There is a wristwatch in almost every photo I take, and the ones from this visit are no exception: a dive watch on a green strap, held up in front of a glass case on Ardennes Street. Behind the glass is the lineage of American special operations. Read it closely and it turns out to be, among other things, a history of time.
The U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum sits on Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The post was Fort Liberty for a couple of years and became Fort Bragg again in 2025, this time named for Private First Class Roland Bragg, a World War II paratrooper who earned a Silver Star at the Battle of the Bulge, rather than the Confederate general it once honored. The museum holds more than nine thousand artifacts, and it is in the middle of growing into a broader Army Special Operations Forces museum that will fold in the Rangers and Army special operations aviation. What follows is not a full tour. It is a few things I stood in front of, and what each has to do with a watch.
The Devil's Brigade
The oldest thread in the building runs back to 1942 and a joint American and Canadian unit called the First Special Service Force. It was raised by Lieutenant Colonel Robert T. Frederick and trained at Fort William Henry Harrison outside Helena, Montana, where the men learned to jump from aircraft, fight hand to hand, handle demolitions, and move through mountains and snow. They were built for the hardest terrain and the worst weather on the map.
In Italy they earned the name that stuck. Tasked with taking the German positions on the Camino ridge, the Force scaled Monte la Difensa in December 1943 and took it at a brutal cost, with the units engaged suffering casualties as high as seventy-seven percent. A captured German diary called them the Black Devils, and the Devil's Brigade they became. The Force was disbanded in 1944, but its bloodline did not end. Both the Special Forces Groups of the United States Army and the Canadian Special Operations Regiment claim the First Special Service Force as a direct ancestor. The red spearhead patch in the case is where the modern Green Beret begins.
Kennedy's Berets
The museum carries John F. Kennedy's name for a reason. In the early 1960s, as the Army was building a formal unconventional warfare capability at Fort Bragg, Kennedy became its most powerful advocate. He authorized the green beret as the official headgear of the Special Forces, a distinction the Army itself had resisted, and he visited Fort Bragg in the fall of 1961 to see for himself what these units could do. When he was killed in 1963, the Special Forces community folded him into its own history, and the school and museum took his name.
That is the institutional story. The human one is in the smaller cases: the field gear, the captured weapons, the improvised kit of men sent in small numbers to do outsized work. Unconventional warfare is not mass and firepower. It is a few people, behind the lines, running on a schedule no one else can see. Which brings me to the case I stood in front of the longest.
Nineteen Hundred and Three Days
Colonel James "Nick" Rowe was one of only thirty-four Americans to escape captivity during the Vietnam War. He was held for one thousand nine hundred and three days, most of it in bamboo cages in the Mekong Delta. On the last day of 1968, with his captors preparing to execute him, a flight of American helicopters passed overhead and distracted his guard long enough for Rowe to overpower the man, break into the open, and flag down a UH-1. He walked out after more than five years.
What he did next is why his display is in this museum. Rowe took what he had learned about surviving as a prisoner and built it into doctrine, developing the Army's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape course, the training now taught at the compound at Camp Mackall that carries his name. He was assassinated in 1989 in Quezon City, Philippines, shot in an armored car by a communist hit team, one round finding an unarmored seam in the frame.
Stand in front of that story with a watch on your wrist and the number does something to you. One thousand nine hundred and three days. Rowe kept count. Keeping count, refusing to let the time blur into a single undifferentiated dark, is part of how prisoners survive. Time was the one thing his captors could not fully take from him, and he held onto it for more than five years and used it to walk home.
The Long Watch
The thread through all of it is that special operations is a discipline of time as much as a discipline of force. The raid works because everyone agreed on the second. The linkup happens because two elements that cannot see each other trust the same clock. The exfiltration window is measured in minutes, and missing it can mean not coming home. And survival, at the far end of it, can come down to a man in a cage counting days.
I walked back out onto Ardennes Street with the same watch on my wrist that I had held up to the glass. It is a small thing, a mechanical instrument that measures a quantity these men spent their careers, and in one case nineteen hundred days, learning to master. The museum is named for a president, but it is really a monument to the people who understood that behind enemy lines, time is the whole game.
Tempus Est Potentia.