OFFICER'S PRIVILEGE: THE COL. GEORGE MARECEK STORY

A Soldier's Story

To understand the controversy that surrounded the Marecek case, it is essential to understand the man. By all accounts, George Marecek was a man who had been forged almost from birth by unimaginable hardship. He grew up in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia and he and his family have always maintained that he spent part of his youth fighting to survive in a Nazi concentration camp, though little official documentation that might add details to his ordeal survived the war. According to published accounts, when he was just a teenager, he managed to escape with his father, a hard man who, it has been said, served as a local policeman before the war, leaving his mother and sister behind.

Like thousands of other refugees from the shattered remains of Eastern Europe, young Marecek made his way through the maze of Displaced Persons camps and the deprivations of post war Europe, and finally managed to find someone who sponsored him so that he could move to the United States.

Green Beret Emblem

It was soon after that he enlisted in the Army and found his way into the then fledgling Special Forces. Based to some degree on the rugged British commandos who during World War II performed what at the time seemed almost superhuman feats of arms, often behind enemy lines, from the beginning the Special Forces - which would later become known as the Green Berets - was a special unit in the American military landscape. Its members were athletic and intelligent; they were required to develop language skills and to be schooled, not just in special weapons and tactics, but also in psychological operations. Their mission, broadly sketched, was to work behind enemy lines, beyond the reach of conventional armies and the logistical bureaucracy needed to support them. They were trained to identify and cultivate local insurgent groups, and to live off the land while they were doing it.

In the early 1950s, when Marecek joined the organization, it was primarily viewed as a Cold War unit, a cadre of carefully selected and trained soldiers whose most likely enemy would be what was then, the most menacing country on Earth -- the Soviet Union. It was no accident then that so many of the men who joined the Special Forces were linked, either by birth or heritage to those Eastern European countries that had fallen under Soviet sway after the war, the so-called Iron Curtain countries. There, military planners believed, Slavic-speaking soldiers, conditioned to work in that gray area between conventional military operations and guerilla tactics, could easily meld with the shadows.