I got to work with Vietnamese troops, good and bad, beginning with my first week in-country, with ARVN Marines. Shortly thereafter I could add Australians and the guys from the South Korean Tiger division to the list. I'd already worked with the British Army of the Rhine and the Gurkhas along the East German border, and with the German Army, of course. There've been a lot of others over the years, some a long way from their homes. Me too.
But when I'm around the Gurkhas, I am at home, with my little adopted brothers, who've honoured me more than once by taking me out bush as one of their own for a little stroll in the woods. Their mountains are my mountains.
In this century, [since 1990] I've added another to the list: the guys from GROM, the Polish Special Forces, whom I was once in a position to do something useful for, and didn't let them down. Squantos, you'd get on with their demo guys just fine;;GROM is the Polish word for *thunder* and they do believe in big noises, even if their nickname is *the silent unseen*.
One other oddity, and it's not a foreign unit. Over the last 5 decades I've more than once run into an American in an odd place, busy at something useful, and often alone or with only one or with only one or two other guys around sometimes maybe a thousand miles from a coastline or port. I just wondered why the US Coast Guard happened to be there. But maybe I didn't really want to know, so I didn't ask.
Cubans on Grenada were as close as I every got to Spetznaz (I think)
I'm pretty sure I got closer to the Voyska spetsialnogo naznacheniya and other VDV and GRU fellers than you did on Grenada. Once they offered me the loan of a PM pistol in a fairly nasty area, and I suggested I wasn't much of a shot with a handgun, but if they had a vezh'lo [oar] I could borrow I'd be grateful- and I got one. It turned out to have been a really good idea.
