Illuminating Reality

One of the great things about serving in elite units in the Army is that you often get to walk in the footsteps of legendary warriors.  In a way, I suppose it might be like playing for a prestigious ball team with a history of all-star players. My old SF battalion was just such a unit and to me its most inspiring former member is Captain Larry Thorne.

Often called “The Man Who Fought for Three Flags,” Larry was born in Finland in 1919 as Lauri Allan Törni.  As a young man he fought the Soviets in the early part of the Second World War and was later sent to Germany to train with the Waffen SS where he became an infantry officer.  He spent the rest of the war continuing to fight the Soviets in Finland and his exploits as the leader of a detachment of guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines made him famous on both sides of the conflict.

As the war came to an end, Thorne escaped a British POW camp and returned to Finland where he ended up in jail for a few years before being pardoned.   This is where his life took a dramatic turn.  After escaping to Sweden a year later, Thorne came to America and joined the Army under the the Lodge Act; switching his name to Larry Thorne in the process.

It wasn’t long before he was selected for Special Forces and became “an ideal Green Beret.”  As a member of 10th SFG(A), Thorne was well positioned to serve in Europe – teaching mountaineering, survival and guerrilla techniques to fellow SF soldiers.  By 1960 he was commissioned an officer again, his third time and third nation of allegiance.

One of the missions Thorne was famous for while serving in 1oth Group was a recovery mission high in the mountains of northern Iran.   He succeeded where two other missions had failed, recovering classified material and the bodies of a C-130 crew.  Not long afterward he deployed to Vietnam as part of 7th Group and returned for another deployment with the elite MACV SOG.  Running reconnaissance missions into Laos and Cambodia, Thorne was back to doing the type of work he did in WW2.

Thorne’s chopper crashed on one of those missions in October of 1965 and he was presumed  dead until his remains were located in 1999.  He was buried with full military honors at Arlington Cemetery – a man who fought for Finland, Germany and died an American soldier.

His legacy however lives on.  The headquarters building for the entire 10th SF Group bears his name, but more importantly the Group has an award in his name – The Larry Thorne Award – for the best detachment in the Group.  One of the things I loved about SF over other SOF units such as the Ranger Regiment is the type of people it attracts.  In the ’90s I served with an NCO who’d escaped from East Germany as a teenager and went on to become an American SF soldier – again, perfectly positioned in 10th Group to be on a team working in Europe.

Thorne’s exploits in Vietnam are covered in Major John Plaster’s excellent book SOG: A Photo History of the Secret Wars.

One of my hobbies that’s a carry-over from my years as a soldier in the Army is long range shooting.  Understanding and exploiting the science of ballistics lets me take a particular load of ammunition and compute a predicted trajectory based on environmental factors such as barometric pressure, altitude and wind.  But there’s also an art form to creating a stable shooting platform with your body, controlling your breathing and making the shooting process fluid, not to mention estimating the wind speed and direction downrange.

Here’s a clip from a recent shoot out in the desert.  The targets are 10×17″ AR500 steel targets – about the size of a laptop screen.

Update:  I just came back from another trip out to the same area and this time made a few hits on the steel targets at a whopping 1750 yards.  Time of flight to the target was almost 2 seconds and it was another 3 seconds before we heard the report.

When I was in 1/10th SFG(A) back in the 90s, we had a month dedicated every year to teaching, developing and practicing winter warfare skills and techniques.  This was important because all three battalions of our Special Forces Group was regionally aligned to operate in all of Europe and that meant we had to be prepared to operate in mountainous regions such as the Alps or the Fjords of Scandinavia.   For that reason we had to learn not only how to survive in snowy conditions but also how to fight and win.  Much of this training was just down right fun, be it learning how to cross country ski or travel via snow mobiles, but there was also a very important tactical component to it that required training and practice to develop.

Since the GWOT began, all of the SF Groups have been very busy operating in Afghanistan and Iraq – a region that only 5th Group is regionally aligned and trained for.  This has required every team that rotates through the region to learn new skills, culture and languages that they normally aren’t trained for, and this has been going on for over eight years now.  Unfortunately, many of those regional specialty skills are quite perishable, especially language skills.  So it made me happy to see members of my old SF Group out in the snowy Rocky Mountains training hard in winter warfare between rotations.  Even though these winter skills apply to certain parts of Afghanistan and northern Iraq, it’s very easy to see how over the years they could be ignored in favor of focusing Central Asia-oriented skills.

Read more at the USASOC PA blog…

Well, now that the underwear bomber has been tied to Islamic terrorists in Yemen, all eyes in the West seem to be once again paying attention to the situation in Yemen.  This hasn’t really happened since since the Cole bombing in 2000 in the port city of Aden or in 2002 when the first known offensive Predator interdiction took place.  But there’s a problem here that I’m afraid many are missing.

Yemen in many ways is like Afghanistan or nearby Somalia, with a very weak central government and a handful of powerful insurgent groups to challenge it.  Not all of these groups are religious extremists- many are just tribal groups vying for power in a fractured country.  Regardless, they all threaten a monetarily poor and politically weak government that doesn’t have a whole lot of friends around the world.  The government’s inability to control the outlying countryside has even led to Saudi forces launching air strikes inside of Yemen against cross border insurgent groups.

So I suspect the Yemeni government is seeing the latest attention pointed their way as a chance to bring in some much needed funding as well as allies.  All they really have to do is convince Western powers that these groups that threaten them are all linked to al-Qaeda, are a threat to the West and can be neutralized with large sums of money, equipment and training.  So if you can’t see where I’m going with this, the danger is that we end up getting suckered into a situation where someone is playing “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  Granted, I don’t think we have much of a choice seeing how threats like al-Qaeda will always seek safe haven in lawless areas, but we would be wise not to get sucked into a situation that could backfire on us.

This is a bit old but quite good footage worth talking about…

The Yarmouk Traffic Circle was a particularly bad location in Mosul when I was there in 2004-2005, often the site of some bad ambushes by the bad guys as well as IEDs.  In this video, special operations aviation is doing gun and rocket runs on targets in the area.   You’ll notice that they have a pattern to their runs:  miniguns, cannon, then rockets.

The DAP is the brainchild of famed Nightstalker Cliff Walcott, who died in Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia.  Up until that point, the only attack helicopters used by the 160 Special Operations Aviation Regiment were AH-6 Littlebirds, armed with 7.62mm miniguns and 2.75″ rockets.  While agile and capable, the AH-6s don’t have the range nor the payload for sustained fire support missions, so operations that required heavier support relied on coordinating with conventional AH-64 Apache elements.  The compartmentalized nature of special operations often made this difficult, so it was determined that an “intermediate level” attack capability for the 160th was required.  The DAP was born out of this requirement by taking an MH-60, special operations variant of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, and fitting it for attack purposes.

MH-60s normally mount 7.62mm miniguns on door mounts to provide defensive fire when ferrying troops to and from targets.  Because the DAPs mission is purely offensive, the miniguns are locked forward firing and hard points are mounted to the fuselage allowing a wide variety of munitions.  The most common configuration is large 2.75″ rocket pods (larger than the ones carried by the AH-6) and a 30mm chain gun (the same used on the Apache gunship).  This is what is seen in the video with the forward mounted miniguns roaring onto the target followed by the 30mm chaingun and rockets.  DAPs can also mount Hellfire laser guided missiles for longer range precision standoff capability as well as Stinger missiles for anti-aircraft needs.

There’s a similar video out there of DAPs doing runs near the MAF (Mosul Airfield) at “Gilligan’s Island.”  There aren’t any active targets in that video – it’s more a series of practice runs or a “show of force” on the south side of the runway in a wide open area bad guys liked to setup mortars in.

A year ago this month, members of the large Pakistani militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked several sites in Mumbai, India.  For the most part, their 173 victims were random civilians located at two upscale hotels, a bar as well as a hospital.  The attack unfolded in realtime on television and via the internet and sowed tremendous confusion amongst the people of Mumbai and the security services.

Recently a documentary was released that covered the attacks in detail.  I found it particularly interesting to see how unprepared the Indian security services were as well as how the attackers were “controlled” by their leaders in Pakistan.  It’s almost chilling to listen to them commanding the murder of innocent people without any sort of emotion.  The attackers were rather run-of-the-mill Muslims from Pakistan, not hardened fighters nor anti-social or psychotic.   They just maintained an intense belief in what they were doing and quite obviously planned to die in the process in classic martyr style.

It’s an interesting look into the jihadist mindset…

Veteran’s Day is celebrated in the United States on November 11th, but this wasn’t always the case.  In fact, it’s origin can be found back in 1919, after World War 1 ended, as Armistice Day.  That war ended when the Germans signed the Armistice at the 11th hour on the 11th day of November, 1918 – so President Wilson proclaimed Armistice Day to commemorate that day.

This all changed in 1953 when a Kansas shoe store owner made a push to expand it to encompass all veterans in all of America’s wars.  The cause was promoted by various groups and turned into a bill that was pushed through Congress.  President Eisenhower signed the bill in 1954, creating Veterans Day as the national holiday that we know.  Between 1971 and 1978 it was moved to the fourth Monday of October to comply with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.

In 2006, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs was inspired by seeing civilians wearing their medals on ANZAC day in Australia.  He urged American veterans to do the same on Veterans Day and so on this day you may be served your coffee by a young man wearing an Operation Iraqi Freedom campaign ribbon. We are everywhere and we are proud.

Happy Veterans Day!

I remember this day 20 years ago quite vividly:  I was a young soldier fresh out of training, getting ready to head to Airborne School when, on my way to morning chow, I stopped to pick up a newspaper as I did every morning and saw that the wall had fallen the night before.

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, the Cold War was very much on my mind, especially when I became old enough to comprehend the geo-political news on TV or in the newspapers.  But for the folks in Berlin, their home was the epicenter of the conflict between East and West.  At any moment it could flare up and they would find themselves stuck between the two strongest kids on the block ready to duke it out in their living room.  This posturing made living in Europe during the Cold War even more impossible to escape.  Germany was split and western Berlin was an island deep behind enemy lines.

Over the years since The Wall went up, over one hundred east Berliners died while trying to escape.  East Germans were turned against each other, forcing neighbors and friends to spy on each other while intelligence agencies in the West and East fought a secret war to answer the one question neither seemed to know:  does my enemy intend to attack me?

In hindsight, we could see the end coming earlier that summer.  Hungary eased travel restrictions into Austria and East Germans flocked there as a way to escape to the West.  Not much later large protests in East Germany made headlines around the world; the citizens emboldened by actions in Hungary and desperate for change chanted “Wir wollen raus!” (We want out!).  At this point it was still unclear whether the Russians would invade a la Prague 1957, crushing the uprising, but the 1980s had shown the Soviets of that decade were different than the Soviets of decades past.  Even in 1981 with Poland’s solidarity movement, the fact that Russian tanks didn’t invade Warsaw in some ways said that the Cold War may be coming to an end.

But the end came quicker than anyone expected. In a press conference on November 9th, 1989, the rather frazzled Günter Schabowski announced that the restrictions would be lifted immediately, causing east Berliners to flock to the border crossings.  Even the guards were confused until the word came down and the borders opened that evening. If ever there was a sign that the Cold War was coming to an end, the most significant symbol of that struggle was being torn down by the very people it separated.

The Denver Post has a really amazing photo series telling the story of a young man graduating high school, joining the Army, and going off to fight in Iraq.  While I don’t identify so much with this kid, he does remind me of many I crossed paths with in my early years, particularly at Ft. Benning.

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2009/09/10/ian-fisher-american-soldier/

Say what you want about Knight’s Armament Co, but their history is an interesting one and while many including myself tend to poo-poo some of their products, they did come up with some revolutionary concepts and items.  Of particular note is their RAS (Rail Accessory System) which instantly made a weapon system modular and capable of mounting items using the Picatinny rail interface.   In the early 90s we had no standard way of mounting anything on our CAR-15 and later M4 carbines.  The only standard mount was via the carry handle, which is why many of us were used to optics mounted high over the receiver.  But many of us needed to mount lights or wanted to add a vertical foregrip, yet there was no standard interface to do so.

In 1994 the M4 added a Picatinny rail interface over the upper receiver which started to open things up for us, but we were still using duct tape, pipe clamps and other non-standard junk to mount on the forend of the carbine.  Knight’s changed all of that with their RAS, which replaced the front grips with four modular rails.  This revolutionized the M4 platform and in my opinion gave the decades old design some new life.  That point is obvious when you consider the level to which the rail interface system has propagated across the entire spectrum of modern military firearms, from assault rifles to precision rifles and shotguns.

American Rifleman TV has a couple clips up interviewing Reed Knight about the history of his company