From:   Public Information Office

101st Airborne Division

and Fort Campbell

Fort Campbell, Kentucky

THE RECONDO SCHOOL OF THE 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION

The Recondo School of the 101st Airborne Division is designed to give the squad and fire team leaders of the division vigorous training in small unit tactics, especially patrolling and reconnaissance.

Especially on the fluid atomic battlefield is the small unit leader a key man.  Therefore the two‑week course at the Recondo School is designed to test the man’s confidence in himself and to give him gruelling instruction and actual participating in patrolling by day and by night.

During the first five days, physical conditioning and confidence tests are stressed.  The students learn to rappel over cliffs, construct rope bridges and rafts to cross a stream and take the 500‑foot death slide from the top of a tree into the water.  Hand‑to‑hand combat, map reading, a two‑mile run and instruction in escape and evasion complete this period of instruction.

Actual patrolling takes up the remaining ten days of the course.  It begins with a jump from a small plane into “enemy‑held” territory.  Seven different patrols have been set up in such an order that the tactical situation would progressively and realistically develop from one to another.  Aggressors are used to make the situation more realistic.

The last patrol is a thirty-mile prisoner snatch.  The students are organized into company sized patrols and their mission is to capture an enemy general who is hiding in a village 30 miles from the patrol base.

Graduates of the Recondo School are entitled to wear a brand on the breast pocket of their fatigues.  The brand is an arrowhead, symbol of knowledge of woodlore and field craft and it has the figures 101 across its face, “Recondo” is a word coined by Major General W. C. Westmoreland, division commander, combining the words “reconnaissance” and “doughboy”.

Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall, military columnist of the Detroit News, after he had seen the school, said:

“There is always a tendency to reject the old just in favor of something that is new and is therefore trumpeted when the old has lost none of its weight.  We always go a little bit too eagerly to the new things.  Why is the Recondo School fundamentally a great addition to the institutional existence of the 101st Airborne Division?  Not primarily because it is a new school, but because it is fundamentally taking the division back to basic principles ‑ ‑ the time tested and proved things. . .”