Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces by Clancy Tom & Gresham John

Author:Clancy, Tom & Gresham, John [Clancy, Tom & Gresham, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, History, Age Range 2 Older Audience, War
ISBN: 9780425172681
Amazon: 0425172686
Goodreads: 62145
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2001-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

Juan’s surgeries went well, and he was headed home a few weeks later—a little boy whose life was forever changed for the better by an SF soldier who saw he could help. (It’s easy to imagine also the reaction of Juan’s fellow villagers. No rebel movement will get a toehold there!)

His story finished, the young captain headed back to his team room to plan his ODA’s assigned mission.

After breakfast, I followed Lieutenant Colonel Smith and Major McCollum across the compound to the FOB 72 operations center.

As we walked across the soggy courtyard between barracks, Lieutenant Colonel Smith pointed out the force protection measures his unit had put into effect. The compound—almost a city block long and a hundred yards wide—was ringed with antipersonnel wire and obstacles; guard towers had been built and floodlights rigged; motion/infrared sensors had been installed; and roving patrols were running continuously.

These precautions were far from idle: The previous evening, a sniper had shot an SF soldier in the compound, sending him to the JRTC casualty evacuation collection point, where he was assessed as “dead”—the first 2/7th casualty.77

FOB 72 personnel avenged this attack when they caught another CLF team trying to enter the compound through an apparent blind spot in the wire. The CLF insurgents “died” in a hail of SF automatic weapons fire. Though other vicious little firefights were fought over the next two weeks, the security of the FOB held up.

The command center was located in a two-story barracks building, itself protected by another layer of barbed wire and security fencing. The staff and command elements had each established a desk or work area on the first floor, arranged much like a mission control center in Houston and manned around the clock. They were equipped with an array of desktop and laptop computers, printers, phones, SABER radios, and laminated maps. The computers, like all of those around the FOB, were linked into a large local area network (LAN), which would allow users to access everything from e-mail off the Internet to secure data from classified databases on a large file server in another barracks building.

Upstairs was a briefing room, equipped with a large-screen projection system for electronic briefing slides. This was my current destination, as Lieutenant Colonel Smith had invited me to the morning shift change briefing at 0700. The FOB staff is split into two sections. Twice a day, the entire staff meets to brief each other and hand off the duty for another twelve hours. It is during these briefings that you can typically get the best feeling for how SF operations are being organized and run.

Following briefings by intelligence, weather, logistics, and public affairs personnel, the operations officer (S-3) began to lay out the missions that FOB 72 would run during JRTC 99-1. As tasked by JSOTF (Cortina), a total of six SF missions were planned for actual execution—three SRs, two DAs, and a single CA. The missions laid out like this:

• CA001—CA001 was designed to assess the morale and political leanings

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.