This has been touched on but not completely....if you were active duty you might want to check your facts...if you were in the Groups.....well then I shouldn't be correcting a snake eater on fact nitpicking :O But I might!
"Top" is generally a nickname for a First Sergeant although something tells me SGM Blane was at sometime a First Sergeant or a Master Sergeant, my guess by his uniform (which I have no idea how they screwed the patches up!) is he was an Operations Sergeant on an ODA which is a Master Sergeants billet, he probably was a First Sergeant in the 75th as well, I believe they reference he was in 2/75th in one episode with a knife that was inscribed with 2/75 C Company, something like that. Delta which this unit is partially based off of is NOT Army Special Forces, they have never been nor ever will be under Army Special Forces Command, they are under US Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) and USASOC reports to USSOCOM and JSOC....however Delta reports directly to JSOC...basically JSOC is the joint tier 1 service component while SOCOM is the joint Special Operations Command. Take a look at this picture below: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/US_Special_Operations_Command.png it is the full and accurate structure of JSOC and SOCOM, it'll give you an idea.
As for the Green Beret....some of them are Special Forces Qualified and Ranger qualified while others are not. Delta has its own selection course and unfortunately you don't get a fancy hat or tab for going the next level of a snake eater. Generally speaking most of Delta is made up of Rangers and Green Berets and thats where they recruit from but anyone can apply theoretically. If you are Special Forces Qualified and earned the snake eater tab you can wear the Green Beret in ANY unit, its unique, JFK made sure of that. Rangers used to wear Black berets although when the Army changed up they switched to Tan Berets, Ranger qualified personnel that served in the 75th Ranger Regiment can wear their Tan Beret while in any unit under USASOC....not quite sure on the Tan beret outside of USASOC but I do know that you will not see any chump who got his Ranger tab wearing a Tan beret unless he was actually a Ranger. One thing that DID bother me was the SF tab instead of the Airborne tab over the electric butter knife on the other shoulder....oh well...maybe Eric Haney walked away and the costume department thought it looked better.
As for ranks and leadership stuff....Officers don't lead teams directly in Army SF for long, in fact I know of ODA's running as 10 or 11 man teams led only by the Warrant Officer, Commissioned Officers are always being moved around as others have said, SF isnt a career killer anymore but it used to be, in fact today its great, I love seeing double tabbed 4-stars in high up positions, it means they understand today's warfare. Anyways Warrant Officers and Enlisted are IMO usually in the Groups longer, guys go and go until their dead in the Groups, Army SF is a very unique structure and Delta is even more absurdly unique. I don't like the whole "Yeah we are SF we are better than regular grunts!!" attitude and the looseness but I realize that its needed. The Ranger Regiment is however basically set up like a regular Infantry Regiment with officers and NCO's in the "correct" spots, they are top notch infantry and represent what every grunt should aspire to be. Check out Charlie Beckwith's book as well as Eric Haney's....not just good facts on the making and structure of Delta but also how the Army ran and still runs in allot of ways.
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