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The Airborne and Special Operations communities are kinda difficult to understand.
There are basically five pieces of headgear that can be worn by soldiers:
The Maroon beret is the headgear of the Paratrooper. If you are on jump status--which means you have graduated from the Basic Airborne Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, you can be deployed to war under a parachute, that you must perform "proficiency jumps" on a regular basis, and that you draw $110/month in jump pay--this is the headgear you wear. Most of the people who wear this are in the 82nd Airborne, but every division has at least one company of paratroopers.
The Red Baseball Cap is the headgear of the Rigger. Riggers pack parachutes and prepare loads for airdrop. Riggers are not only jump qualified, they're required, on a frequent and unannounced basis, to jump a parachute they packed themselves. This makes sure they pay attention.
The Ranger beret is the headgear of the 75th Ranger Regiment. This used to be black, but General Shinseki changed it to the tan "Darby Beret." To earn this beret, you must graduate from a combat arms initial training course (think "infantry school"), Airborne School, then either Ranger Indoctrination Program (E-4 and below) or Ranger Orientation Program (E-5 and above) before being assigned to one of the three Ranger battalions in the Regiment. (This is different from Ranger School. You must attend that too, but that comes later.) Not everyone in a Ranger battalion wears this--as with any unit, Ranger battalions have mechanics and clerks. The mechanics and clerks, who are all airborne qualified, wear the maroon beret of the paratrooper...because that's what they are.
The Black Beret is what soldiers who aren't on jump status at all wear.
Now to the meat of your question: The Green Beret. Symbol of excellence. Worn by the men of Special Forces, and the qualifications for wearing this damned hat have changed more than Alberto Gonzalez' story about where he was when they decided to fire Carol Lam.
A Special Forces soldier is a member of a Special Forces Group (Airborne). In the old days, SF wasn't an "accession specialty"--you had to be out of training for a couple of years before you could volunteer for SF. These days, you can enlist for SF. Anyway, let's say you want to be a Special Forces soldier. I'd kinda recommend you join the army as a combat arms trooper, and preferably an infantryman. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to volunteer for Airborne training. This will put your ass straight into the 82nd Airborne Division; most of the currently-serving SF guys have 82nd service in their 201 files. (DA Form 201: Military Personnel Records Jacket.) When you have finally made peace with yourself, and you can do about a brazillion push-ups in two minutes, you get a copy of DA Form 4187, Personnel Actions Request, and type up a "request" to become a Special Forces soldier. At this point it's best that you be a very good soldier but that you haven't figured out some way to make yourself indispensable to the colonel, else he won't let you go. You get together a big batch of paperwork--a physical examination, your military entrance exam scores, a Physical Fitness Test scorecard, your swim test scorecard, IIRC a rifle range scorecard, letters of recommendation...the whole packet's about half an inch thick. This gets mailed to the Commander, 1st Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg. If THEY accept you, you'll be scheduled for the Special Forces Assessment and Selection Course. This is four weeks of fun and relaxation at which the cadre of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School decides whether they like you. Should you pass (we sent a guy from Berlin to SFAS; they sent him back because he drowned twice) and you HAVEN'T been to jump school yet, your next stop is to go to jump school...where they fuck with you even harder than normal because you're an SF candidate. This is why I kinda recommend joining the army to be a paratrooper if you eventually want to be SF; you only get the normal amount of severe harassment that way. If you're still in the game now, you go to the Special Forces Qualification Course, or "Q Course."
The Q Course is broken into three pieces of varying length. The first part is small-unit tactics and "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" training. In this part you learn to be Rambo, basically. Part Two is your MOS (job) training, and this varies depending on what you decide to do. If you join to be a Special Forces medic you're going to be in school for well over a year, and when you graduate you will know how to perform surgery. (You've heard of a Physician's Assistant; that whole career was started by SF medics who'd served in Vietnam, who wanted to practice medicine after the war was over, but couldn't get a job...they were overqualified to be nurses and undertrained to be physicians, so they and some former Army doctors who knew what they could do worked with some state licensing boards to create the Physician's Assistant.) The final part of their training, except for some language stuff, is counterinsurgency. What they must do to pass the Q Course is to hook up with a guerrilla leader (he works for the US Army, I know the guy, and he's probably the best actor in America) and win his trust and confidence to help defeat a dictator's forces. Once you get through all of this, you are awarded the Special Forces tab and they'll wind up burying you on Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Lewis or Fort Carson (depending on which SFGA you're in) because you'll never leave.
So what's all of this to do with the Green Beret? The fully-qualified Special Forces supertrooper wears on his head a green beret that is decorated with the "group flash." There are seven active SF Groups (two are US Army Reserve units, the other five active-duty formations), and each one of them has a distinctive patch that is sewn on the beret. Enlisted men display the Special Forces Crest on their flashes; officers wear their ranks.
As with Ranger battalions, not everyone in the unit is an SF-qualified supertrooper. The unit has clerks, mechanics and supply sergeants just like every other unit does. What THEY have worn has changed over the years. When SF first started wearing berets (during the Kennedy administration), SF guys wore the green beret, airborne-qualified non-SF guys wore the maroon beret and legs wore the baseball cap. Then they got rid of all the legs, or more accurately sent them all to jump school. Now you have guys in green berets and guys in maroon. Well...one of the generals at SOCOM decided a formation with two different colors of beret didn't present the proper military uniformity and put everyone in the green beret...but only Q Course graduates could wear the flash. The support soldiers were required to pin their crests directly to their berets. (This is probably when the state senator in question was in an SF unit.) Then another general decided to return the green beret to its former position as an exclusive headgear for SF-qualified soldiers, and he put the support troops back in maroon berets.
For troopers of the "everyone in a green beret" era, there's some wiggle room: he was "in the green berets," and he "wore a green beret," but he wasn't a Green Beret. Which makes no fucking sense whatsoever even to guys at the Special Forces Association, but that's how it works.
Okay, so this guy was an armorer or he worked in the motor pool.
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