I learned a lot from you and DJ Taylor, I'm so rarely this much in the dark about a military subject.
Maybe you guys can help me with one more thing, when I was in the army during the Vietnam war, my memory is that OCS required a GT(?) of 110, but that Special Forces at the time required a 115.
Is my memory good on that?
I thought it was 105 and 110, with SF the higher. That changed in the nineties. The Clinton DOD did a big study, by a panel headed by recently retired GEN Colin Powell, about "minority underrepresentation" in special operations forces. I have a pile of documents on that study (mostly .pdfs) somewhere.
The study concluded that the two biggest obstacles were the GT score requirement (which is essentially an IQ test) and the swim test. For both physical and cultural reasons, some minorities are less likely to be strong swimmers than whites or east-asians.
The Clintonistas wanted to eliminate the standards and require a quota... you know, if 20% of the military is black, 20% of each graduating SF and BUDS (etc) class must be black. All the way down to eskimo and Samoan quotas. Saner heads prevailed and the final result for SF was, GT score lowered to 100, and swim test still taken, but no consequences for failure.
The results? Nil. Under the lower standards more minorities were accepted, but GT score is strongly correlated with SFQC completion, to a point. (Apparently you can get so smart that you say, "**** this!" -- and apparently I'm not that smart). As a result, almost all the candidates who scored between 100 and 110 did not complete SFAS or SFQC. I believe we netted two more grads over the first year, and they weren't blacks who had been excluded, they were dumb (but very stubborn) whites.
At one time there were many more black NCOs and officers in SF, back in the 1960s. But there were very few decent opportunities for a bright young black man in 1962; none that could compare to the fair shake he'd get from the military. Paradoxically, increased opportunities for, and fairness to, minority Americans in general, has resulted in fewer of them in some military elites than there were when society discriminated cruelly against them.
Dang, I would have to either dig in my attic for that information or remember all the way back early 1963, but I believe you remember correctly. Not only did Special Forces require a higher GT score than did OCS, but SF also required an ALAT score of at least 118. The ALAT test measured a soldier's ability to learn a foreign language; because back then, all SF troops were required to learn at least one foreign language.
The first training an SF entrant attended at Special Forces Training Group was MOI (Methods of Instruction). If the soldier failed the course, he was out. At the time, SF troops' primary mission was to teach their soldiering skills to foreign soldiers, and then lead them in combat.
SF had a number of requirements back then and many of them were either lowered or eliminated during the height of the Vietnam War. One requirement we didn't have, and should have, was the swim test. Entrants were simply asked on a form, and then they signed, "Can you swim?" It was when we started losing troops to drowning in the canals of IV Corps that we saw the need to check and make sure a soldier could actually swim before we found out the hard way he couldn't. As happened in our lose of 1LT Pelligrino.
You've caused me to remember things I haven't thought of in decades, and I thank you.