come to the forefront of your mind is when you go in one of those jobs, nobody's coming to help. If you get in trouble. You're on your own and you're going to have to figure it out, and you really need to keep that in the forefront of your mind with everything that you do, and as long as you go into it with that attitude, it can be very interesting work and liberating to a great extent too. But these days, you've got cell phones. The guys who've got helmet cameras,
they got the earphones on. They've got some officers sitting three thousand miles away when they're going through a room clearing rooms, telling no, go left, don't go right. There's nothing they can do that. Somebody isn't leaning over their shoulder and watching, but you're still three thousand miles away. If it doesn't turn out right, they're still not going to be able to get there to help you.
That's Christopher Brewer. He's a retired Ranger Battalion NCO and Special Forces officer. The book is in the Shadows between the Wars, when we come back facing the Colombian drug cartels. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
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This is Veterans Chronicle. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US Army major and Special Forces officer Christopher Brewer. His new book is in the Shadows Between the Wars. In August of nineteen eighty nine, Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan was assassinated by hitmen hired by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The country was rife with violence, and the US decided to get involved in a limited way, enter Christopher Brewer and the seventh Special Forces Team.
George Herbert Bush was the president at that time, and he went on national TV after Galan was assassinated by Escobar and said, we are going to help the Colombian government stand up to the cartels. We'll provide logistics, we'll protride helicopters, we'll give them whatever they need, but we are not going to get involved in a Latin American war. We will not send combat troops. So one of the first things that they asked Force is where we really
need a medical Corman school. We don't have any medics, and when we go out into the jungle, if our guys get hurt, they die. So we figured out that we need a metavact capability. That went down to an office that's called at that time was called the Security Assistance Training Management Office, and they basically provided doctors, nurses, logisticians, engineers, non combat arms folks that they would send out to teach other foreign governments and military and police non combat
related items or skill sets. But when they looked at Bogata at that time, there were on a normal day in Bogatah, there'll be one hundred people get killed just from street crime. And at that time, the cartels were setting off bombs all over the city, and no one really knew who in the military was compromised and who in the government was compromised. The government had just decided they're going to fight back against the cartels and they had a real challenge on their hands, so nobody could
guarantee the safety of anyone that went down there. So SATMO said, look, you know, we can't put and nurses into that environment. So mission came over to seventh Special Forces Group. We speak Spanish, but it called for six medical trainers. Now you've only got two medics on an a team, and none of the guys that were down in Panama who were some of the best Spanish speakers. A third battalion wanted to give up all the medics for three teams. So it came to us.
Brewer explains how he and his men were not officially Special Forces in Columbia and the limited resources they were given.
So we got the job. But the way they handled it was they transferred us on orders out of Special Forces to SATMO. So once we were officially SATMO not special Forces, put on Savine clothes luggage, went down to Miami Airport and jumped on a flight going down to Bogata. And while I was in there, I saw this book just come out Tom Clancy, Clear and Present Danger. So I bought that book to read on the flight down.
We got there, the RSO briefed up. Everybody said, nobody goes out of the embassy unless you're an armored vehicle, most dangerous posting since Beirute, and all the casualty figures except for you guys. We'll drive you down there to the middle of South Bogatah where all the shooting's going on. You're going to be living there. Here's a bretta pistol, and here's a box of fifty rounds to protect yourself with. Call us once a week let us know if you're still alive.
The closest Brewer got to combat in Colombia came as Escobar vowed to attack a US radar site that was causing him problems with his drug trafficking, but Brewer needed a lot more weapons and a plan to stop Escobar's attack.
There was trouble down in the valley between Bogata and Median and Escobar knew that there was a US Air Force radar site that had been set up at a Colombian Air Force base, and that radar was picking up the drug planes that were flying out of that valley and handing them off to Colombian jets and US Air Force jets that were intercepting him on the way to Miami. Now, obviously that interfered with Escabar's business. He didn't like that. But the president has said there weren't any US troops
down there, so this was TSSCI. Nobody could know about this, and the Colombian government wouldn't let him bring down more troops to protect the base. Escobar called the base up and said, if you don't shut off that damn radar, I'm gonna come on there and I'm going to kill all the gringoes and I'm going to blow up the radar. So they were in a quandary. They didn't know what to do, so they called us. There were only six
of us there and we were running a school. We couldn't really afford to let anyone go, so I took one guy with me. They flew us out on a Columbian general's airplane. We landed. We brought along one set of combat fatigues with us, with no patches or anything. So we had that tucked up in our backpacks and we got out, changed out of saving closed, changed into army gear. Still only had a burretta and to talk to. There were only about five or six US Air Force
people there. There was a commander, some technicians, and one security policeman. And first thing we did would say, hey, we're here to help. First off, if you guys got any guns, This bread is all I got. He said, oh yeah, come on. So he took us out to this GP large tent that was in a grass strip between the two runways, and I thought that was their command post. But that GP large tent was completely full
of crates of guns, of ammunition, explosives. Now there was literally enough there to outfit a couple of companies, And I said, what the hell were you going to do with all this. I said, well, we were going to equip the Colombians, but we think they're compromised and descobars paying them off, so we couldn't give it to them.
But you guys can have whatever you want. So we started opening up boxes and grabbed an M sixteen, found these beautiful little chopped M sixty machine gun, Grabbed a couple of things of ammunition, loaded up a jeep trailer, found crates of claymore minds. Loaded all those up and he felt a lot better at that point in time, a lot more comfortable.
That's retired US Army Major Christopher Brewer. His book is In the Shadows Between the Wars. When we come back, we'll finish the story in Columbia, and then Brewer is off to the unstable aftermath of Operation Just Cause in Panama. I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US Army Major Christopher Brewer. He served as
a Ranger Battalion NCO and a Special Forces officer. His latest book is entitled In the Shadows Between the Wars. Becoming a Special Forces operator. In just a moment, you'll hear how Brewer and his team went to Panama after Operation Just Cause in order to deal with these significant instabilities there following the deposing of Manuel Noriega. But first we head back to Columbia. Brewer now explains what it was like waiting for Escobar's attack and how the situation unfolded.
Escobar had already cleared trail going up to it, so we went back down. We talked to the base commander says, look, we need to use this company for about a day. We need to clear fields of fire all the way around that hill. We need to dig fighting positions, communication trenches, and we're going to put those claim wars up. So
we did all of that. We made a point to getting the Columbian officers out there with the machine guns, showed them how to operate the machine guns, let them shoot that made them happy, got good food for the troops, and water that made them happy. And knowing full well that we're being observed the whole time by Escobar and his crew. So by the time we got done the target that he had already made plans to have his guys crawl up through this trail in the jungle and
blow them up. Now had three hundred meters of open ground all the way around it, with dug and fighting with them, sixty machine guns set up in them and claymore set out. And the last thing we did before the sun went down on the night he was supposed to come, we told all the cabos, the corporals that we were pretty sure were compromised, do not come on this hill tonight. You don't come. Don't let any of your guys come, because we will kill anybody who comes
up that road tonight. This is when Escobar said he's going to come, and I can't tell them at you or them, so don't come. I care about you. I don't want you to get hurt. And lo and behold, eight man patrols started walking up that road about three in the morning, and it was pretty obvious these were not the same guys. But that cabo that I'd talked to popped up out of the brush and stopped him at the base of the hill, talking to him, pointing up. They turned around and they left, and the next day
Escabar called the base commander. I said, I don't give a damn about your radar or your green berets, and that was it.
Because of the assignment in Colombia, Brewer and his team were part of Operation Just Cause in Panama in late December nineteen eighty nine, but they were not home for long before they were on their way to Panama to deal with the volatile aftermath of removing Noriega from power. Brewer explains the less than enviable task he was given with respect to the recently defeated Panamanian forces.
We got down there and we were met by some people who, in briefness that said that you're going to go out to all of the Panamanian National Defense Force compounds with all of their troops. We want you to go and give them their guns back. They've just been shooting them. A lot of these guys have been killed just the week before. Literally give them their guns back and tell them they're police now. Now, in that culture, if you were too fat and lazy to be in
the army, you could be a cup. So telling all these guys that you're not in the army anymore your cups was not going to go over very well. And said, okay, well, you want us to teach them how to be cops. Said no, you can't do that. You're not cops. You're a tripwaar. We want you to live with them, keep an eye on them, and if it looks like they're going to mutiny and try to mount a coup, you
let us know. And if you don't check in after three days, we'll figure you're dead, and they will know pretty well that the coup's going on.
To find out whether there were plans for a coup, Brewer and others on his team routinely patrolled areas to keep order and keep an eye out for anything resembling a plot to stage a coup. But Brewer also explains that simply walking through different areas gave him ample opportunities to gather intelligence without even trying.
We'd go out of the compound because we wanted to know. They weren't going to tell us much, so we'd go talk to the people in the village. We'd leave. We'd walk around initially in twos, but there weren't enough of us, because there's only four in my location. Some places only had two. So sometimes you'd go walk alone, but you'd walk with there were lots of witnesses. You'd keep moving you never let anybody know other than your own guys, where you're going or at what route you're going to
never follow the same route twice. And we weren't allowed under US law at that time to establish an intelligence network. In fact, we got in trouble with that with some of the army intel people because they accused us of being spies, and we're spies. You're not spies. You can't do that, as we told them, says, we're not spies. We're going out and saying hello and having coffee with the people. And if the people want to come up and tell us something, who am I to tell them? No,
I'm just being friendly. I'm not tasking anyone. I'm not saying go find this and come back. I'm not paying anybody. I'm just being a nice guy and just getting out and being a nice guy. We started to get better intel than the military intelligence unit back an amatur in the Canal Zone was getting, which really pissed them off
no end. So then wound up doing the dance with the nory Gistas, the Dignity Battalion guys who have been formed by No Diego that were part of the organization trying to mount a coup, and the US military police who really didn't like green Beres, and the US military intelligence unit who was trying to catch us doing intel operations. GUS, we were walking on their turf.
As you heard, Christopher Brewer was not only dealing with the very real possibility of a coup, but he was also embroiled in turf wars within our own military and orders from higher ups that he found completely unacceptable. Here, Brewer explains the back and forth he had with a higher ranking officer about what the rules of engagement ought to be for him and the other Special Forces members on this assignment in Panamon.
When they said go to civilian clothes, they stipulated, we have credible intelligence you're at risk out there, and well, no shit, we knew that when we got here. But if we want you to go armed, and we want you to carry your weapons concealed. So the only thing we had that we could conceal, you know, the rifles are obviously going to be too big, but we had
the baretta. So we got people to make us some holsters that we could put on our civilian clothes, and we started carrying the bretta concealed and said now here's your rules of engagement. First off, make sure you carry that pistol unloaded. You can have a loaded magazine in your pocket, but do not put it in the pistol. Now, if you're in a situation where you feel your life is in danger, draw that unloaded pistol and shout halt, I am armed. If they don't stop, pull out your
magazine and say halt. If they still don't stop, put it in and say halt and they still don't stop, load around and yell halt. And if they still don't stop, and your life is in danger, shoot to wound, not to kill. Yeh listen, Oh God, we go. They don't have a clue. So finally I said, look, man, no, if that's the roe, we're going unarmed. We're not going to carry any guns at all, because all you're going
to do is get us killed. Because even the local crooks are going to know we're carrying an expensive Buretta pistol that's unloaded, and they're not going to have any trouble at all taking it away from us, so they're going to kill us just to get the gun. So no, we're not going to do that. And I got to
reply it back, saying, well, what is your roe? I said, Okay, my ro is very simple, and I'm going to brief my guys in Spanish out in the compound, where I'm sure that all the Panamanian Defense Force guys can hear every word I say, and I'm going to use a loud voice, and I told my guys we are in danger out here, there is a threat. You will carry your weapon on your person at all times. There will
be around in the chamber. And if you find yourself in a situation where you think your life is in danger, I want you to negotiate, and I want you to warm threaten whatever you have to do to de escalate without anyone being harmed. Don't be afraid to run if you have to. But if you're cornered and there's nothing you can do and your life is in danger, you draw that pistol and you kill whoever represents the threat. If that gun comes out of the holster, there better
be a dead man at your feet. Otherwise, you keep that gun in the holster and you keep talking or you get running. That's those are the conditions.
When it came to turf wars, Brewer says he had a memorable and intense exchange with a colonel from military intelligence. As you might have guessed from some of Brewer's earlier comments, special forces and military intelligence were not on the best of terms due to the military intelligence leadership becoming convinced that the special forces were encroaching on their turf. Brewer's boss, also a full colonel, did not want Brewer revealing anything
to the kernel from military intelligence. Brewer was a captain at the time, but followed his colonel's orders precisely.
Officer in charge of US called me and told me that, look, this MI I Brigade commander is coming out and he's coming to your compound and he wants to be briefed. You don't tell him a thing because this is a turf war. We don't want to give him any leverage. Just tell him you can't brief him. Leave it at that, say, man, you know he's not going to be happy and he's going to be a full bird talking to a captain,
So yeah, we'll handle it all right. So he showed up, came in, and I was going to give him the standard briefing that we would give to any military tourists that showed up that none of the really sensitive stuff. But here's where we are and where we're positioned, and how many people this compound and this compound we've been here for this long. And get about halfway through that, and he said, I don't want to hear any of
that crap. Tell me about the guns. He said, look sir, we know in where we're sitting right here is probably surveilled. I would be very surprised if they didn't have this place tapped. And I can't talk about stuff like that. Well, you're gonna have to tell me anyway, all right, come on with me. And I took them to a place that we knew was clean because we had our people all the way around it and we checked it. Sat him down, said, look sir, you've got an MI person
here on the team. He'd sent out a young lady who she was a translator. She spoke flawless Spanish, showed up at our door saying, have you got any bullets for this thing? With a bretta that was unloaded, and she'd been sent out to gather intel and a sign to live with us. So we said, look, you know, first off, let us teach you how to shoot that gun. Second, let us teach you a little bit about collecting intel and let one of our guys go with you because
this is not a safe area in it. And over a period of time she learned she was really sharp. She ultimately went over to the FBI and she got to be a strong member of the team. But she knew everything we knew, and that helped solve the dilemma. Because she was military intelligence, she could task, she could pay people, but legally we couldn't. So it actually made a good functioning team. And I told him, says, sir, your representative here knows everything we know. I don't care.
I want you to tell me. Sarah can't. Well, you should have called back and got permission, Sarah. I did call back, and they said not to tell you. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what the conflict is, but I have my orders. I can't do that. And he crosses his arm says, well, Captain, I'm giving you a direct order. You're going to brief me, and you're going to do it right now. And I've had about all of this guy that I can handle on that particular day. So I said, look, sir, I have
my orders. I can't violate my orders. I will tell you that I've got a situation going on in here right now where I don't feel that we're safe or you're safe, and you're getting in the way of me being able to accomplish my mission. So I'm asking you please leave now. I'm done talking. Well, Captain, I'm not leaving, sir, Yes you are. If you don't leave on your own, then we're going to take you out of here. Well
how are you going to do that, captain? And I'd already called two of my guys to come on in, told him, come on in here, bring a duffel bag. Well, you need it, the duff bag. Just bring a duffel bag and fleck scuffs. So you see these two E seven standing behind you? Yeah, I see him. Well, sir, if you will not cooperate and leave voluntarily in your car, I can't have you going out of here kicking the screaming. So what's going to happen these two E seven's here.
They're going to cuff you, They're going to gag you, and they're going to put you in that duffel bag and then they're going to carry you out, put you in the trunk of your car, and we're going to drive your car with another one of my vehicles and my guys in it to protect you back to the canal zone. And he just looks at me real hard. I'm looking at in and I finally he blinked and he got up and walked out.
But that is not the end of the story. Brewer says he faced a list of court martial charges from the military intelligence colonel, but Brewer explains how the allegations were methodically countered.
But as soon as he got to the canal zone, he tried to started bringing court maultra charges, and he tried to charge me with assault that I didn't lay a hand on him. I just extribed what I was going to do for his safety, disobedience of direct order, which I had the conflicting orders for my colonel. They backed me up, and ultimately he charged me with sexual harassment because I would not let his female agent go out into the field alone, and I had had to
explain this look. Ultimately, we did let her go out alone, but we asked her to stay and take training from us and allow us to escort and shore around so she didn't wind up dead in a hole someplace, and she voluntarily did so and turned into be a damn good member of the team.
Christopher Brewer spent twenty four years in the US Army, retiring as a major in nineteen ninety seven. Much of that time was spent in Special Forces, where your role and your work are often kept secret for years, decades or longer. In fact, he had to fight to declassify certain details from the mission in Panama before he could
talk about them in his book. But despite the occasional clashes with Army bureaucracy, Brewer is grateful for his service and to have served alongside the excellent soldiers in US Army Special Forces.
We accomplished a lot of good things, a lot of good things people don't really know about, and Special Forces is still doing that. The guys that are out there don't get enough credit for what they do, So I was just proud to be able to be one of them and stand out there with them.
That is retired to US Army Major Christopher Brewer. He served as a non commissioned officer for an Army Ranger battalion and as a Special Forces officer. His latest book is In the Shadows Between the Wars becoming a Special Forces operator. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi. This is Greg Corumbus and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information,
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