Cool article from Time Magazine.

Some 10,000 special-forces troops saw action in Iraq, the largest such deployment since World War II and three times the number who participated in Gulf War I. From a secret base in western Saudi Arabia, they seized a pair of airfields and scoured the Iraqi desert for Scuds every night for nearly a month. In the east, they secured a port for the delivery of humanitarian goods. And in the south, they fought to keep Saddam from destroying the 1,000 oil wells that are the country's financial future. Teams in humvees and low-flying helicopters rolled into dozens of towns in search of arms caches; riverine squads on inflatable boats cleared mines and other vessels from Umm Qasr harbor; and with help from the Marines, Army Rangers and some locals, a seal team freed Private Jessica Lynch from a Nasiriyah hospital.

Special forces were usually ahead of the tip of the spear: as U.S. troops pushed toward Baghdad, secret combat teams zipped into Iraq aboard specially outfitted MC-130 Combat Talon planes that used highways as landing strips, surprising the enemy at its rear. On the road to Tikrit, they fingered Iraqi vehicles fleeing the capital for destruction by M1 tanks. And inside the capital, the elite Delta Force slipped into Baghdad's back alleys and into its sewers to eavesdrop on communications, cut fiber-optic cables, target regime leaders and build networks of informants.

Sometimes they just got lucky: a 12-man Green Beret team in customized humvees came upon a Shi'ite cleric and several hundred of his anti-Saddam disciples near Basra on March 20, according to the team's intelligence officer. The cleric sheltered the U.S. troops and their vehicles in warehouses as they plotted joint maneuvers. The Americans deputized the locals and then passed out Chinese-made weapons to the cleric's men and led them on a number of successful raids, seizing more than 100 antitank missiles. When the same Green Berets couldn't dislodge a well-entrenched Iraqi detachment from around a bridge in Basra, they broadcast the sound of approaching tanks from their humvees, drawing the Iraqi troops out of hiding and exposing them to fire—a model psychological operation. "It was bait-and-ambush," the intelligence officer said later.