Why Did Special Forces Guys Used to Look So Much Cooler?

When journalist Wesley Morgan first went to Iraq in 2007, he says the SOF guys were just then beginning to stand out. “There already was an operator look that you could tell,” says Morgan, who is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley and has reported extensively from America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “But there was sort of a studied anonymity that in fact made them stand out.”

Morgan, who is currently working on a book about JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) during the War on Terror, saw a lot of the changes we associate with modern operators happen in real time. He sees the shift as a direct result of SOFs’ missions changing from reconnaissance, manhunting, and hostage rescue to high-tempo night raids.

“I think pre-9/11, what we associated special operations forces with was kind of doing things way out there on a shoestring, deep in enemy territory—kind of the lone commando thing,” says Morgan. “The flagship role of SOF in the war on terrorism, especially in the hot-and-heavy days in Iraq, when a lot of the cultural stuff was formed, was the opposite of that. It was to go out on brief raids for which there’s sort of no endurance requirement, wearing a lot of gear with a huge amount of technological support, gunships, predator drones, everything. It’s almost the opposite of what you kind of imagine [in terms of] the World War II or Vietnam commando.”

The pre-9/11-era operator was considered the “quiet professional.” But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan devolved into long, costly slogs, the exploits of SOF units were portrayed as bright spots, convenient narratives replete with heroes and decisive endings (both of which were in short supply in the wider wars). “The interplay between special operators and Hollywood begins in this moment, and the code of silence is sort of broken,” says Craven.