Category Archives: SF History and Lore

We’re holding out for “John has a Long Moustache”

Somebody in one of those tactical patch vendors has a sense of humor, and an appreciation of 1980s guerilla warfare movies. They’ll sell you this for $6:

It’s 11:59 on Radio Free America; this is Uncle Sam, with music, and the truth until dawn. Right now I’ve got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone: “the chair is against the wall, the chair is against the wall”

A tribute to one of the greatest movies ever, Red Dawn!

PVC, velcro backed, and approximately 2″ x 3″ in size. Available in Coyote and Black, Grey and Black, and Camo.

We hear that the Powers That Bees are cracking down on display of morale patches, and there’s currently a sergeants-majors’ jihad against that garment inimical to good order and discipline, the baseball cap. These things go in circles. When the Army was in dopey green baseball caps (which were worn with your rank and unit crest pinned on, just to take the dopey to 11), SF guys liked to wear their Ranger caps (same-same current patrol cap, but OD Green) in garrison just because it was forbidden. Now that the Army is in patrol caps (and black issued-not-earned berets), SF guys like tan baseball caps. All that was old is new again. In WWII it was the angle of your overseas cap; we wonder what it was for Napoleon’s Guards or Caesar’s legionaries. The combat soldier has to have something to push back against the overhead and the teeming grifters of the rear area.

via The Chair is Against the Wall Patch. Tell ‘em WeaponsMan sent ya.

Charity begins at home

Pentagon defends Goat Lab — halfheartedly

Actually, this is someone else's goat, roasting on the interwebs... we don't eat the same goats used in live tissue training (too full of medicines!)

Actually, this is someone else’s goat, roasting on the interwebs… we don’t eat the same goats used in live tissue training (too full of goat medicines!)

Pentagon lawyers have released a weak, feeble defense of Fort Bragg’s Med Lab, where special operations medics’ skills are honed on live animal tissues before they have to perform the same treatments on combat-wounded team members, allies, or even enemy detainees.

The report tried to appease the animal-rights extremists by, for example, banning live tissue training in team-level trauma cross-training.

Naturally, this thrown bone did not satisfy People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the overt arm of the violent Animal Liberation Front terrorist group. PETA has made an end to the lab one of its highest priorities. The extremist group also opposes: clothing made of animal hides and shoes made of leather; ownership of pets (didn’t you know Granny’s Shih-Tzu years to be returned to its pack in the forest?); and animal models in medical research.

No pun intended, they’re barking mad. But they do have a fellow crank in Congress (from California, naturally), and he stuck legislation threatening the med lab in an appropriations bill. We’ve previously covered this issue in these pages, and now here’s an update from the Fayetteville Observer:

The Pentagon said in a report this month that an early transition from using live animals in trauma training would potentially lead to more battlefield deaths.

The Department of Defense report was compiled for members of Congress to outline the military’s strategy for a transition from using animals for trauma training.

The four-page report says the total investment required to stop using live animals is unknown but highlights a $20 million, three-year research effort that began in 2010.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which provided the report to the Observer, criticized the document Thursday.

“The Department of Defense report released today is a regurgitation of baseless excuses for the continued shooting, stabbing, dismembering and killing of thousands of animals in crude medical training drills,” said Justin Goodman, PETA’s director of laboratory investigations.

The military’s use of live animals in trauma training has been controversial, particularly among animal activists.

Government documents have shown that, on average, soldiers on Fort Bragg have killed 300 goats a month for medical trauma training that supporters said helps save lives.

The crowd at PETA loves them some goats, at least in the abstract. It bothers them that they are killed:

PETA officials estimate that thousands of animals are killed during similar training across the military and have argued that simulators provide better training.

Previously, PETA has said that Fort Bragg training accounts for a third of all animal deaths caused by the military each year.

Meanwhile, there’s a cruel organization that operates an animal shelter that puts a happy face on to receive animals for “adoption” — and then kills damn near all of them. Tens of thousands of ‘em. Then they throw their carcasses in garbage bags and stack them up in big, unsanitary piles. And they don’t even train a single useful trauma medic.

Its operator? People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Swimming, Lifeguards, SOF and Affirmative Action

Phoenix, Arizona, can’t meet its quota for black lifeguards even with a $15,000 scholarship program for minority kids to learn to swim and certify as lifeguards. So what’s the answer? You betcha: lower the standards until the bean-count comes up good. Even if it means lifeguards who can’t swim.

No, we are not making this up.

In an effort to increase diversity among its lifeguards, Phoenix, Ariz., is launching an effort to hire more African Americans and Latinos for the positions — even if the candidates aren’t strong swimmers. “We will work with you in your swimming abilities,” said a department official at a recruiting event at a local high school.

via City of Phoenix Recruiting Minority Lifeguards Even if They Can’t Swim – By Andrew Johnson – The Corner – National Review Online.

Another official said it wasn’t about racial quotas, honest, but about a “language barrier.” That might fly if their targets were Mexican-Americans only or something, but blacks? What, Ebonics?

Swimming is also blamed for minority underrepresentation in Special Operations Forces. Every SOF unit has some kind of swim test that must be passed, even the SEALs, for whom life can be one enduring swim test. Sometimes the test is easy — various Ranger swim tests involve only moving a few feet without panicking — and sometimes it’s harder, longer, or multi-event. And minorities — blacks, specifically, and others with significant African blood — have a harder time with swim tests than whites of European ancestry do. There are solid reasons for this, both cultural (more blacks are urban and lack swimming opportunities as kids) and physiological (at the same level of fitness, a black man has less body fat, and therefore less buoyancy, than his white swim buddy. So swimming is a lot harder for the black guy, and the paradox is, the fitter he is, the harder it gets).

Sometimes and in some services, lowering the standard has been tried, with the results you’d expect — the guys given preference here were mostly not minorities, just crummy swimmers; and they wound up bouncing out by failing some other performance measure anyway.

For example, Army diversicrats, disturbed by the increasing pallor of ARSOF, actually convened a commission in the 1990s to recommend ways to get the beans to count up “right.” This was a highly unpopular idea with serving SF and Ranger guys — whatever their race. If anything, the black guys opposed it more vigorously than their white and asian peers; everyone was worried about the future of the force, but black men also were insulted by the idea that lowered standards would diminish their own achievements.

The board was headed by freshly retired conventional forces General Colin Powell, and it made two recommendations for Special Forces in particular. The first recommendation implemented was to lose the cutoff score of 110 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery’s “GT” or General Technical subscore. The GT score is exactly analogous to an IQ score. (For example, it’s accepted at a certain threshold for entry into MENSA). The score was lowered to 100, the 50th percentile. This had the exact outcome the men predicted: net-net, no more minorities came in, but a lot of average-IQ soldiers tried out for SF (and failed, mostly, because even the course rewards quick and accurate thinking and punishes average intellect).

The second recommendation was to eliminate the swimming test entirely, and so it was written, and so it was done. (At least, it was eliminated as a must-pass gate). These results were more pernicious, because there’s only the one swim test gating entry into SF. So, unless the guy failed the swim for overall lack of fitness, in which case he was going to fail out anyway, a lot of non- and weak swimmers wound up graduating. (These were almost all white or hispanic; Asian and black men actually in SF tend to have passed the swim test).

A team has enough men to work around one and maybe two lousy swimmers. Most ops take place, after all, on dry land (and recently, in arid countries). That’s what you do, on an SF team: play each man to his strengths and disengage his weaknesses to the extent you can. Obviously dudes who float like engine blocks are not going to volunteer for SF Combat Diver school; so in a way this intervention, even if it was a bust as far as putting more black faces in Group formation, didn’t do much harm.

Conversely, the non-swimming lifeguards of Phoenix is one of those ideas so brilliant that only a government worker could hatch it. Can’t you see it now: Here comes the dude in the orange trunks. Yay! I’m saved. Oh, snap. He can’t swim at all. He’s dragging me down! Goodbye, cruel world!

Glug.

But hey, at least he has the same skin color as me! I feel good to be drowning in such an inclusively diverse public pool!

Ironically, the very statistic that has Army diversicrats steamed about Special Forces — that the rate of minority membership has declined precipitously since the Vietnam era — does not mean what they think it means. The statistic is definitely real. You don’t even need the Army’s own reams of racial bean-counting data. It’s something anyone can see clearly by comparing then-and-now team pictures — there were a lot more brothers in SF in 1963 than now, fifty years later. Where did they all go? Did the Army get racist?

Nope, not a bit. What happened is that opportunities got better for the 2013 cohort of young black high school graduates than they were for the 1963 cohort. In 1963, there were few better deals than the Army or other service for a bright black kid. Fifty years later, a lot more institutions are color-blind to excellence, as the Army then was; and some even bend over backwards the other way. The Army is no longer the best path from poverty into the middle class, or from the middle class into leadership, for that kid.

Whether or not he can swim.

“We killed him. We shot Rich. He’s gonna die.”

With that, we had to get a repeat from the guy on the phone. He was crying. “Wait, what? Say again?”

“We shot him, one of us shot him. During live fire. We just came from the hospital. He’s not gonna make it, man.” Another broken voice joined in, saying the same essential thing.

It was hard to make out what they were saying. They were our two team medics, and they and a third doc from another team had rendered first aid. One also thought he might have fired the fatal shot, but he couldn’t be sure.

“How the *&%&#$(!! did that happen?”

Of course, if anyone understood how Richie got shot, he probably wouldn’t have been shot. Over time it was possible to to wring some details out of the weeping, distraught medics. They had a long drive back from the hospital where Rich was in an ICU with a hugely swollen head and a bad prognosis. Both docs were tough men, one of whom would retire as a team sergeant and one as a first sergeant and acting command sergeant major. Both earned the CIB and CMB before retiring (which you could do, on separate tours, Back In The Day™, although you could only wear one at a time). And both would serve in a “where’s where” of the world’s badlands. But right now, they were probably too emotional to be driving or talking on the phone, but they were doing both because they thought we needed to know. And they needed to talk.

Each detail of the accident scene was worse than the previous one. There was Rich, conscious but brain-damaged, begging them to remove the helmet that was squeezing his head — but his helmet had long since been taken off. There was Rich asking what happened, and marveling at the fact that he had been shot; and then asking the question again minutes later, his damaged brain having fomed no memory of the first conversation. There was the aftermath, where pimply CID privates in polyester PX shirts and pants tried transparent and amateurish “gotcha” interrogation techniques.

Against guys who, first, had nothing to hide, and second, had all had resistance to interrogation training. It would have been comical if it wasn’t for the buddy in the ICU. That took the mirth right out of things.

It turned out the CID guys had built such a towering theory that they were trying to determine which one of the guys was having an affair with Rich’s wife and had conveniently offed him. (It never occurred to them that the men in our unit came from a region 250 miles wide and 500 high, and some of them flew to drill. It was usually impractical to get together with the other guys, let alone to hit on their women, even if we were so inclined).

Paradoxically, our reputation — “SF guys are too well trained to screw up like that” — was one of CID’ most powerful reasons for seeking a criminal explanation.

But, yeah. We screwed up like that.

One powerful feeling was terrible guilt for not being there and not sharing that misery drill with the guys. One problem with being a Reserve or Guard SF guy is that drills will conflict with civilian life. Sometimes drill wins; sometimes you’re a member of a corporate board and have to make the annual meeting. So there was a profound feeling of guilt in the air as the horrifying details of Rich’s wound tumbled out.

Later, Rich’s helmet would be sent back when the 51-3 investigation was over. We signed for it and put it in the company safe. A test coupon had been cut out for analysis, and we could see where the M855 round penetrated the back of his helmet, and how some fragments had peppered the opposite inside after scrambling his brain. Other fragments stayed inside his head. It was a fatal wound; that much was obvious.

To everyone but Rich. He didn’t die.

We never determined conclusively who fired the shot. It was a difficult, night, live-fire evolution where the team had to transition from firing and maneuvering in one direction to react to being ambushed on the flank. The team has to transition and engage the new threat. Rich, a pugnacious Ranger Bat alumnus who prided himself on his fieldcraft, was point as usual. When the team secured from the drill, they were one man short. Someone found Rich and asked him to get up. He didn’t move, so the guy kicked him, thinking he was being a smart ass. Rich mumbled something, and moaned. That’s when it was obvious something had gone drastically wrong.

While it was never clear who fired the shot – not to us, not to the safety investigators, not to the junior G-men of CID who did their best job on an investigation, once they figured out it wasn’t a TV show murder plot — every man on the team was afraid it was him. One member took it particularly hard, and soon left the unit. He drank a lot, a real lot. He died young.

It was Rich who called this time to talk about his friend. “I never talked to him after the accident. I wish I could have. I would have told him it’s OK, I’m OK.”

And considering that he took a lethal round through the brain housing group at point-blank range, Rich is OK. We suppose his MICH helmet helped; maybe the delta-V that came from going through all those Kevlar layers that the test engineers so carefully delaminated to inspect was enough. Maybe it was just the path the round took through his grey matter — brain injuries are weird like that. Maybe God has stuff for him to do — we’re not ruling anything out here.

Sure, he had consequences. He lost some field of vision, he had to learn a lot of motor skills (like walking) all over again. He had to retire, medically, from his civilian job in the law and order field as well as from the unit. His wife left him. Most painfully, he had to sit in a wheelchair and watch his buddies — his old team — go off to war without him. They could have used him, you know.

But when they came back, he had a trick to show them — he came to the homecoming party, and stood up out of the wheelchair. Every man in the unit felt momentarily beatified. We bought him enough drinks, and he bought them for us, that we all needed wheelchairs before we stumbled back to our hotel rooms (nobody was driving that night. Wouldn’t have been wise).

Rich didn’t lose a point off his intelligence, and his personality didn’t shift at all (both common in brain injuries). His sense of humor — another frequent head-wound casualty — was untainted. When we got back from the board meeting, and got in to see him, his first comment was, “well, if a guy on the team had to be shot in the head, it’s lucky it was slow ole Ranger me. A bullet in your head might have hit something! In mine, it just went clean through. Whooosh!”

So, yeah, we’re hard on NDs here. What was going on was an extremely hazardous, advanced evolution that required men to cross in front of other men, at night, under NVGs. But the bottom line is, we blew it — guys that knew our weapons, sights, and NODs, and fire thousands and thousands of rounds a year.

Since this accident is still so imperfectly understood, it’s hard to determine what lessons we can learn from it, specifically. Here are a few:

We would suggest that you should concentrate 90% of your training time on basics and 10% or less on advanced elements. Work on the few things you always need. A Special Forces team has to do some hairy live fires, but you probably don’t.

You don’t have to go any further than YouTube to see instructors — often, largely self-taught self-promoters — doing things that are designed to look cool but that add risk without adding training value. Don’t be that guy. SOF do some advanced shooting, but every thing we do is taught painstakingly on the crawl, walk, run basis. Even then, we sometimes blow it. Ask Rich.

Stress inoculation works. As horrifying as the experience was for all concerned, the many gut checks of SFQC, 300F1 (medic school), and Ranger school meant that when things went pear-shaped, everybody acted. They didn’t freak out until the drive home, after the CID kids finally let them go, and it was OK to freak out.

Rapid and proper medical action saves lives, even lives thought forfeit. Control the bleeding, maintain the airway. It’s not brain surgery… at least, not unless you do the right things to get him to the operating theater, and then the brain surgeons can take it from there. If you don’t know combat first aid, learn some. And put a med kit in your range bag and your trunk.

And one last thought: you’re not dead, even when both your team medics have mentally written you off, until you give yourself up for dead. (Of course, the docs maintained a positive attitude whilst treating Rich, even as they calculated his odds as nil — fortunately, mistakenly. So he never knew they wrote him off until they talked much later). Rich never quit which is the single most necessary ingredient in coming home with your tab, or trident… or life. Many years later, Rich is doing better than ever.

Hostage Rescue Ain’t Easy

French weapons captured by Somali terrorists.

We’ve had a few reminders of this lately, with French special operations forces failing to rescue a hostage and losing two guys (one of whom wound up as an MIA and then dead in the hands of al-Shabaab terrorists), and Algerian forces making an unholy mess out of a mass hostage situation, which turned into a mass ~~Mohammedan worship service~~ murder. Sure, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team successfully freed a kid held captive last month, but what went wrong with the French and Algerian attempts in January?

First, it’s not because the FBI’s all Yanks and those forces aren’t. Both foreign forces are professional. They have individual issues, but they’ve exchanged training with US and other counterparts and we have a pretty good eye on their skills and TTPs, which do not appear to be the problem. (And the FBI doesn’t win ‘em all, either; you can bet they were as relieved as they were pleased at how the Alabama case wrapped up: hostage freed and hostage taker dead).

So what happened? It’s rather simple, actually. Hostage rescue is extremely hard. It’s complicated, risky, and dangerous. These operations seldom succeed, and to do so they need a good dose of intel, planning, skill, and, the quality that Napoleon prized above all others in his subordinates: luck.

The enemy, also, is evil, not stupid. He adapts and reacts and exploits his strengths against our vulnerabilities, which is not some novelty from Mao, Ché (that hack), or Marighella, but bog-standard Clausewitz, Jomini, and Sun Tzu. (See here for a specific example of Sun Tzu’s grasp of asymmetric warfare, to prove it’s nothing new). Just as our special operations forces study their own, their allies’, and third parties’ hostage-rescue missions to learn from their successs and failures, terrorists and hostage takers study those same missions with a view to understanding the TTPs in use and thwarting them.

Son Tay Raiders, on the way. Dick Meadows on left.

The last war from which most details of hostage (POW) rescue missions has been declassified, in the United States, is Vietnam. Even our best special operations forces were thwarted by circumstances and luck. The classic example is the flawlessly executed Son Tay prison raid, doomed to failure by catastrophically flawed intelligence. There, the highly-trained task force needed all their skill and technological advantage to get out of the AO without serious casualties. Many other Bright Light missions failed. A few succeeded in rescuing ARVN prisoners. The men who pulled them off still treasure those memories.

Complex, many-moving-parts hostage rescues can succeed. The Israelis at Entebbe. SAS at the Iranian embassy. GSG-9 at Mogadishu. Delta in Panama, freeing Kurt Muse from Modelo Prison (each one of those had some aspects go wrong, from a sniped commander to a crashed copter, but the forces adapted fluidly and the final outcome was good). There are others we know of that are not publicly released.

But these missions can also crater spectacularly. Desert One is the most incendiary example, perhaps, but there have been as many failures as successes — and failures usually wind up with dead hostages. (Remember Linda Norgrove, the hostage who was killed accidentally, by a SEAL’s grenade?) The enemy always has his vote, and Lady Luck has hers.

If you want to read some case studies, the guys at SOFREP have put together a pretty good rundown of the track records of British HR-specialized SOF and American JSOC elements. In many cases they link to Wikipedia; that site is not terribly trustworthy on these things.

The next hardest thing after a hostage rescue is the tactically similar prisoner snatch. Even when the task is simplified by being a snatch of any prisoner instead of some specific prisoner, it often fails. Likewise, most intentional prisoner snatches in the Vietnam theater came up dry, and various standing incentives offered to recon teams were very seldom collected.

The hostage in Somalia, Denis Allex (pseud.), was an intelligence officer. One reason nations can find men (and women) to undertake such hazardous jobs is that they promise to expend every effort to get them out. But the al-Shabaab terrorists executed Allex after the unsuccessful raid failed to free him.

The mass-hostage-taking in Algeria ended with a mass raid that left most hostage takers and about a quarter of the hostages dead. In retrospect, this wasn’t really a failure. The hostage takers were intent on killing them all and going out in a blaze of glory; they achieved the latter, but only a fraction of the former. The mission is reported as a failure largely because of armchair experts like this journalist (zero time in service, expertise acquired with ass in Beltway chair), quoting an armchair expert no more informed than he. (Again, zero time in service, and who consulted mostly with other Beltway dilettantes). We have known and trained, albeit not intensively, with real live Algerian SOF. The Atlantic’s “experts” have read about them — entirely from other armchair experts. Advantage, us.

The Algerian raid was mostly successful on another metric — killing the hostage takers. The most important thing, when liberating hostages, is to ensure that you kill all the hostage takers. Otherwise, if you screw up and take one alive, their confederates still at liberty may get the bright idea of taking more hostages to try to do a prisoner swap. The conventional military always seeks to take prisoners where possible, on grounds both humanitarian and practical — the practical reason is that POWs are a rich and deep source of intelligence, if exploited properly. Terrorists are of very limited utility as captives and come freighted with all kinds of baggage — and these days, you’ll get more actionable intelligence by imaging Hadji’s hard drive that you will by playing head games with him. In 2003, prisoners were giving up useful intel. Ten years later, that juice isn’t worth the squeeze any more.

But the bottom line is that hostage rescue, even when the hostages are held by ordinary soldiers or criminals who want to live, is very, very difficult. When the hostages are held by captors who seek death, you’re likely to lose a few. It’s not a reflection on the French or Algerian operators, but on the nature of the game, that Fate and the enemy get a roll of the die, too.

SF Loss in Wardak Insider Attack

SF lost a young officer and a conventional unit working with our guys lost a good NCO. In addition, as many as 10 other Americans, and some loyal Afghans, were wounded in the incident. The wounded include members of the 3rd Special Forces Group and of a conventional unit that has been working closely with them on this deployment.

It was one of the insider attacks that Secretary Panetta went out denying, and that PAOs have been directed to diminish and deny, lest it interfere with the Master Plan of the Pentagomers, which seems to be to generally bug out, but to leave SF and some support elements indefinitely, dying for no articulable reason.

Not that we’re bitter or anything.

Here are some obituaries of the late CPT Pedersen-Keel

The USASOC official one.
The Fayetteville, NC, Observer’s. The Observer can’t avoid the fact that it’s the paper of record in a company town, where the company is the US Army and especially its Airborne and Special Operations elements. But they bring J-school values, such as they are, to the job. They don’t like us much, and the dislike is reciprocated.
His West Point classmates have a classy and minimalist obituary page here, with several photos of Pedersen-Keel in country.

Here are remembrances of the late SSG Schad.

Official Army notification from the DOD. It’s a bare-bomes
His family expressed great pride to a local reporter. The family has a tradition of military service. His brother, also a soldier, flew to Dover to meet his remains.

The insider threat has proven an effective technique for the Taliban, which has been able to (1) turn disaffected Afghan security force members, or members who fear for their families’ safety in areas where the Talibs range free; (2) infiltrate Taliban loyalists into the ANA and especially into the loosely-vetted Afghan police organizations; and (3) infiltrate into bases dressed in Afghan uniforms stolen or sold by corrupt Afghan officers and managers. The combat effect that the traitors or disguised Talibs have is considerable — they killed 64 US and NATO soldiers last year this way, more than they did with IEDs — but it pales beside the psychological effect, which is paralyzing. Every incident sows further Afghan/American distrust.

The man who shot and killed Pedersen-Keel and Schad, and wounded the other Americans and several Afghans, was an Afghan Police officer. The traitor was shot dead.

American senior leaders have been in deep denial about the insider threat, and have been willing to see more and more Americans killed than admit that this is happening, and threaten politically-established withdrawal schedules and a politically-established narrative of Afghan success.

Wardak province, of course, is a hotbed of several things, including Taliban infiltration, Afghan national corruption, and resistance of all kinds to effective US or NATO operations. Recently, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has demanded the withdrawal of USSF from that province. Karzai’s government is thought to be behind orchestrated protests in Wardak.

Karzai’s reasons are unknown, but it may be that SF operations were crimping the corruption and drug trafficking that has made the Karzai family incredibly wealthy, or it may be that he just sees America abandoning him, and is looking to establish some distance lest he end up like his Soviet-era analogs. Russia’s last quisling, Comrade Najib, was hung from a barren tree when Kabul fell, and his body beaten and mutilated on camera; the previous puppet, Babrak Karmal, “the Friend of the Workers,” was driven into poverty-wracked exile in Muscovy. Since Karzai’s wealth leaves Afghanistan regularly for more trustworthy banking climates like Switzerland, Singapore and Belgium, he’s already well-hedged against the poverty, but he has to be concerned about the other possibility. Poor Karmal believed all that workers-and-peasants bullshit, and look where it got him. (Karmal’s predecessors Nur Mohammed Taraki, Hafizullah Amin and Mohammed Daoud also met unhappy ends, at the hands of their successors or the successors’ Russian puppetmasters. It’s an Afghan tradition of long standing).

Shout out to SOG veterans

You know who you are. There’s a guy in the film industry who wants to tell your story in a documentary — remember, like CNN was going to do to settle the suit about their vile “Tailwind” fabrication back a dozen-plus years ago? (No, CNN never did). This guy doesn’t have CNN’s juice, but he doesn’t have CNN’s attitude, either. He’s been talking to the VHPA and now to SOA.

His objective is to raise, basically, a million dollars to extend the interviews and combat audio he’s already got through his helicopter connections into a television documentary series.

My name is Sonny Joe Roberts. I am from Frisco Texas. My uncle is a veteran of Vietnam. His name is Jack Jordan (Panther 36). He was a Cobra pilot with the Pink Panthers 68-69, then he flew Slicks with Command Control in 71-72.

I am on a mission to create a documentary to tell the story of MAC-V-SOG. I have been connecting with other men who served at SOG in an effort to obtain any help they are willing to give. I would like to interview anyone you may know that would be interested in speaking with me about their time there.

I am also looking for pictures, or videos taken while there. At this time I have about 20 hours of audio recordings from missions flown during various times. I also have been fortunate enough to borrow lots of information from some guys that flew with the Pink Panthers. Three of these guys have agreed to an interview to tell their story. I have a better description of the project on my website www.mac-v-sog.com.

Please let me know if you would like to contribute in any way (interview, research information, ect). The end result of the project is to create a non-profit organization that will provide scholarships for children and grandchildren of the MAC-V-SOG pilots, as well as provide assistance to men suffering with PTSD. I am still trying to find the guys to control the NPO. I would like it to be the contributors to the project that control things. At this point I am still in the planning phase of this project. Hopefully I will be able to go to San Diego in July to start interviewing pilots during the VHPA reunion.

The Harve Saal books and the new Jason Hardy books are excellent sources on SOG. Some of the vets are still with us, too.

Mr Roberts has, since sending this message, been invited also to the Special Operations Association reunion, whose Vietnam-era members are mostly SOG-associated: even SF A-camp guys are denied membership, a decision that periodically stirs controversy. (We’re members but not of the Vietnam generation. Those guys were our mentors and role models).

SOG was a joint unilateral command; the natives who participated were essentially mercenaries in pay of the United States, not Vietnam. It conducted covert reconnaissance missions into the politically “denied ares” of Laos, Cambodia, and occasionally even North Vietnam, and sometimes into the functionally denied areas of South Vietnam that were vital to the Ho Chi Minh trail and were under the tight control of PAVN regulars. Along with the ground component that launched Reconnaissance Teams (RTs) and Hatchet Forces, there were maritime forces and several air elements including Vietnamese transport helicopter pilots (the legendary King Bee 219th Squadron) and American forward air controllers, attack helicopters and fighter-bombers.

If you are a SOG guy and want to make contact, we’re going to volunteer Tilt Meyer as a good cut-out. (Sorry Tilt, but everybody knows how to reach you).

If Mr Roberts happens to read this: Good luck with this story. Great photo on your website, but get rid of it and put a SOG-related one there instead! Jason Hardy can probably help you; he knows more SOG history than many of the operators themselves.

New Insignia for USASOC

The new insignia has been well-received.

The United States Army Special Operations Command has a new Distinctive Unit Insignia — usually seen as a small enameled brass badge worn on the beret flash of enlisted soldiers and in various places on dress uniforms. USASOC units include Army elements of the Joint Special Operations Command, numerous special operations staff and support elements, and subordinate units that have their own DUIs, including Special Forces, Rangers, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

The USASOC DUI change was set in motion by then-CG LTG John F. Mulholland in 2011, but was only finalized February 25th. The old DUI, which dated back to an era when Army special operations eviation didn’t have its own, had a gaudy set of gold wings on it. The new version drops the wings and superimposes the WWII-inspired black dagger on a red arrowhead on the globe instead, symbolizing the global reach of the command. From the USASOC press release:

Inspired by Burt Reynolds’s 1976 Trans-Am! The gaudy old one already has been ruthlessly purged from military websites, but this is what it looked like on a red and black USASOC flash.

“The old one had this outlay of gold wings or some people thought they were flames. The problem with the wings is that it looked like (the insignia of) an aviation unit and while we do have an aviation component, they are not primary,” said Dan Telles, USASOC Art Director.

The new insignia kept the red arrow head, because it was derived from First Special Service Force (FSSF) from WWII. Their legacy laid the ground work for the planning operations and equipment that we use today.
The FSSF members received rigorous and intensive training in stealth tactics; hand-to-hand combat; the use of explosives for demolition; parachuting; amphibious warfare; rock-climbing; mountain warfare, and as ski troops; training much like Special Operations forces get today.

Remaining in the middle of the arrow head is the Fairbairn Sykes, a double-edged fighting knife that was designed for surprise attacks and fighting with a slender blade that can easily pierce and a vase handle that grants precise grip. It was used by British commandos during WWII and adopted by the Rangers and the operatives of The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency and America’s first Strategic Service.

The major change to the insignia is in the background, with the subtraction of the gold wings and the addition of the globe. The globe represents a couple things; Army Special Operation Forces focus on ground combat and that USASOC has soldiers operating all over the world in more than 70 countries at any given time.

“If you actually look, the arrowhead sits over the Middle East with Africa and Europe to the left and Asia to the right,” Telles said. “That was chosen because we looked at where the majority of our forces go and there was no way of getting the entire earth on there because obviously we are all over the place…It seemed like the best way to get the majority of our operational forces represented at one time on one globe.”

While we’re glad to hear from the command’s graphic designer, we note that the Special Forces patch, the jump wings, the original (Trojan Horse) SF crest, the Merill’s Marauders patch which became the Ranger Regimant’s DUI, the First Special Service Force patch that inspired the USASOC one, and many other insignia that are now legendary, were designed not by pros but by members or commanders of the units in question.

A government that has a graphic designer in every combat command, and yet can’t figure out how to cut even a percent out of its budget, is a government that isn’t trying very hard.

This crest, by the way, doesn’t change what Rangers, Special Forces, or Nightstalkers wear on their berets. They’re still leading the way, liberating the oppressed, and never quitting just like they always have done.

WeaponsMan

Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery