KALIX, Sweden—A dozen highly trained U.S. Army Green Berets lumbered through a northern Swedish pine forest, struggling not to fall on their brand new skis as they dragged sleds over hills and frozen creeks.
Veterans of the global war on terror, the special forces were retraining for Arctic warfare. And the extreme cold was proving as hostile as any human enemy.
Near the Arctic Circle, temperatures constantly hovered around -30 degrees Fahrenheit (-34 Celsius). Days into the training, one team member—who had spent years in the jungles and deserts of the Middle East and Asia—was dismissed from the course with a boil on his finger the size of a cherry after spending the night outside in the cold. A European soldier from another team was hospitalized and risked losing parts of two toes. Instructors suspected he had failed to change out of his sweaty socks.
