Commandos: The Making of America's Secret Soldiers, from Training to Desert Storm - Softcover

Waller, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982128224 ISBN 13: 9781982128227

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Discover what it takes to fight alongside the very best of America’s armed forces in this heart-pounding precursor to American Sniper and SEAL Team Six.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at the most secret and elite of clandestine warriors, including the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Delta Force. Offering inside details of the US special operations forces, former Newsweek and Time correspondent Douglas Waller reveals the excruciating training and dangerous missions behind America’s elite fighting forces.

Following them closely into battle in Operation Desert Storm, Waller shares never-before-revealed scenes and details from the US Special Forces–waged Scud-busting night raids, firefights, and some of the most unconventional and dangerous war missions in history.

In this vivid account, Waller’s singular experience not only shines a light on the obstacles these soldiers face but gives an intimate portrait of the individual men and women serving our country. His inside reporting highlights the humanity of these soldiers by sharing their struggles, perseverance, and triumphs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Douglas Waller is a former correspondent for Newsweek and Time, where he covered the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, White House, and Congress. He is the author of the bestsellers Wild Bill Donovan, Big Red, and The Commandos, as well as critically acclaimed works such as Disciples, the story of four CIA directors who fought for Donovan in World War II, and A Question of Loyalty, a biography of General Billy Mitchell. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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The Commandos
1
ROBIN SAGE
7:30 P.M., THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1992

The helicopter ride was surprisingly boring. Ken Swanson had heard stories about the daring of the 160th Aviation Regiment, the U.S. Army’s secret helicopter unit. The all-black MH-47 Chinook, souped up with fancy avionics and electronic countermeasures equipment could juke and dive so fast that its passengers would be flattened on the ceiling. Swanson expected the pilot to put the chopper through its paces for him and the rest of his student detachment. The fifteen Green Beret students squatted on their rucksacks, crammed together like sardines on the helicopter’s deck. Four dim blue lights overhead cast an eerie pall inside the chopper’s belly.

But except for flying blacked out with their night vision goggles, the Chinook’s pilots kept a steady course above the pine forests and tobacco farms of North Carolina’s southern Piedmont. The ride would be the only calm moment for Swanson for the next two weeks.

Kenneth Swanson. Infantry captain. The insignia on his uniform revealed he was one of the Army’s rising young officers: an airborne patch showing he could parachute from planes, a pathfinder insignia designating him qualified to guide aircraft into remote jungle landing zones, an expert infantryman’s badge, a Ranger tab on his shoulder.

Winning that Ranger tab had been hard. Sixty-five days of constant marches, two hours sleep a night, half starving in the field sometimes with just one meal a day. On lonely listening posts soldiers would become so hungry they’d start hallucinating about food. Army manuals called Ranger school the ultimate in leadership training and physical stress. Swanson felt like a physical wreck afterward. Never again, he vowed.

But now Ken Swanson was on the verge of completing the most unusual training the Army had to offer. In two weeks—if he didn’t screw up—Swanson would be able to add another patch to his uniform. This one would say “Special Forces.” And on his head he would wear the Green Beret—that is, if he got through these next two weeks.

Over the deafening whine of the chopper’s engines a helicopter crew member shouted into Swanson’s ear, offering a headset to monitor the radio traffic of the pilots.

Swanson waved it off. The chopper would be landing soon enough, he thought.

That was his first mistake. If Swanson had listened to the radio chatter, he would have heard the pilots tick off their checkpoints along the way to the aircraft’s final destination. He could have confirmed for himself that the pilot had landed at the right spot. Helicopters get lost when their high-tech direction-finding equipment malfunctions. The first rule of clandestine operations: never trust anyone or any machine to do what you’ve been told they’ll do.

Swanson was forgiven this mistake. The MH-47 was not lost. A chopper crew member in the rear of the plane held up a finger. Each team member did the same down the line. One minute to touchdown.

The helicopter landed with a bump. The rear ramp door flopped down. The team members struggled to shoulder their rucksacks in the cramped quarters, shouting “Go, go!” as they piled out.

The helicopter had landed on a farmer’s dirt airstrip, about three miles southwest of the village of Coleridge in Randolph County, North Carolina. As the team clambered out the rear ramp, they took up positions in a half-moon perimeter. The chopper stayed on the ground less than a minute, then lifted off.

The team crouched in the tall grass and waited several minutes more to let their ears adjust to the silence of the night. No one spoke. Only hand signals were exchanged.

A farmer wearing a tan jacket and baseball cap leaned against a white two-and-a-half-ton truck with a tan canvas top, which was parked at the other side of the runway. The farmer waved them over.

Swanson and half his team quickly crept up to the vehicle and circled it with a security perimeter.

The other half of the team raced up. Never taking his eye off the open field behind the truck, Swanson motioned his team to pile in the back. They were sitting ducks if counterinsurgents attacked.

“Hurry,” he whispered a bit out of breath, as he climbed up himself after the last man had boarded.

The truck sped south on a dark two-lane road. Swanson and several team members hunched over tactical maps with pen lights, desperately trying to keep up with the twists and turns the driver made, the bridges he crossed, the miles he had driven, so they would have some inkling where they would be when the truck stopped.

Swanson craned his neck out the back of the truck looking for landmarks in the darkness that he could match on his map. He had wiped clean the acetate-covered map the night before so that if it ever ended up in enemy hands it would reveal none of the coordinates for his dropoff and linkup points with the guerrillas. Those he had committed to memory.

The driver was supposed to take Swanson’s team as far as he could to Pleasant Hill Church, where they were to meet a guerrilla contact. But Swanson’s intelligence file had warned that these drivers, part of the guerrilla auxiliary, were not particularly reliable. The first rule of clandestine infiltration: don’t begin a nighttime walk in the woods to meet a distant contact unless you knew exactly where you were starting from. You would only end up hopelessly lost. If the driver decided to dump the team along the road somewhere short of the church, Swanson knew he had better have pinpointed where the truck stopped on his map or he would never be able to match the map’s legends and contour lines with whatever terrain features he could make out around him at night.

Ken Swanson was not about to get lost at the start of this mission. He was a conscientious officer. Twenty-seven years old and strikingly handsome, he had bright blue eyes, wavy brown hair brushed back, a deep voice, and a gentle manner. An avid outdoorsman, he was a marathoner when Army field exercises didn’t disrupt his training schedule. Ever since he was a child in Moline, Illinois, Swanson could remember wanting to camp out in the wilderness. He packed off to the University of Idaho in 1983 to major in wildlife recreation management. He wore flannel shirts and blue jeans and became a committed environmentalist.

But Swanson did not mix well with the other environmental activists on campus. They were too liberal politically. He may have been an environmentalist, but he was also deeply conservative. It was a conservatism nurtured among the small towns and farms of the Midwest, where people rose with the rooster crow and worked until dark and had little time for big government or taxes or welfare programs.

The Army seemed a natural place for Swanson. He won an ROTC scholarship after his freshman year and applied for the infantry after he graduated in 1986. It was a branch the recruiters were only too happy to give him. The infantry meant he would be outside, not in some stuffy office.

As Swanson expected, the truck stopped about two miles short of his linkup point with the guerrillas. If he had calculated it correctly, he was just north of Benchmark 121.9 on his map, on a road two miles east of Antioch Church. The driver walked to the back, unhooked the latch and dropped the cargo door. It clanged noisily.

“This is as far I’m takin’ y’all,” the driver said firmly with a Southern twang. “They’ve had roadblocks all up and down this road and I ain’t gettin’ stopped by one.”

Swanson’s team piled out of the back of the truck....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982128224
• ISBN 13: 9781982128227
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar