
It is a tale that grew to epic proportions over the years out at Camp Mackall, North Carolina where Special Forces train soldiers to become America's future Green Berets.
The guy who had pizza delivered during the survival and evasion phase of the Army's notorious Survival Escape Resistance and Evasion (SERE) school, is the sort of thing that would be whispered about in the chow hall or told loudly in bars around Fayetteville.

But now the real story can be told, directly from the man himself.
Gene Yu grew up in Cupertino, California before attending West Point and becoming an armor officer. He found that being a tanker was not really aligned with his interests, and having attended Ranger School motivated him to push himself towards something even more challenging.
Yu decided to give Special Forces a shot. He got selected at SFAS and began the Q-Course. At that time, SERE was the last phase of the course before you graduated and donned the Green Beret after nearly two years of training.
After learning the necessary skills, Yu and his fellow students were sent on the evasion portion of SERE in which the trainees have to live off the land while being chased down by role players. It was about a week in when Yu's team was at their hide site location. They were all exhausted and starved.
Yu went to go look for firewood. "We heard some Latin music, and realized oh there are people here," Yu recounted in a recent interview. His thought was that some people must be camping or having a BBQ and wondered if he could beg them for some food. The SERE students came to some train tracks and saw some locals playing soccer on the other side. The rules given to SERE students said not to cross the tracks, but they were really hungry.
Gene spoke a little bit of Spanish from previous experience in Ecuador and one of his fellow students was fluent. So they built some rapport with the locals and ask if they can be taken to the local market to get some food.
"So they pull up the pickup truck and the three of us jump in," Yu described. "He starts rolling out on the hardball and rolls out a 60 miles per hour. I thought it was right around the corner, maybe because my Spanish is not so good."
The three SERE students in the back of the pickup looked at one another, unsure of what to do next.
As a young Army officer, Yu now had an epiphany that he had arrived at a fork in the road of life but figuratively and literally.
"I remember at the time having this thought that this is a major watershed moment in your life, and I wasn't sure which way it was going to go. It was like there was this spirit talking to me and saying, 'this is a big moment Gene, what are you going to do?' I'm going to see where this road takes us."
The locals drove them from Carthage to Aberdeen where Yu went into a gas station mini-mart. Luckily, he had memorized his credit card number because he ordered things off the internet fairly often. However, the gas station attendant was not going to serve a dirty SERE school student who did not actually have his credit card.
Yu's next thought was to find a Papa John's pizza joint. He often ordered pizza from Papa John's and just verbally gave them his credit card information over the phone, so by his reasoning he should be able to do the same at a physical pizzeria. Upon arriving, Yu made use of his Special Forces negotiations skills with the Papa John's manager and she agreed that while this arrangement may be unconventional, it did not appear to violate any policy.
Yu ordered the works. "Now it's gloves off," Yu described. "I bought like ten large pizzas and buffalo wings and all these drinks because it is like, you know, it was unlimited! I bought like $300 worth of pizza and even added some money for a tip for our drivers."
The three SERE students had been gone for a while now after just going to look for firewood as far as the rest of the team knew. Now, hours later, they arrived back at the hide site with the pizza. Yu remembers the students literally jumping for joy as they inhaled the food. The trash was then put into the fire to burn the evidence.
Then the other shoe dropped. The students went into the next phase of their training as they were captured and processed into a mock POW camp for the final phase of SERE in which students practice resisting interrogation and banding together against their captors.
"For whatever reason, I forgot to get rid of the receipt," Yu said. When strip-searched at the POW camp they found the receipt in his uniform pocket. "When they found it, they were like this is weird. This is $300 worth of pizza...yesterday," Yu said.
After a few days in the POW camp, Yu was pulled out of training and brought into a different type of interrogation room. The instructors running the school sat him down and laid the receipt from Papa John's out in front of them. Yu's personal policy was never to lie when caught breaking the rules, so he told them the truth. It did not go over well.
Yu was kicked out of SERE, and the Q-Course itself, given a dreaded Never To Return or NTR which means that you can never attempt to join Special Forces again. There is an equally epic story as to how Yu got his NTR overturned, completed Special Forces training, donned his Green Beret, and went on to have an amazing career serving with Special Forces in the Philippines and Iraq.
Today, Yu is the CEO of a cybersecurity company called Black Panda which provides insurance and cybersecurity specialists to companies across Asia. The infamous pizza delivery in SERE school remains a fond memory however. The rest of the story is told in full in Yu's series of memoirs titled Yellow Green Beret.
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