Sage Eagle: How Green Berets train the Air National Guard

I placed my foot methodically so as not to crunch any decaying leaves on the forest floor. After lowering myself into a prone position, I aimed my lens towards the Green Beret preparing to fire an M-240 machine gun with a belt of simulation rounds. A drone buzzed overhead seeking any hint of movement beneath the canopy. The Green Beret and the rest of his team members lie still, I did my best to do the same. As the buzzing in the sky faded from earshot, the Soldiers refocused on their position, awaiting a vehicle to roll through the crosshairs of their simulated ambush.

Two weeks prior, as we drove through a long tunnel of green foliage, I thought to myself, “It’s so green here.” A layer of fog and mist fell over Fort A.P. Hill as my COMCAM partner and I pulled our unassuming Nissan rental care up to an exercise tactical operations center beside a fleet of armored vehicles. Exercise Sage Eagle was building pressure, ready kick off.

Sage Eagle, as it is called, is a recurring warfare exercise that validates Special Forces’ ability to train and incorporate partner forces. For iteration 25-4, U.S. Army Green Berets assigned to 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) trained hundreds of Air Force security forces personnel with the Air National Guard as their chosen pupils.

Over the last year, I’ve distanced myself as far as I reasonably clear from Instagram, a cornerstone of my creative pulse for the last 10 years. For so long it represented a creative diary and immediate audience for which I found energy and motivation in. I’ve grieved as the addictive, data mining changes have made it almost impossible for me to consume any quality content or foster any real communication. With Sage Eagle, I was craving a new way to tell stories without this cornerstone of my process for so many years. I wanted something deeper, more permanent. Like many athletes at the end of the summer, preparing for their season, I went into the Sage Eagle with a “training camp” mindset. Three weeks. Total isolation. Nothing to focus on but my chosen craft.

Fort A.P. Hill, outside the small town of Bowling Green, VA, is devoid of most infrastructure. Aside from rows of barracks and a small laundromat, its sprawling footprint is filled with dense deciduous forest and intermittent streams. At the industrial Air Force bases I am used to, giant aircraft leaving the ground lift your gaze to the sky. Fort A.P. Hill was the exact opposite. Inspiration instead came from the faces covered in green and black paint that traversed the forest floor.

Sage Eagle exists as a validation exercise for Special Forces teams to prove they can train and enable small teams of complete strangers to carry out missions in new and unfamiliar places. Air National Guardsmen from around the country were chosen to support 3rd Group, and in turn receive highly valuable training from some of the military finest field teachers.

A new element of the Special Operations Forces (SOF) environment for me was the relaxed standards; no bloused pants, first name basis with the operators, and a myriad of different baseball hats. Rather than focus on having military standards enforced to the highest degree, the entire focus was on enabling the partner force.

With all of my summers spent guiding Boy Scouts in the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico, I immediately felt a familiar feeling watching the Green Beret’s teach and enable their less experienced National Guard students. Their pedagogy (teaching methods) involved demonstrating the hard skills, and a peer attitude despite their advanced skillsets and demonstrated abilities to do their jobs.

After tying into our counterparts in photo and video coverage from the Army side, we made the decisions to split up to cover individual Green Beret teams and their partner forces. I wanted to create a product that showed the progression of the Guardsmen from wide-eyed trainees to confident, side-by-side warriors.

As the days turned into weeks, and our reality felt like the movie Groundhog Day, I became more confident in my ability to navigate the Army environment, and its subtle yet consequential differences compared to Air Force operations. The following video documentary and images highlight my Sage Eagle Experience, just a few of the great people that I met, and my enthusiasm for my small role as a Combat Cameraman in the process.