Inside the New National Defense Area

Last week, 250 miles of the Rio Grande River shoreline in Cameron and Hidalgo counties were designated a National Defense Area (NDA). The international Boundary and Water Commission land fronting the river has been transferred to the General Services Administration and is now considered part of Joint Base San Antonio.

U.S. Northern Command will exercise command and control. They have been tasked with installing signage and fencing in the NDA according to Air Force standards, and then to immediately source follow-on security operations. The security force’s mission is to provide enhanced detection and monitoring through stationary positions and mobile patrols, detain and transfer trespassers, and support the installation of temporary barriers and signage.

This map obtained by MyRGV.com illustrates the Rio Grande Valley’s designated National Defense Area, or NDA, which was established by the U.S. Department of Defense last week. Highlighted in red, the area will snake along the curves of the Rio Grande from the mouth of the river in Cameron County to the western edge of Hidalgo County. (Courtesy: U.S. Air Force)

What are the ramifications of the border land being under the jurisdiction of Joint Base San Antonio? The NDA land includes local and State Parks, agricultural fields, and privately owned land, which is accessed daily by local workers and tourists. Trespassing on military property is a federal offense; being caught on an Air Force base with a privately owned firearm is a serious federal offense. The risk-averse military prohibits carrying privately owned firearms onto its bases. They claim their policy is for the safety of people visiting or stationed on them. History proves that claim to be ridiculous, but facts are irrelevant to the discussion.

Demonstrating their uncannily poor timing that has become a feature of the Democrats, the South Texas Alliance of Citizen Coalition of Mayors issued a joint proclamación decrying federal illegal immigrant enforcement operations. They claim enforcement of federal immigration laws is bad for business. I didn’t realize that South Texas construction companies, restaurants, car washes, fast food franchises, and nursing homes depend on illegal migrants’ labor to function.

There are unintended consequences when riverfront land is designated as part of a military base.

The mayors claim they are motivated by the “well-being, safety, and economic stability of our communities.” If that were true, the mayors wouldn’t ignore the sky-high automobile insurance premiums we pay in the Valley to cover illegals who drive without a license or insurance and are prone to hitting other people’s cars, especially when it rains.

There is also the increased tax burden to cover the costs of court hearings, police calls, identity theft investigations, and car accidents involving illegals. And health insurance premiums must consider Emergency Room visits by uninsured illegals, of which thousands are (apparently) loitering here in the RGV.

Relying on undocumented workers for labor has several benefits besides paying low wages. Payroll taxes are eliminated, and OSHA regulations and fines are no longer a threat. Illegals cannot file a civil suit for compensation if injured on the job. The only downside to employing illegal labor would be federal prosecution, which can be ruinously expensive and unpleasant.

The Mayors don’t care about any of that. They’re from the rent-seeking class who view government office as a purely extractive enterprise. Every year, they raise our property tax rates to increase the number of their subordinates in the city government, yet public services never improve.

Economic growth in the RGV is characterized by an unending proliferation of payday loans, pawn shops, fast food franchises, and cheaply constructed apartment complexes. The vibrant service economy offers numerous opportunities for young couples to work two jobs each, enabling them to afford to live here.

Boston Jerry aptly sums up the situation faced by many today.

The South Texas Alliance of Citizen Coalition of Mayors represents a new South Texas archetype; men (and women) who are rotund of body, soft of hand, and thick of skull. They operate devoid of facts; they pronounce things to be so, and that’s the end of it.

There is little chance that large numbers of impoverished Hispanics will smoothly integrate into the local Tex-Mex society. They litter HEB parking lots with abandoned shopping carts, they don’t restack their weights in the gym, and they listen to hideous Spanish accordion music at deafening volumes. On the plus side, they seem to despise Rap music.

The city fathers want to meet and coordinate with the military now that our riverfront is part of a National Defense Area. Given their public denunciation of and refusal to support federal law enforcement efforts, why would federal officials bother talking to them?

Not that the residents of the RGV can pick and choose which local law or ordinance they want to ignore. Local politicians can virtue signal with no cost or repercussions to them, but local citizens who do the same to them will be arrested, fined, and jailed by them.

Disposing of 400 decomposing bodies is a routine task in Mexico.

A glance at the morning news from our southern neighbors reveals more reasons to avoid traveling to or living in Mexico: 400 decomposing corpses stacked inside a nondescript building in Juarez. This is one of the benefits of a closed border. Keeping the desperate poor of the world away from the homicidal psychopath rapists venerated in popular Mexican corridors. Every politician in the nation should support that.

Yesterday, I took a tour of the NDA inside Hidalgo County. I found what I expected, nothing. In the many places that were full of Border Patrol and State Police trucks during the President Auto Pen administration, there were no law enforcement vehicles, no stationary police camera units, and no military personnel.

The portable camera systems that dotted the border are now gone.

It is hard to believe that the Air Force will send security units into the RGV to conduct mounted patrols. How many units like that do they have? What kind of vehicles will they use? I don’t see the utility of additional fencing in the parts of the NDA with which I’m familiar.

There is no reason to patrol or fence in the popular birder’s paradise of Bensten — Rio Grande Valley State Park, or the Anzalduas County Park. Texas law enforcement has been using the Anzalduas Park boat ramp to launch their watercraft, and I’m sure NORTHCOM will use it if they bring watercraft. The military has numerous small boats, but for a security mission, the smallest they will use are Riverine boats, which are usually armed with multiple automatic weapons.

I would love to see NORTHCOM deploy a Riverrine squadron to patrol the Rio Grande River. They look cool and would be fun to watch in the narrow waters. However, there is no reason for them to be here, just as there is little reason for numerous security forces to be working the former IBWC land. There isn’t much for them to do now; the border is closed.

The Iran Punitive Raids were a Long Time Coming

We finally have a Leader in the White House.

I was a member of two renowned infantry battalions while serving as a company-grade officer in the Marine Corps. The first was the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines (1/9), and the second was the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines (1/8). 1/9 was known as the Walking Dead, a moniker they picked up after losing a rifle company (Bravo) to a North Vietnamese Army ambush in the Leatherneck Square area of Northern I Corps in 1967. 1/8 was the battalion targeted by Iran in the 1983 Beirut bombing.

Former 1/9 Marines are constantly creating new and improved 1/9 logos

The term “The Walking Dead” originated as a pejorative label for the battalion, referring to it as a hard-luck outfit that suffered excessive casualties. Vietnam-era Marine infantry battalions averaged 800 men. During the four years 1/9 fought in Vietnam, they sustained 747 men killed in action.

Despite the casualties that earned 1/9 the “Walking Dead” nickname, Marines assigned to 1/9 embraced the Walking Dead handle. It was on our PT shirts in the 1980s when infantry battalions were allowed to have distinctive physical training uniforms. It was on our unit plaques; every Marine assigned to 1/9 was proud of being in the famous Walking Dead battalion.

The 1st Battalion, 8th Marines was the exact opposite. There was no institutional memory of the Beirut disaster. When I served in 1/8, I knew the battalion had been decimated in Beirut because my surgical support team was deployed there following the bombing. While I was with the battalion in the mid 90s nobody ever talked about or acknowledged the Beirut disaster.

Former 1/8 Marines do not seem that attached to the battalion despite its long history of combat excellence.

The difference in how Marines viewed the disasters in Vietnam and Beirut proves an old saying, frequently forgotten by officers, that you can’t fool the troops. Vietnam-era Marines knew the media were lying about Vietnam. They knew, after Walter Cronkite said that the War was lost, that it was, in reality, won. The Marines knew that they had beaten the NVA to a pulp, destroying entire divisions with their aggressive deployment of raggedy ass infantry battalions into the Demilitarized Zone.

Despite media skepticism, regardless of the popular histories written by unpopular journalists like Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, and Michael Herr, the troops knew who won the fighting portion of the war. Not until legitimate historians like Mark Moyar, who can read Vietnamese and spent time in Hanoi’s archives researching the war from the North Vietnamese perspective, did the truth known to troops on the ground reach a wider audience.

After the Marine barracks bombing in 1983, the troops knew they would never get payback. They intuitively understood our feckless national leadership would not punish Iran but would, as hard as it was to believe, reward them in the ensuing years. Our national leadership was incapable of understanding or operating from first principles; they refused to understand the Koran, the purpose of Islam, or believe that Islamic clerics and militants meant what they said about the infidel West.

While the “best and the brightest” flailed about in the Middle East, the troops seethed. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the troops got a little payback. Still, they were halted long before the job finished because our leaders were squeamish about the disproportionate casualties they were inflicting on the Iraqis. Then 9/11 happened, and instead of going into Afghanistan and destroying the Taliban and killing Osama bin Laden in a massive punitive raid, we destroyed the Taliban, then let Osama get away because our leaders are risk-averse careerists. The idea of “mission first” or winning a war is an alien concept to careerists.

Then, inexplicably, we decided to stay in Afghanistan because of the “you break it, you buy it” rule at Pottery Barn. That Pottery Barn has no rule like that was irrelevant; our best and brightest do not concern themselves with trivialities like the truth, the narratives they create are more important.

After allowing OBL to slip away, we then invaded Iraq for unexplained reasons, placing our troops in mortal danger while spouting nonsense like Islam is the religion of peace. Islam has never been a “religion of peace” and never will be. Early during the Iraq debacle, the CIA was warned about Iranian military officers infiltrating Shia areas to introduce explosive formed penetrating IEDs designed to destroy American armor and automatic weapons to cleanse Iraq of its Sunni Muslim minority.

The CIA came up with a plan to kill the Iranian agents using contractors, and Eric Prince got busy putting together a force to do it, but, at the last minute, Susan Rice canceled the plan. Every American killed by an explosive-formed penetrator died because Susan Rice found the idea of killing Iranian agents distasteful. The troops who served in Beirut, the ones deployed by dumbasses who had no idea what they were doing, were denied payback by a new generation of feckless idiots.

Public service announcement: I don’t speak for every Marine, sailor or soldier who deployed to Beirut; just the ones who are worth a damn.

Now, finally, we have our payback in the form of a punitive raid launched by a President who understands how to wield the power granted him by our constitution. The hammering of three Iranian nuclear sites by giant GBU 57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators was gratifying. Watching the press, the military YouTubers, and the know-it-all podcasters prove wrong in real time was even more gratifying. I know some of the guys who have taken to the airways, trying to cover their flawed analysis by doubling down with opinions that are half-baked and dead wrong. They’re still my friends, but they’re wrong, and I have never been shy about pointing out the obvious to my friends.

Few institutions in America are as worthless as the media, but idiot congressmen and the Council on Foreign Relations run a close second.

The thought that President Trump would put boots on the ground in Iran, of all places, is ludicrous. Iran is a natural fortress protected by massive mountain ranges and deep, hot deserts. The fear that Iran is capable of hurting the United States financially by closing the Strait of Hormuz or by activating “sleeper cells” of battle-hardened jihadists is a pipe dream. Closing the Hormuz hurts Iran (and China), not the United States. How long would “sleeper cells” last in a country that has more firearms in the hands of its civilian population than people?

I admit that using firearms to kill Americans would work in the blue cities that prohibit or restrict their citizens from owning or carrying firearms. It would be most effective in Washington, D.C., where the law-abiding are unarmed and law enforcement DEI-centric. Still, Iran isn’t stupid enough to do us the favor of shooting federal officeholders.

Punitive raids do not start wars; they avoid them by punishing the targeted country so severely that they are incapable of meaningful retaliation. And we just saw one pulled off by true professionals. The plans were kept secret, and the operation was flawless, indicating that we now have a Secretary of Defense who knows how to operate effectively. President Trump did a masterful job of obfuscation, which enabled both strategic and tactical surprise.

This proves that being a wounded combat vet doesn’t prevent one from becoming a political hack who places her dysfunctional political party and personal interests above a competent military.

I don’t care how much of Iran’s nuclear program was destroyed, and I know that nobody currently commenting in the old and new media about it has any idea about the extent of battle damage from our GBU 57s. Not that it stops people from claiming it had a limited effect or that it destroyed the targeted facilities. Nobody will know that for a long time, and the only source that has proven it has the human intelligence networks to find out is Israel.

I hereby retract every snarky thing I have ever said about the Air Force. They did us old Marines a solid by putting the big boom on target in Iran.

We now have a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, which is impressive, and it might even hold. I don’t care about that either, although it is certainly an impressive accomplishment by President Trump. All I care about is that we finally got our payback on a bill that has been long overdue. Iran delenda est, let’s hope they do something stupid so we can destroy more of their military infrastructure.

Dar al-Harb is still out there, and there will come a day of reckoning with them. Let’s hope President Trump or someone like him is at the helm when that happens.

LZ Margo . . . The Dead Went Last

This article first appeared in the November 1998 issue of Proceedings magazine, earning my father, Maj. Gen. J.D. Lynch, USMC (Ret.), author of the year. With his permission, I’m repurposing it for a Memorial Day tribute. It is a story of the price paid by grunts for the incompetence of higher headquarters. It is also an elegant testament to the grit, determination, and resilience of American infantrymen thrust into an impossible situation.

The 2d Battalion, 26th Marines, rarely appears in the Marine Corps’ illustrious combat history. The battalion saw only brief service during World War II—long enough to land in the assault wave at Iwo Jima. Later, during the Vietnam War, it reappeared for a few years before its colors were once again returned to the museum curators.

Major JD Lynch, USMC working the DMZ during the fall of 1968

Its daily Vietnam experience was usually far less stressful than the Iwo Jima operation, but Vietnam had its days – and when it did, the late 1960s Marine of 2/26 experienced the horrors of war at the same level of intensity faced by the generation that fought its way up the black ash terraces beneath Mount Suribachi. This is the story of one of those days: 16 September 1968.

Late 1968 found the 3rd Marine Division serving in the extreme north of I Corps, the northernmost corps in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, controlling ten infantry battalions: those of its organic 3rd, 4th, and 9th Marine Regiments, plus 2/26. The division’s operational concept  – an effective one – was as easy to understand as it was difficult to execute. Relying on few fixed defensive positions and even fewer infantry units to defend them, the defense was offense. Battalions stayed in the bush for weeks on end, covering North Vietnamese Army (NVA) infiltration routes and, in general, looking for trouble. They moved constantly on foot or by helicopter, and when they encountered an NVA unit, all hell broke loose until it was destroyed.

MajGen JD Lynch USMC (Ret) speaking at an LZ Margo reunion in May 2019. Today, he is 92 years old and still going strong

Our battalion – I was the operational officer – celebrated the Fourth of July in an area near the coast called Leatherneck Square, where it was responsible for defending the square’s northern and western sides. In late July, the battalion was reinforced to conduct amphibious assault operations and designated Battalion Landing Team (BLT) 2/26.

After training with the reinforcements, BLT 2/26 embarked on the Amphibious Ready Group Alfa ships, including the famous World War II Essex-class carrier Princeton (LDH-5), now an amphibious assault ship. Initially, there was talk of landings just south of the Ben Hai River inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), but the pattern of NVA operations had shifted westward, and the amphibious talk died out. An early-September landing well inland marked a temporary end to our amphibious experience and the beginning of service as one of the division’s maneuver battalions. Despite the change in mission, the battalion kept its reinforcements – among them a tank platoon, a 105mm artillery battery, and a 4.2 inch mortar battery.

Operational control shifted to the 3rd Marines, headquartered in Camp Carroll, but several days of aggressive patrolling yielded no enemy contacts. About 7 September, the BLTs’ field elements were trucked to Camp Carroll. They staged for two contingencies: a helicopter assault in Landing Zone (LZ) Margo, a barren hilltop just south of the DMZ, roughly 17 kilometers west-northwest of Camp Carroll – or a shift of operational control to the 4th Marines and return to Khe Sanh, where the battalion had served throughout the early-1968 siege.

To the relief of those who had served at Khe Sanh, the Margo operation prevailed—an assault into the LZ followed by movement north to the high ground on the southern border of the DMZ, where the battalion was to turn east and sweep the high ground. The orders emphasized the need to take prisoners.

A typhoon brushed the coast, and although the tree-covered mountains inland showed no outward signs of rain, movement became impossible—the war ground to a halt. Finally, the weather began to clear, and on 12 September, the commanding officer of the supporting helicopter squadron flew in for the Zippo brief – a planning and coordination meeting attended by the battalion and squadron commanders and their staffs.

Zippos were businesslike affairs. Lives were at stake, and the assaulting battalion and supporting squadron had to reach complete agreement and understanding. On the plus side, Margo was easy to find due to its location on the north side of the Cam Lo River, inside a distinctive, kilometer-wide and more than kilometer-deep U-shaped bend. Unfortunately, this plus was offset by several minuses, most of which stemmed from the tiresome but necessary subject of terrain.

The spring – used for a water resupply point in LZ Margo

Margo, which resembled a broken bowl, was smaller than the maps indicated. Using north as 12 o’clock, the rim from 5 to 10 o’clock was the dominant piece of ground within the LZ. The southern side of the rim dropped sharply to the Cam Lo River, actually more stream than river at this point, while the interior slope provided good observation over the landing zone and north toward the DMZ. A spring near the center of the zone fed a stream that had cut a deep draw, which meandered eastward and exited Margo between 2 and 4 o’clock. From 10 to 2 o’clock, Margo’s northern rim varied in height but was lower than the southern rim. Its exterior sloped sharply downward for a kilometer or so before reaching the steep approaches to the terrain fingers that led to the high ground in the DMZ. At its highest point, Margo was about 150 meters above sea level. The hills to the north were three to four times that height, while the intervening terrain dropped to low points of about 50 meters.

It was rugged, forbidding country, made all the more so because, although Margo was clear, the heights and intervening areas were covered with double – or triple-canopy forest.

The terrain inside the LZ made Margo a “one-bird zone” – helicopters had to land and unload one at a time. This was hardly unusual, but it slowed the rate of assault dramatically. Margo was also too small to accommodate the entire BLT. Since the intent was to retain only G company, the BLT command group, along with the 81mm mortar, engineer, and reconnaissance platoons, in the zone for any length of time (a few days), the size of the LZ did not seem to be a major factor. Its rock-hard soil, however, was another problem. Digging in took time.

Finally, there was Margo’s history. For a brief period, some months before, it had been used as an artillery fire support base, and the North Vietnamese were known to keep such positions under observation. The terrain and history summed to the point that BLT 2/26 was landing, one aircraft at a time, into a zone that was:

  • Too small to hold the entire BLT
  • Dominated by high ground to the north
  • Probably the subject of continuing NVA attention, at least to the point of registering mortar fires.

Not good . . . but not unusual.

Friday the 13th of September 1968, a date not lost on many of the Marines, marked the beginning of several days of cloudless skies and comfortable temperatures. By 0700, a thousand or so Marines and corpsmen were waiting quietly in the Camp Carroll pick-up zone, smoking, talking, thinking, and maybe – especially in Golf Company – which was landing first – praying. They were grunts, a term coined during the Vietnam War. While it may have been a derisive term, the sting was long gone. With a certain pride, it is what they called themselves.

Believing that the chances of infection dramatically increased with the amount of clothing worn when wounded, they were deliberately underdressed. Boots, socks, and trousers were the standard: no underwear and often no shirt during the day. Their faded helmet covers sported an elastic band around the outside intended to hold camouflage material when the wearer sought invisibility in the bush. More often, it held either a main battle dressing for use if the wearer’s luck turned bad or, in the case of optimists, a bottle of mosquito repellent. The graffiti on most of the covers addressed a variety of subjects, but many tended toward the religious. David Douglas Duncan’s striking photographs of the 26th Regiment Marines at Khe Sanh captured the phenomenon.

A David Douglas Duncan photograph from Khe Sanh

 They all wore flak jackets, never zippered because shell or grenade fragments taken in the wrong place could jam the zipper, making it difficult for the corpsmen to remove the jacket and treat the wounded man in the field.

The flak jackets, if anything, were dirtier than the helmet covers. Sweat-stained from long wear by a series of owners, they had the same faded color as the camouflage covers, but their graffiti, for whatever reason, tended to more basic thoughts than those found on helmets.

They carried a haversack holding a box of venerable C-rations, a poncho, a poncho liner, and, most importantly, an extra two or three pairs of socks. They also carried extra radio batteries, mortar ammunition (although not mortarmen), rocket launchers, grenades, at least four filled canteens, and as much extra rifle and machine gun ammunition as possible.

They were typical grunts and corpsmen, normally unwashed, usually underfed, always overloaded, and, more often than not, tired. The lucky ones, those who avoided disease, wounds, or death, did not enjoy a hot meal or cold shower for weeks.

 Shortly before 0800, the CH-46s began landing in the pickup zone with their distinctive whumping blade sound – unforgettable for those who rode them into combat. As the first wave launched, the sound of the artillery preparatory fires in the distance and the roar of the fast movers orbiting overhead helped ease the tension.

The actual landing was anti-climactic. Although there was no opposition, it still took a considerable amount of time. Echo, Fox, and Hotel companies quickly assembled and began moving north. Echo struck out for the finger on the right, which led to the high ground, while Fox and Hotel headed up the other finger on the left. Golf Company, the command post, the 81mm platoon, and others established defensive positions in the LZ and began digging in. Friday the 13th passed quietly.

Inserting BLT 2/26 into LZ Margo

On Saturday, 14 September, the companies continued moving north at first light. While there were well-worn trails in the area and occasional sounds of movement ahead, there were no contacts. Even so, the companies called artillery fire on possible targets to keep the fire-support system active. About midday, Hotel Company’s point, leading movement up the left finger, saw movement ahead and signaled the company to move off the trail and wait. Their patience was rewarded as they watched a North Vietnamese soldier, weapon at sling arms, striding down the trail toward them.

The point team was in an excellent ambush position and easily could have killed him. That they didn’t was a testimony to discipline and the emphasis on taking prisoners. Waiting until the NVA soldier had passed, the point man re-entered the trail and, in Vietnamese, ordered him to halt, which he did promptly. The capture was reported to the company commander, relayed to battalion, and within a matter of minutes, the 3rd Marines had learned of a potential guest speaker. Within the hour, the prisoner had been flown to Camp Carroll for interrogation.

BLT 2/26 command post, the author is the second Marine from the right.

Throughout the war, most higher headquarters consistently failed to pass timely intelligence information down to the battalion level, where it could be acted upon. The 3rd Marines did not make that mistake. Just before sundown, 2/26 learned that the prisoner had intended to surrender because he had been at Khe Sanh when the Marines first arrived. Stating that he “had a love of life,” he added that he wanted no more of anything remotely resembling that battle, a confrontation that had a psychological hold on both sides. Of greater interest was his disclosure that the lead company – Hotel Company – would be attacked at about 2000 that evening. All three companies were alerted.

Echo, Fox, and Hotel halted for the night and began registering artillery defensive fires. Hotel Company’s artillery forward observer (FO), controlling a supporting 155mm howitzer battery, had just started registering fires to cover a listening post located on the western side of the finger when the Marines manning the post reported hearing movement through the draw to their direct front. Since the registration rounds were on the way, they could only wait. Seconds later, as the roar of the explosions died away, the listening post reported screams and other sounds of panic. The FO immediately called “fire for effect” and swept the draw with 155mm rounds. Other than some moans and the sounds of some movement in the draw, the remainder of the night was quiet.

15 September dawned clear and cloudless. Visibility was so good that Marines could watch outgoing 81mm mortar rounds until they reached their apogee. Again, keeping the mortar and artillery fire support systems active, E, F, and H companies resumed their slow climb toward the high ground. Signs of enemy presence were plentiful, but there was no contact.

The 81mm Mortar platoon fire direction center moments before the shit hit the fan

The trouble started at noon, when a radio message from 3rd Marines ordered the BLT to pull its companies back to the LZ and prepare to shift operational control to the 9th Marines. The message was cryptic – it had to be because none of the radio transmissions with any of the battalions in the 3rd Marine Division’s area were secure. The encryption equipment of the day was too heavy to be carried in the field and, in any case, seldom worked in the heat and humidity of the bush. Problems with getting shackle sheets (code) down to the company level precluded using even decades-old encryption. Everyone assumed that the North Vietnamese heard most of the radio traffic.

Communications security problems notwithstanding, the order was received with incredulity. There was little doubt that the NVA would follow the companies back to the landing zone, and less doubt that mortar and perhaps infantry attacks would follow. The three rifle companies were told to halt and then move south to Margo; meanwhile, the order was strenuously argued. The regimental commander made it clear that he agreed with the battalion’s tactical assessment of what lay in store. Obedience would have a price; that much was obvious. What was not obvious was how much.

After a few hours, the three companies were instructed to halt, reorient, and resume their original northwest advance. We had to know if the trailing enemy theory was correct. The order did not specify how long to follow the reverse course, but did tell the company commander something they already knew – to expect contact. It came quickly on both ridges as small NVA units were surprised to find the Marines heading north again. Breaking contact, the companies once more turned south toward Margo. So far as 2/26 was concerned, the point had been proven. We reported this to the 3rd Marines and forcefully recommended cancellation of the withdrawal order.

The reply was more enlightening than helpful. The battalion was told that its arguing and temporary resumption of the offensive had caused some difficulties (it wasn’t phrased quite that way) and that there would be a 24-hour postponement. Furthermore, the entire battalion was to concentrate in LZ Margo, south of the 61 grid line – an east-west map line that split the LZ – by a specified time early the next afternoon, 16 September. In the meantime, the BLT was authorized to take whatever actions it deemed necessary to prepare for the return to the LZ. The maneuver companies were turned north again; within minutes, they bumped into NVA troops following them down the ridgelines.

 The enlightening section of the order was the part about moving south of the 61 grid line. It made no sense because the area remaining in the LZ south of the grid line was too small to accommodate the BLT in anything resembling a tactical position.  Even worse, it did not permit defense of the LZ, especially against infantry attacks coming from the most logical direction – north. It was apparent that the order had emanated from a headquarters other than regimental or division, neither of which would have displayed that level of tactical ignorance. This, and the urgency associated with the 61 grid-line provision, led to the conclusion that an Arc Light – a high-altitude B-52 area bombing mission – was imminent.

 It might seem strange to those steeped in the traditions of obedience to orders, but the BLT now confronted a dilemma. If its tactical assessment were correct, the order returning the maneuver units to the LZ would result in some form of NVA attack: if, on the other hand, the Arc Light guess was right, there were other problems. The timing and target area were unknowns and, for security, would remain unknowns at the battalion level. Further, the tactically inane directive to move south of the 61 grid line indicated that the Arc Light was going in north of Margo – but close.

 The dilemma was stark and straightforward: Comply with the order and risk NVA action, or move the companies toward Margo, retaining some semblance of tactical deployment north of the LZ, and risk the Arc Light. To those who have seen a proper Arc Light, the choice was easy. The companies were directed to hold in place and begin moving south to the LZ early the next morning. But as a concession to common sense, that portion of the order regarding the 61 grid line was interpreted rather loosely. We would defend Margo.

The weather on 16 September matched the brilliance of previous days. Today, the Vietnamese Bureau of Tourism would tout the weather; on that day in 1968, however, it turned into a scene from hell.

Occasionally stopping to engage the NVA units following them, the three rifle companies slowly made their way back to Margo. Echo company came in last. Commanded by Captain John Cregan, now a Roman Catholic priest, the company began to climb Margo’s northern slope and, by approximately 1430, was taking up its assigned defensive positions on the northern perimeter. Even after ignoring the order to stay south of the 61 grid line, there were too many troops in too small an area – and they had to contend with Margo’s rock-hard ground. Digging in took more time.

Echo Company Marines moments before the first attack

Early in the afternoon, ominous sightings of North Vietnamese soldiers with mortars fording the Cam Lo River west of Margo were reported. Artillery fire was called, probably without effect. At the same time, there was a minor flurry of activity as the BLT shifted to the operational control of the 9th Marines, and radio frequencies were changed and tested. That done, the chatter of troops and the clanging of their entrenching tools were the only sounds disturbing the quiet.

At 1500, Captain Ken Dewey, an F-4 pilot serving as the battalion’s air liaison officer, was looking north toward the left of the two hills that had been the original objectives when suddenly a mirror started flashing  – followed immediately by the soft “thunking” sound of mortars firing in the distance. Within seconds, Margo was blanketed with exploding 82mm rounds from several compass points, especially the northern arc. The battalion began its “time on the cross,” as the French put it earlier in the Indochina War.

The noise was deafening. Each explosion filled the surrounding air with black, stinking, greasy-tasting smoke. The mortarmen poured it on until 200 to 300 rounds had pummeled the Marines and corpsmen, a good percentage of whom had no protection beyond that of shallow fighting holes. As the fire eased, the LZ sprang to life and First Lieutenant Al Green’s 81mm platoon began counterbattery fires, an action that won them concentrated NVA attention.

Battalion machine gunners on Margo’s southern rim saw some enemy mortarmen and began to engage them at long range – attracting in turn, their share of incoming. The exchange continued for a few minutes until a mirror on the high ground flashed again. The incoming barrage slowed, then stopped – but the noise in the LZ grew to deafening proportions as hundreds of rifles went into action. At first, it seemed as if frustrated Marine riflemen were wasting ammunition on out-of-range NVA mortarmen, but a radio query to First Lieutenant Bob Riordan, the Golf Company Commander, revealed that from his position on the southern rim, North Vietnamese soldiers could be seen moving uphill to assault the LZ’s northern side.

Then the rifle fire stopped abruptly, and, within seconds, the southern rim and center of the LZ was alive with Marines running to the northern side. Their fires had been masked by those manning the northern slope defenses, and they were leaving their own positions to get into the fight. The enemy never has a chance. The NVA commander who ordered the assault likely had fewer troops than he thought, due to previous contacts. In any case, the reactions of the defenders were too violent. No more than 20 minutes had elapsed. The cost to BLT 2/26 was more than 150 dead and wounded. The cost to the enemy was unknown.

Marines filtering back to their positions after repulsing the NVA ground assault

 At 1700, the mirror flashed again, and the mortars went to work. Once more, rounds rained down on Margo – fewer this time and without an infantry attack – but the BLT’s casualty list grew longer. For the first time since the attacks began, medical evacuation of the wounded now seemed possible. It was likely that the NVA had expended most of their mortar ammunition and would not interfere with the helicopter evacuation.

The casualties had been separated by category . . . emergency, priority, and routine .  . . and the “permanent routine,” a euphemism for the dead that had crept into the radio operator’s lexicon. We hoped to medevac at least the emergency and priority wounded before nightfall. Several CH-46As and gunships arrived about 1830, and the laborious process of loading the casualties, one at a time, began as soon as the lead bird touched down.

As usual, the strength and example can be found in the casualties. I saw Staff Sergeant Donner from the reconnaissance platoon, covered in blood, as he was being escorted to the medevac staging area. He was refusing to leave, insisting that he was okay. I told him that he would leave.

Late in the afternoon of 16 September, I watched as an unwounded Marine rapidly searched the rows of wounded looking for a friend. Suddenly, a large arm reached out and waved. “There you are” said the first as he took the wounded man’s hand and squatted down to talk. They held hands quietly until the medevac helicopters arrived. The wounded Marine had been hit badly. I do not know if he survived. Nor do I know if his friend survived our subsequent encounters with the NVA. What I do know is that the wounded Marine was black and his buddy white. I remembered thinking at the time how much better people would be if we were all like those two.

Recently, we have been told that the best and the brightest did not go to Vietnam. When I heard that, I thought of those two Marines so long ago, the hardships they endured, and their obvious respect for each other. Maybe they weren’t the brightest, but they were the best.

Realizing that there would be no other medevacs from Margo that night, the last pilot insisted on overloading his aircraft with wounded. Over his objections, the loading stopped, and the pilot was told to launch. He must have been good. If not good, he was very lucky. The overloaded 46 resembled a giant praying mantis as it struggled into the air, tail down, nose swinging back and forth in a wide arc, as though searching for escape from a trap. Finally, he nursed it a few feet higher, leveled, and began slipping sideways, just above the trees, down the slope that formed Margo’s northern rim. Again, the LZ filled with Marines running north; convinced that the 46 was about to crash, they were moving to assist the survivors.

One of the Medevac helicopters waits patiently for the casualties to be loaded.

The helicopter disappeared from view behind the trees and, an eternity later, came back into view, this time in full flight, nose-high on a southernly course, jettisoning fuel to lighten the load and clear the ridge to Margo’s east. All movement stopped as everyone in the LZ watched the miracle claw its way over the ridge line, taking the wounded to safety.

Quiet settled over Margo. As the troops returned to their positions, the silence was broken by a single “thunk” off to the north. This time, it was only one round, but it landed precisely where the medevac birds had loaded. It was Charlie saying he knew what had been done and could have stopped it at any time. He was also saying he was a pro. We knew that already.

The XXIV Corps Commanding General visited Margo the following morning. His worries about morale evaporated as he watched the Marines improving their defensive positions. He then looked toward a large group of wounded waiting to be evacuated. In response to a question, he was told they were the routine medevacs. Behind them were rows of poncho-covered objects. He looked at them, saying nothing, knowing what they were. Finally, a Marine broke the spell. “The dead go last, sir.”

Epilogue

The Arc Light went in five or six kilometers north of Margo on the afternoon of 16 September. Maybe too much had happened, or maybe there was an unusually high number of duds. Regardless, it was unimpressive. Paradoxically, it hurt 2/26 more than it hurt the enemy.

Early on 17 September, Golf, Fox, and Hotel Companies returned to the familiar trails, attacking north. Echo Company, having lost nearly 70 Marines in the mortar and infantry attacks, remained behind. The LZ was mortared twice that day, but there were few casualties. Margo’s final toll will probably never be known precisely. We evacuated more than 200 dead and wounded, some of whom doubtlessly died later. Before we left, we filled 18 external helicopter nets with packs, weapons, and other equipment that was no longer needed.

Weapons and gear collected from the casualties

Eventually, after another long period of torrential rains, the attacking companies reached the high ground, where Golf found a graveyard  – 18 graves with markers aligned in rows near where the mirror had flashed before the mortar attack. They evacuated a few to confirm that it was a graveyard. They also traced the extensive writing on the markers and sent them to the rear for translation. The writings turned out to be a history of each of the casualties. We learned we had gotten the NVA battalion commanding officer and much of his staff. The CO had been a soldier since joining the Viet Minh in the late 1940s: he was a professional. I think whoever ordered all the writing put on the markers did so, at least in part, so that we would not dig up their dead.

One of the 18 external loads of weapons and gear evacuated from LZ Margo

 We stood by to attack to the west. It never happened. Near the end of September, the BLT moved by helicopter into another one-bird zone in the DMZ just south of the Ben Hai River, nearly 15 kilometers north and east of Margo. In a series of assaults, BLT 2/26 routed an enemy force defending a headquarters complex and artillery positions. During the last assault, Marines of Echo and Hotel Companies were treated to the rare sight of North Vietnamese troops fleeing in panic.

 The Marines and corpsmen of 2/26 formed a typical grunt battalion. They fought a dirty, unpopular war, and they did it well. They never claimed to be the best. All they said was that, if they met somebody better, they hoped he was on their side.

The Foot Sergeant

*Although based on actual events, this is a fictional story of love and forgiveness that seems timely on Easter Sunday. But this is a man’s story, so there is no actual love or formal forgiveness, because that is not how men love each other.

When the 1MC (ship loudspeakers) erupted with “Mass Casualties Inbound,” I hustled down to the hangar bay and started to set up stretcher stands. Ship-to-shore communications were not robust in 1983, so we had no idea how many wounded we would see when the elevator came down from the flight deck. It was just one Marine on a stretcher; the red shirts from the flight deck deposited him in front of us; one of the squadron corpsmen was with him, and as he talked with the surgeon, the other corpsmen and I started prepping him for the Operating Room.

The Marine was a sergeant, but he didn’t look like any of the Marines from Beirut International Airport that we had previously treated. His camouflage utilities were clean and starched, and the boot he still wore was shined. He didn’t smell from weeks without showering, yet he was lying before us, missing a good bit of his right hand and left foot. The battalion aid station had administered morphine before he flew out to us, so although alert, he wasn’t feeling any pain. When I removed his boot, I gasped in amazement. The surgeon and Marine looked at me, so I pointed to the intact foot, saying: “Holy shit, his feet are clean, and toenails trimmed; he doesn’t even smell bad. I’ve never seen a wounded Marine who wasn’t filthy; I think he might be a homosexual.”

I made the joke because the sergeant was starting to freak over the severity of his injuries; getting him focused on something else was a professional move. Back then, you could joke about the gays without fear because the military was male-dominated. Men don’t coddle other men – they teased them, often unmercifully, even if they were friends. The Foot Sergeant was a public affairs Marine assigned to the USS New Jersey and had been riding a CH-53 ashore to do man-on-the-street interviews of the grunts for his ship’s newspaper. The pilot thought he saw an RPG grenade launched at his aircraft as he was landing and dumped the collective, skipping his tail rotor off the deck. The rotor shattered on impact, and pieces flew into the big airframe, hitting the Sergeant, the only passenger. When the sergeant heard my allegation, he protested his innocence as expected, starting a heated back and forth with me until the Anesthesiologist put him under. We were professionals, after all, and knew how to handle injured Marines, even clean ones.

The surgeons trimmed up his lower leg stump and right hand, and both were elevated with Penrose drains inserted in the wound tracts to facilitate proper healing. The sergeant joined another recently wounded Marine in the USS Guam’s seven-bed sick bay. The other Marine was a machine gunner from New York City nicknamed Second Best. He had been wounded in the right leg by First Best, a Syrian machine gunner. They had been dueling for fifteen minutes before Second-Best, who was lying prone behind his gun, was hit by a round that traveled the length of his leg. Although the wound track was long, the injury was minor, allowing Second Best to return to duty in a few weeks for another attempt at his Syrian nemesis.   

The Foot Sergeant would be sent back to Bethesda Naval Hospital at some future date. For now, he was stuck on the USS Guam because all our helicopters were ferrying the equipment and entertainers for a Bob Hope Christmas Special to the ship. The lineup included TV stars Brooke Shields, Cathy Lee Crosby, Ann Jillian, and Miss USA Julie Hayek. This would be the last Bob Hope Christmas Show for service members deployed in a war zone, making it a big deal. Not that the Pentagon was admitting Beirut was a war zone, but the loss of over 250 Marines, sailors, and soldiers over the months made it seem damn close to one.

The big show was on Friday, the 23rd of December, and was impressive. The Marines had flown a few hundred of the grunts in from the beach, and they were given the front-row seats. I had a dirty pair of Marine Corps cammies stashed in my locker for just such an occasion and was hanging out close enough to the stage to be selected to go up and get a Christmas present from Brooke Shields, who kissed me on the cheek on national television. I couldn’t have had a better day before Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve, I strolled into the ward to check on the Foot Sergeant and Second Best, who were restricted to their racks while their wounds drained. The Foot Sergeant asked if one of the Hollywood stars or Miss USA would be dropping by, and I said they would, but added, “Not to see you; they want to see wounded Marines, not a closet homo injured by a shitty pilot.” My joke was not well received; instead of calling me foul and filthy names, the Foot Sergeant started to cry. I didn’t know what to do and looked to Second Best for some guidance, but he called me a motherfucker for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried. I felt like shit and apologized profusely, but the Foot Sergeant was inconsolable.

I had to make things right; it was Christmas Eve, a time to share joy and love with your fellow man, even those with clean feet and trimmed toenails. I glanced into our two-room ICU and was suddenly inspired. I told the Foot Sergeant to calm down as I was moving him into the ICU, where we could cover him with bloody bandages, hook him up to the EKG, and lure a Hollywood starlet in to spend some time comforting him. The sergeant thought about it for a minute and decided he liked the idea, so I got a wheelchair and moved him over to the ICU.

Pulling Liberty in Haifa, Israel, with one of the Foot Sergeants’ Marine buddies

In 1983, the ICU aboard the USS Guam had an illegal washer and dryer set up in its bathroom. The washer and dryer ran 24/7, except when patients were in the ICU, so the room was hot, and the floor was covered in dust bunnies from the dryer vent. The ICU beds were bigger and taller than the medical ward racks, so the foot sergeant fit comfortably in one, wearing just his pajama bottoms. I covered up his chest and head with gauze, poured a little blood on him, hooked up the EKG monitor, and put an oxygen mask on him without connecting the hose to oxygen (that required doctor orders), so it hung down on the deck.

I sat at a portable stand with a logbook open, mimicking the ICU critical patient watch because the Foot Sergeant looked like a goner. A chair was between the two ICU racks for the Hollywood stars to use if they felt compelled to comfort the fallen warrior. The Foot Sergeant was happy; Second Best was delighted too but bitching about not being in the ICU with us, and I felt like I had made up for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried (which was gay, as I pointed out to him later). The stage was set, and we didn’t have long to wait.

The first VIP to wander down the passageway was Bob Hope, who appeared to have had too many celebratory drinks. He was escorted by the Surgeons from Mobile Medical Team 11 and my boss, Dr. Derbert. Fortunately, they, too, had been drinking because they overlooked the missing Foot Sergeant when they escorted Bob Hope to meet with Second Best. I had closed the door to the ICU when I saw them coming, saving the Foot Sergeant for one of the starlets. When I saw a gaggle of news photographers in the passageway, I opened the ICU door and told the Fort Sergeant to stand by. Brooke Shields was the first celebrity to poke her head in, but she immediately decided against entering. Miss USA did the same; looking at the bloody, bandaged spectacle of the Foot Sergeant, she took a pass. But not Ann Jillian. She and her husband immediately entered the ICU, asking how badly the Foot Sergeant was injured. I made up some bullshit about him being shot multiple times when he ran into the no man’s land to rescue a small child in the middle of a firefight. I finished my report, telling the couple we did not expect the Marine to survive the night.

The story moved Ms. Jillian; she had wedged herself into the chair between the ICU beds and was stroking the Foot Sergeant’s blood-matted hair while whispering in his left ear. As I watched, I realized that the Foot Sergeant may not handle this attention well. The room was hot, so he just had a thin sheet covering him; his pulse was starting to skyrocket, which we could hear on the monitor, and suddenly his breathing became labored. That was most likely due to dryer lint clogging the open end of the O2 mask tubing. Then nature stepped in to refute my claims about his sexual orientation. Suddenly, the Foot Sergeant had a massive, rock-hard erection that lifted the sheet covering him like a tent pole.

When that happened, the poor guy turned bright red and began making strange noises as he struggled to breathe. Being a sharp lad, I shouted, “Oh my God, he has a priapism. I’m afraid you must leave now.” I thought I was home free as I escorted the pair to the passageway. But when they left the ICU, they ran into the ship’s doctor, who looked in to see what was happening. “What the fuck is going on in here?” He shouted, probably because he, too, had been drinking.

As the other physicians crowded into the ICU, I explained that some of the corpsmen had been teasing the Foot Sergeant about maybe being gay for some reason. I wanted to make amends for their despicable behavior by getting him some one-on-one attention from a Hollywood starlet. My boss, Dr. Derbert, wasn’t having it; “Bullshit, Lynch, you’re the one who started that rumor when he arrived in the hangar bay, and you’re the only corpsman to tease him about it ever since.” That wasn’t true; one of the other corpsmen occasionally teased the Foot Sergeant, but I was still screwed. The only thing that saved me was the propensity of the American military to cover up embarrassing incidents.

When the officers piled into the ICU, one of the nurses escorted Ann and her husband from the room. He confirmed to them that the badly wounded Marine would probably not survive, while Dr. Derbert read me the riot act. The medical men then gathered in a scrum to get their story straight before heading to the bridge to report to the Captain what had happened. When everyone cleared out of the ICU, our charge nurse, Frank, stood there looking at me with a wry smile. He was a good man, and we got along well, but I was still surprised by his following comment.

“Look at the bright side, Lynch; you got the physicians so pissed off they didn’t notice the washer and dryer. Your illegal laundry is safe for the time being.”

That was a big deal; clothes washed in the ship’s laundry returned damp, smelly, and wrinkled. If I had been responsible for losing our machines, I might have been even less popular with the crew. My new reputation for being the guy who took advantage of Ann Jillian’s kindness and sympathy was bad enough.

At Captain’s Mast, the skipper fined me three hundred bucks for being a dumb ass but suspended half of it after Nurse Frank read a statement from the Foot Sergeant about the impact Ann Jillian had on his flagging morale. The Foot Sergeant was a stand-up guy, and we stayed in touch. He married and left the Marine Corps for the big leagues in 1990. In 1992, he won a Pulitzer while writing for the New York Times. Then the son of a bitch got leukemia and died in 1995. I don’t think I ever cried as hard as I did the night his wife called to tell me. The fucking Foot Sergeant was a good man, and It’s been lonely growing old without him.

Fitness Standards for the Combat Arms

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made headlines last week for ordering the military services to review their fitness standards for troops assigned to combat arms units. His goal is to create uniform standards to replace gender-based fitness tests. Although Hegseth is on record as being against women in combat, this (in theory) wasn’t about that. Hegseth reinforced his order with a video on X where he stated:  

“We need to have the same standard, male or female, in our combat roles; soon, we’ll have nothing but the highest and equal standards for men and women in combat.”

That is great news, except it won’t work because standards can be waived, exceptions made, and rigorous standards challenged when senior officers or SNCOs cannot meet them. We didn’t end up with female officers graduating from the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course because IOC lacked standards. General officers of my generation seemed to honestly believe that introducing women into the infantry was a good idea as soon as they were selected to flag rank. But I don’t want to explore flag officer complicity because some of the men involved are friends of mine, and Marines have rules about what one says about one’s friends in blog posts.

Except for Joe Dunford, the best Marine Corps Commandant in my lifetime, who designed and authorized the 2015 Marine Corps Force Integration Plan experiment. That rigorously controlled, detailed experiment showed that forcing females into the combat arms would degrade overall performance and lethality.

Here is a sample of the data collected during the study:

  • Female Marines averaged 15 percent lower anaerobic power and capacity levels than their male counterparts.
  • In anaerobic power performance, the top 25 percent of female performers and the bottom 25 percent of male performers overlapped.
  • Female Marines demonstrated levels 10 percent lower on average in aerobic capacity than male Marines.
  • Over the course of the assessment, musculoskeletal injury rates totaled 40.5 percent for women, more than double the 18.8 percent rate for men.
  • In all, female Marines sustained 21 “time-loss” injuries, which took them away from task force duties for a day or more. Nineteen of the women’s injuries were lower extremity injuries, and 16 percent took place during a task that required movement while carrying a load.

 Here are some highlights from the nine-month, 36-million-dollar study:

  • All-male squads in every infantry job were faster than mixed-gender squads in each tactical movement evaluated. The differences between the teams were most pronounced in crew-served weapons teams, which had to carry weapons and ammunition in addition to their individual combat loads.
  • Male-only rifleman squads were more accurate than their gender-integrated counterparts on each individual weapons system, including the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle, and the M203 grenade launcher.
  • Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system at levels ranging from 11 to 16 percentage points.

The detrimental effects of forcing women into ground combat units were beyond dispute, and the way forward for then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Maybus was crystal clear. Maybus ignored the study (pilloried in mainstream media), and the standards for IOC were dropped so women could make it through. Putting those standards back will not fix the problem because they never were the problem; women were.

How can the senior flag officers insist it is imperative to put females into every combat formation when they would never force women onto the football teams of West Point or Annapolis? Is winning football games more important than the lives of the men and women they command? Of course not. If you forced a woman into the starting lineup of the Army or Navy, the ensuing disaster would play out on national television, and the ridiculous experiment would be terminated.

The same dynamic will play out if we ever expose our mixed-gender combat units to the sustained ground combat we experienced in Vietnam, Korea, or World War II. During the twenty years we spent fighting the Global War on Terror, the military fought a few battles, lots of firefights, and hundreds of ambushes, but it did not engage in sustained ground combat. When faced with the tactical problem of improvised explosive devices or separating insurgents from the local population instead of tactical solutions, the Pentagon made the money printers go brrr. They purchased thousands of gigantic Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles to protect every fireteam leaving the wire. When we abandoned Afghanistan, we also abandoned the MRAPs. They were no longer needed, and there was no budget or manpower to maintain them.

The Pentagon has lost the ability to make the money printers go brrr. In the future, tactical problems will need tactical solutions, which will be easier to find without the self-inflicted wound of women on the front lines.

I was watching one of the more popular Special Forces influencers, Nate Cornacchia, at the Valhalla VFT channel explain that the Special Forces Q course and Ranger School have already returned to the original, rigorous standards, effectively eliminating women from those courses. Nate explained in great detail why he believes in returning to the former standards. I think I agreed with everything he said, but he took so long to explain things that I skipped through the video. Too much computer screen time has reduced my attention span so much that my wife calls me Desi.  My 2 ½ -year-old grandson Desi is not known for sitting still in quiet contemplation for longer than 5 seconds. But he’s cute as shit and can climb like a monkey because he’s fit, just like his granddad.  

So I’m watching Nate, who looks like your typical former Special Forces operator. He’s wearing a tank top, has the tats, is jacked, and has the obligatory beard and ball cap. I was wearing a tank top, too, and I have a couple of tattoos but no beard, and I don’t habitually wear ball caps. I take a screenshot of myself watching Nate to compare, thinking I might be able to duplicate his SF mojo and become a corporate-sponsored military influencer. I might have a shot if all it takes is being fit enough to wear a tank top and some military tattoos.

Retired Special Forces operator Nate Cornacchia
Retired Marine infantry officer Tim Lynch watching Nate and realizing he was in grade school when Lynch retired from the Marine Corps

So, with a little more color in the background, I’m one expensive microphone away from the influencer lifestyle. Then, I remembered that America already has a retired Marine Corps infantry officer influencer, my friend Asad Khan. I then went over to his Sentinel 360 YouTube page to grab a picture of Asad in mid-rant.

No ball cap, wife beater, or Tats for Asad, who, like me, is just a regular infantry officer. If you can’t tell, he is a no-nonsense, very bright guy who can be a scary dude when aggravated. He took his battalion into Afghanistan back in 2004 and battled the Taliban to a standstill in Uruzgan Province.

When I went to fetch a shot of Asad, I noticed that Nate Cornacchia had another video up about the same topic. This time, he has another former Green Beret dude on, and they spent almost two hours going over the same territory. Once again, I agree with everything they said in principle because I skimmed through the video. Those guys sure can talk a lot, and I wonder if it’s the ADHD meds that seem prevalent in Gen Z, not that there is anything wrong with getting treatment for ADHD. It would explain why they are both wearing their ball caps backward while getting pedantic over what women can and can’t do in the SF community.

Then it dawned on me why I find the generational differences perplexing.

Chivalry.

Chivalry was taught to boomers at a young age as the masculine way of maintaining social decorum. Men were expected to protect women, children, and the elderly. Before you can protect your community, you must be able to protect yourself, so fistfights were expected as part of coming of age in the 60s and 70s. Our teachers taught us that violence never solves anything but our archaic masculine culture taught us it is really the gold standard.

An armed society is a polite society

Generation Z was taught that chivalry was an archaic, misogynistic artifact of Western European colonizers. They were taught manners instead of chivalry, with schools instituting zero-tolerance physical altercation policies. Chivalry is concerned with the right behavior; manners are concerned with the right appearance. One is the product of a masculine society, the other of a feminized culture. This might explain why testosterone levels are plummeting in younger Americans.

What happens to a military that denounces masculinity as toxic? Mannerism as disconnected from reality today as it was during the Italian High Renaissance. Colonel Susan Myers, commander of the 821st Space Base Group in Greenland, recently displayed classic girl boss mannerism. Col. Myers wrote this in an email to her command last week after hosting the Vice President and his lovely wife.

“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base. I commit that, for as long as I am lucky enough to lead this base, all of our flags will fly proudly — together.”

No adult who has taken a hard, straight right to the face would ever talk like that. As the ancient stoic Mike Tyson observed, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.” So what was Col. Myers’s plan with her girl boss email? She had no plan. I’m uncomfortable with military commanders who continue to use passive-aggressive, malicious compliance to ‘flex’ against the bad orange man.

It is not only cowardly but also ungentlemanly to voice your personal “concerns” about the Vice President of the United States when you are in command of a military establishment. Military officers are taught from a young age that with politicians, they are to respect the office, not the man, which was a useful heuristic when serving under Clinton or Obama. As I sat here ruminating about loquacious Green Berets and shit-bird Space Force Colonels, a notification popped up that Sentinal 360 had posted another video. I checked it out, confident it wasn’t another 2 hours about women in combat.

Asad is interviewing retired Marine Colonel C.J. Douglas, who went through IOC when I was on the staff. C.J. is a great Marine and funny as hell, but as you can see, Asad is a serious-looking dude.

I was not disappointed because Asad had one of his generation’s best-retired infantry colonels, C.J. Douglas. Colonel Douglas distinguished himself during five combat tours and with his all-source intelligence-gathering capabilities. He consulted Free Range International for Afghanistan updates prior to deploying there, which he revealed by mentioning his old mentor (me) during his first interview with Asad, which automatically put him into the Free Range Hall of Fame.

And I know CJ Douglas can think after taking a punch to the mouth because I put him through the Room of Pain at IOC. The room of pain was designed to exercise decision-making while exhausted and fighting an enlisted close combat instructor, followed by an IOC instructor after being thrashed to the point of exhaustion by calisthenics.

As you look at the picture above, C.J. is smiling and is genuinely happy because he’s talking about killing bad guys. Asad is being Asad – interesting and candid, but not somebody you’d want to provoke because he’s a hard dude. CJ is, too, and if you’re not a personal friend and he’s looking at you with that big happy smile, he’s probably working his day job with the New York State Police, and you’re probably going to jail. Chivalrous men delight in tales about well-laid ambushes or nailing a high-value target and are genuinely happy when incarcerating anti-social drunks or petty criminals.

Then, praise the Lord, I found an article that might wrap this rambling post up nicely. It’s too late for me, Asad, CJ, or the Green Berets to be legitimate influencers because influencers are now considered obnoxious. I had no idea there were male fitness influencers who filmed their 6-hour morning routine. Another fitness guru (Dr Edward Group) drinks his urine every morning, claiming it’s the best source of stem cells. Is it possible that Dr. Group is correct? Of course. Should you drink your own urine every morning? No. Chivalrous men don’t drink their own urine or concern themselves with self-improvement via injections.

The antidote to influencers is authenticity, which is why the podcast market is booming. That’s why I enjoy the Sential 360 channel so much—Asad is fun to listen to because he is authentic, interested in the military, knows his history, and has great sea stories. As you watch him interview CJ Douglas, you can see the mutual respect and genuine love of the country and the Marine Corps in both of them.

Increased fitness standards will not rid the military of females in combat arms occupational specialties because they make meeting arbitrary fitness standards the issue. As Saul Alinsky, the patron saint of DEI, noted, “The issue is never the issue.” The issue of women in combat isn’t about fairness and equity for women; it’s about political power and the maintenance of the progressive elites’ narrative. Secretary Hegseth should announce the removal of women from all combat arms occupational specialties, not because they can’t meet some standard but because they have no business being there in the first place. It is high time to make Army infantry look like the West Point football team, not some utopian vision of a color-stratified America.

President Trump Responds to the Water War . . . But

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but just days after I posted on our current water war with Mexico, President Trump responded decisively by cutting American water to Tijuana. This is a very strange development because the Mexicans have not met their 1948 treaty obligations since 1948. Once a year or so, Texas politicians issue a hysterical la proclamación threatening to withhold building permits until Mexico coughs up some of the water we are owed. In the past, this allowed the captured media to portray the matter in whatever light their democratic overlords told them. These days, it allows sharp bloggers to bring up yet another indecency we decent Americans are facing, thanks to progressive globalists. But that’s where the issue is supposed to end – expecting Washington, DC, to do something about it would be like pulling a diamond out of a goat’s ass.

Yet here it is, as explained in this statement from the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs:

“Mexico’s continued shortfalls in its water deliveries under the 1944 water-sharing treaty are decimating American agriculture — particularly farmers in the Rio Grande valley Valley” the bureau said. “As a result, today, for the first time, the U.S. will deny Mexico’s non-treaty request for a special delivery channel for Colorado River water to be delivered to Tijuana.”

I had never heard of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, but I had to correct their statement. They had the valley in Rio Grande Valley in lowercase and were missing a comma. Not bad for government work, but I’d love to see DOGE go to work on their books for one reason. Whatever the mission of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs was when it was formed, it is not its mission now. Bureaucracies, by their nature, grow and expand, losing focus over time, but they aren’t of nature, so they have no predators to keep their numbers down and personnel in fighting trim. To be healthy, federal bureaucracies should periodically be ruthlessly scoured by DOGE autodidacts who test low for the empathy character trait.

It is also worth noting that the attached story credits Senator Cruz for alerting the President to this sorry situation and not the Free Range International Blog. This is probably true, but the timing is suspect, given my last post. Still, I’m amazed that the President acted on something that the federal government has studiously ignored for 78 years. It’s morning in America again! What could possibly go wrong now that we have an awesome president getting things done? And then I saw this:

The 6th generation F-47 can expect cost overruns, production delays, and fatal performance glitches that will be worked out after it has been fielded—just like every other modern jet fighter we have built in my lifetime.

President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth bragging about the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform, which is designated the F-47. There is no better example of Pentagon gold plating inefficiency than acquiring next-generation military aircraft. I thought President Trump, with the able assistance of Secretary Hegseth, was going to trim down and toughen up our military. Their counterrevolution against the pathology of wokeness and political correctness in the military has been impressive. But another massive investment in a “next-generation” manned fighter is a depressing signal that the status quo with our military-industrial complex will continue unimpeded by logic or fiscal responsibility.

The F-47 is the replacement for the F-22 Raptor, which was supposed to replace the F-15 platform. However, we still have lots of F-15s because the F-22 was a nightmare for the Air Force. Only 186 of the 750 F-22s anticipated by the Air Force were delivered, and only 130 of those aircraft were operational. The number of F-22s in service today is classified but suspected to be in the double digits.

Why are these people being trusted to build a sixth-generation air dominance fighter?

We cannot build F-22s anymore because much of that industry was retooled to produce the F-35, another super high-speed ‘next-generation’ jet plagued by reliability, maintainability, and availability problems. The cost of the F-35 program has soared past 2 Trillion Dollars. It is a flying computer that requires periodic updates and modernization that significantly reduces sortie rates. Additionally, the F-35’s current engine and thermal management systems must be fixed. But the Department of Defense hasn’t figured out how these repairs will be accomplished. So we don’t know how much this will add to the 1.6 trillion dollar projected sustainability costs.  

It’s hard to believe that the F-47 program won’t face the same challenges, but for what benefit? To have the best air dominance platform in the world? We already possess that capability with our few dozen remaining F-22 Raptors. No hostile Air Force in the world can”dominate” the F-15EX, which the F-22 was supposed to replace. Israel could give the Air Force fits on its home turf, but they are friends, not foes.

Speaking of Israel, its F-35 fleet performed flawlessly against Iran’s sophisticated air defense systems. And speaking of F-35s, the Marine Corps paired theirs with Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie unmanned drones under the “loyal wingman” concept. We currently have the stealth capability married to drones that can defeat any air defense system in the world. The question isn’t why we need a new-generation jet fighter but why we would invest Trillions in developing a new manned air dominance fighter.

I’m not sure these are the people we want building passenger planes, let alone stealth fighters

There may be a logical explanation for the F-47, but we won’t know what it could be until somebody tells us what it is designed to do. Online speculation about its size, shape, and capabilities is all over the map but can be summed up as more lethality, speed, greater range, and additional (undefined) weapons. Every new “air dominance higher” is supposedly more lethal and faster, with longer legs and increased sortie rates due to decreased maintenance cycles. Yet, the exact opposite always proves to be the case.

And we are now supposed to believe that Boeing will deliver this plane on time, on budget, and without a long list of expensive, nearly insolvable problems? Boeing? Are you joking me? What are the chances this plane will be in production and operational by the end of President Trump’s term as currently planned? I say zero. What are the chances that Boeing will deliver this aircraft on budget? Who knows? The price and capabilities of this plane remain classified; we’ll never know how much the program will cost over budget.

Do you believe Boeing will build the F-47 in under four years?

The plane has been designated the F-47 to honor our 47th President, Donald J. Trump, and that’s the kind of bullshit that should have caused instant program termination. Hegseth and Musk are supposed to protect Trump from swamp creatures adept at appealing to the great man’s vanity. Elon Musk called the F-35 design “shit” and derided the “idiots” making the fifth-generation stealth fighter. He met with SecDef Hegseth just before the F-47 announcement and has remained mum on the topic. The SecDef had the appropriate level of gravitas for the situation, but comfort with this new unfunded liability was hard to read.

Gravitas is a word that became common during Bill Clinton’s administration. The paid corporate media used it to describe Clinton when he got that deer-in-the-headlights look while telling what we now know to be bald-faced lies. It is obvious that Secretary Hegseth and his public relations shop will need some serious gravitas to navigate the disaster they unleashed by greenlighting a program they did not have the time to review or understand. The future suddenly does not look so bright, and getting a few more hundred thousand acre-feet of water from Mexico will not change that.

Suddenly the CIA is Competent?

This morning America awoke to the news that the CIA had run down and arrested the man responsible for the Abbey Gate bombing. The new CIA director said he called Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and told them a man named Mohammad Sharifullah (aka Jabar) was inside the Northwest Frontier or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or hanging out near Chitral – somewhere on the border that Pakistan barely controls. He claimed Jabar was the man behind the Abbey Gate bombing, so the ISI and CIA launched a raid, captured him and brought him back to the USA to face justice.

ISIS terrorist Mohammad Sharifullah arriving in the USA last night. ISISK is turning into a problem for both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it is a safe bet that this dude deserves everything he has coming. But it is hard to believe he set up the Abbey Gate attack having just been released from the Bagram jail

The chances that this story is true are not high for the following reasons:

  1. The last time the CIA went after the “man responsible for Abbey Gate” they killed a Kabul-based NGO worker along with a carload of women and children. At the time the morbidly obese Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said it was a “righteous strike” before being forced to admit they killed ten innocent civilians.
  2. The ability of the CIA to gather accurate intelligence inside of Pakistan or Afghanistan was compromised by the ISI, who took our money, gave it to the Taliban, and forced-fed target lists to the CIA, which benefited Pakistan – not America
  3. The ISI is and always has been an enemy and they proved that with 20 years of interference and lying.
  4. The CIA was so incompetent that the military started their own private spy network, which identified dozens of lucrative targets in Pakistan that the military serviced with their drones. That enraged the Pakistan ISI who threatened to throw the CIA out of the country if we didn’t stop hitting targets they had not been nominated or approved.
  5. The military private spy ring identified OBL’s Abbottabad compound in 2008 and even sent the architectural drawings to their boss, retired CIA legend Dewey Clarridge. I know that’s a fact because I sent the drawings through our secure DARPA funded internet connection from the Taj in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
  6. One of the most proficient CIA analysts with a proven regional counter terrorism track record, Sarah Adams, said the Abbey Gate attack had two organizers, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Sanaullah Ghafari: two men who had the means, intelligence, motivation, and a long history of attacking Americans. Sarah was on the Shawn Ryan Show and some other podcasts I listen to and she’s impressive.
  7. It is impossible to believe that some low-level jail bird had the ability to organize, arm and execute a suicide bombing mission so quickly, having been locked up in Bagram until mid-August. The bombers needed the assistance of a senior terrorist experienced in launching suicide attacks in Kabul. The Taliban leadership had one man who fit that bill, Sirajuddin Haqqani, now the Interior Minister of Afghanistan.
The first attempt to exact retribution for the Abbey Gate bombing killed an innocent family.

Like most Americans, I have been thrilled to see President Trump dominate the deep state. If it is humanly possible to turn the CIA from a renegade political opposition operation into a functional organization that subordinates itself to the Executive Branch and is actually capable of doing spy work, I believe President Trump will do it. However, Trump is not a superhuman, and it is going to take a Herculean effort to clean out the Augean Stables of the CIA. It would be easier, safer, cheaper, and more efficient to dismantle the CIA and let Eric Prince of General Michael Flynn build a new organization using the Office of Strategic Services model.

The idea that the CIA suddenly became a functional, nonpartisan intelligence agency during the FJB era is hard to believe. As is the claim, that “Jafar” has confessed to his crimes. Confessions by Hill Pashtuns under the tender ministrations of the ISI are meaningless. American jails are full of men who have “confessed” after very little pressure to crimes that DNA proved they never committed.

Confessions, absent hard, solid, SIGINT complimented by human intelligence are meaningless. The CIA has a 20-plus-year record of failure generating accurate human intelligence in Afghanistan or Pakistan. There is a show on Netflix that proves the point. They think they are depicting a competent human intelligence operation. What they show is two old Warlords taking the agency to the cleaners over fabricated bullshit. My assessment of that amusing spectacle is here.

CENTCOM Commander Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., USMC is responsible for the disaster in Kabul and should have been held accountable.

Accountability for the disastrous Kabul NEO mission should start at the top because it was preordained the day we abandoned the Bagram Airfield. On this episode of All Marine Radio, I predicted exactly what would happen the month before Abbey Gate, making me one of maybe 10,000 people who recognized that fact at the time. The CENTCOM commander, Marine General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr. should have never allowed Biden to give up Bagram. The Pentagon had already perfected thwarting presidential directives under Trump, so why, suddenly, did their attitudes change with Biden? I suspect they thought the 2020 election marked the ascendancy of the deep state apparatus. So McKenzie played ball knowing he would be handsomely compensated upon retirement while never held accountable for the fiasco he created.

My generation’s senior Marine Corps general officers are not proficient in reading historical trends. I know most of them and once respected and admired them more than any other group of men on the face of the planet. With age comes wisdom as well as the disappointment of seeing your heroes exposed by fate and circumstance as being petty, vindictive shits because all the cool kids in DC thought that the Bad Orange Man was a kook. They thought wrong, but it’s going to take more than six short weeks to repair the damage done by their long march through our institutions.

A Bittersweet Veterans Day

Election Day was long and busy as I was the judge for the Cayetano Cavazos Elementary School polling station. This is a blue county, and I was appointed an election judge because I was one of the few Republicans who volunteered to work the polls. Shout out to the Vet the Vote organization, which is where I got the idea to volunteer. Regardless of political affiliation, the people working this election were professional, conscientious, and pleasant to be around. It was a fantastic experience.

Throughout election day, I was asked if I was a veteran, and when I confirmed I was a retired Marine, I was thanked for my service. That made me uncomfortable because our failure to win the Global War on Terrorism has left this country in much greater peril than it was in 2001. Not only did we do exactly what Osama bin Ladin predicted, which was to fight a long war we could never win, only to withdraw in humiliating disgrace. But we degraded our military capabilities and are now ruining the fighting spirit of the fighting men at the pointed end of the spear.

Our military is a broken, demoralized joke that cannot meet its recruiting or retention goals. When I enlisted in the Navy in 1978, the military was considered a hollow force, but that force was full of mean bastards who could fight. And we had the ships, combat aircraft, and officer corps required to take those rowdy misfits into a fight and crush any other adversary in the world. Now, we have a diverse force with women in the infantry and trans moralism making a mockery of the profession of arms. We no longer have the sea lift or aircraft to meet our peacetime obligations, let alone fight a peer-level war.

Battalion Landing Team 1/9 exercising in Australia during the summer of 1987. The Marine Corps can no longer insert and sustain a battalion in the field from Amphibious shipping. A task that was routine when I was on active duty. Photograph of 2ndLt Lynch and my radioman LCpl Kline courtesy of Marines magazine.

Our Navy has shrunk to the point it can no longer control the busiest shipping lane in the world. Instead of using the Red Sea, commercial ships are now re-routed around the horn of Africa, adding 3500 nautical miles to their transit, which takes 12 extra days and a million extra fuel dollars per trip. The Navy can only field 12 Amphibious ships worldwide because a former Marine Corps Commandant reduced the number of amphibious ships the Navy was required to maintain from 38 to 31. He did this to free up money for the Navy to build a new class of ships called Landing Ship Medium, which would support his Force Design 2030 plan. Those ships have not been designed, funded, or built and will never be because of this harsh rebuke from the Congressional Research Service over the ludicrous FD 2030 concept.

The Navy/Marine Corps team can no longer perform the missions they have been assigned for the past 85 years. Now that President Trump is returning, Congress suddenly has buyer’s remorse for agreeing to the radical reorganization it allowed under the commandants Berger and Smith. This article by a former mentor to officers of my generation, Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC (Ret), sums up the state of play well. I’m pasting his last two paragraphs below because they describe exactly how we ended up with a broken Marine Corps.

There are two types of incompetents, active and passive. Active incompetents don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they act on the zany ideas. Passive incompetents know that they don’t know what they are doing. They are dangerous because they tend to defer to the active incompetents.

Berger and Smith are active incompetents. Biden and Congress have been passive incompetents. Shame on them. If Congress acted today to repair the Navy and Marine Corps and return it back to 2018 capabilities, it would take at least a decade to recover. Our civilian leaders were sold snake oil, and the rubes bought it.

Those same rubes are now plotting to undermine President-elect Trump. These are the same people who had no problem abandoning Bagram airbase when FJB arbitrarily and recklessly cut the troop numbers in Afghanistan. Without Bagram, there was no way to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan in an orderly manner. Everyone (not inside the Pentagon) who knew anything about Afghanistan recognized that total abdication of service stewardship. The resulting fiasco in Kabul was as easy to predict as it was uncomfortable to watch.

General Furness and Mac hosting me for the 2011 Marine Corps Birthday at Camp Dwyer in the southern Helmand province

However, all is not lost because these two fighting generals, LtGen Dave Furness, USMC (Ret) and MajGen Dale Alford, USMC (Ret), who know how to train and lead Marines, may have been sidelined, but they are not forgotten. They are featured in this All Marine Radio podcast that dropped yesterday, and listening to them is a tonic for the souls of concerned military professionals. It is worth listening to if you (like me) are alarmed by the current state of our military and think the current crop of general officers are a collection of sycophantic yes-men. LtGen Furness tells me the other services still have talent hidden in their flag officer ranks, too, which is remarkable given the ongoing war on competence being waged by DoD diversity/equity mandarins.

I made the mistake of listening to this while lifting weights and damn near broke my back when LTGen Furness popped off with, “I’m just happy somebody gives a shit about what I have to say.” Listening to two of the best generals of my generation will instill some much-needed confidence in today’s broke-ass military.

Have a Happy Veterans Day, and let us hope the incoming Trump administration taps these two retired generals or others just like them to resuscitate our broken, demoralized military.

I Spy: How Human Intelligence is Supposed to Work

Once again, highly classified American intelligence documents have been published on the Internet. This was not a massive leak by some low-level enlisted soldier or disgruntled contractor but a focused leak of two intelligence products regarding Israel’s current preparations to strike Iran. The documents are revealing for several reasons. The first is that they reveal our intelligence community’s sources and methods, which is bad. Second, Israel no longer trusts the Biden-Harris administration and isn’t telling them anything about its current or future operations, which is good.

An excellent summary of the situation can be found on John Schindler’s Top Secret Umbra substack. It is worth reading to understand how serious the leak is and who inside the Biden-Harris most likely leaked the material. The most likely culprit, a POS named Rob Malley, couldn’t be the leaker as his security clearance was revoked in 2003 for spying for Iran. During that investigation, he was caught lying to the FBI, so guess what happened to him? Not one damn thing because Rob Malley was the architect of Obama’s 2015 Iran deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Laws in Obama-Biden-Harris America only apply to the little people or associates of President Trump.

President Trump demonstrated geostrategic common sense by placing the interests of the American people over the “legacy” of Obama when he canceled the JCPOA. President Biden demonstrated partisanship over common sense and complete disinterest in the safety and security of America by trying to resurrect the JCPOA but ended up with a spy scandal centered on Malley instead.

Note the difference between the treatment of General Michael Flynn, who was tricked into a supposed lie by nefarious FBI shenanigans, and Rob Malley, who was and is a straight-up traitor. The rule of law in America today is non-existent if you’re a Democrat. If you’re a patriot who served this country with distinction for 35 years in uniform and a Trump supporter, you will be prosecuted and financially ruined for the most trivial offenses.

General Flynn was instrumental in setting up the Eclipse Group, a private spy network providing desperately needed human intelligence (HUMINT) in Afghanistan. The Eclipse Group was created by a former CIA legend, Dewey Clarridge, who knew the CIA could not deliver HUMINT for several reasons, including institutional risk aversion. You can see that for yourself by watching the CIA get taken to the cleaners in a bogus HUMINT operation on the NETFLIX series Spy Ops. My post explaining that ludicrous operation (the segment is titled Taliban Spies) is here.

Eclipse started operations after my recruiter, Willi 1, and I (Willi 4) met with some senior CENTCOM staffers in Dubai in July 2009. Not long after we started, Kabul’s CIA station chief sent cables to Langley, complaining vociferously about our activities. Nobody in the Pentagon or CENTCOM gave a shit what the CIA had to say about us because they sucked and weren’t providing anything useful to the military. The CIA then turned to their favorite New York Times reporters Matt Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins, who wrote several articles full of half-truths, outright lies, and innuendo. The articles referred to my friend Willi 1 and me  (my source code was Willi 4) as “commercial Jason Bourne’s,” which we found amusing.

After driving the Khyber Pass from Jalalabad, the Commercial Jason Bournes Chilling in Peshawar, Pakistan.

But this post isn’t about that I want to explain what a legitimate HUMINT operation looks like by lifting some material from my unpublished book Free Ranging Afghanistan. On the morning of September 26, 2010, I received a panicked call from the senior Afghan official who ran my spy ring in Regional Command East, comprised of Nuristan, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Laghman provinces. He told me he was on his way to my guesthouse with bad news about the kidnapping of an aid worker. He had been told one of the women working for DAI, a large American aid implementor, had been kidnapped on the Asadabad to Jalalabad highway. That was incorrect as I knew DAI personnel would never be allowed to drive that highway and, being a USAID implementor, would have had an armed ex-pat personal security detail. But I knew exactly who would be on the road without an armed escort, and that was one of the girls working for the Idea New program, and there was only one of those: Linda Norgrave.

In 2010 I was working as a heavily armed humanitarian for the Central Asia Development Group (CADG), doing massive irrigation and cash-for-work projects in the cities of Jalalabad, Asadabad, and Gardez. CADG was a “direct implementation” outfit, which meant we did not have ex-pat security teams, B6 armored SUVs, or UN Minimum Occupational Security Standard (UNMOSS) rated living compounds. Idea New was also a direct implementation outfit that was associated with DAI, and they lived and worked out of the DAI Jalalabad compound.

I was at my guesthouse, The Taj, which contained a Tiki Bar that we opened every Thursday evening for the international community (mostly aid workers) that was then thriving in Jalalabad. Like every other international working in Nangarhar province, the British ex-pats working for Idea New came over with the DAI crew every Thursday evening for happy hour. One night, my Aussie wingman Ski and I listened to their program manager explain their modus operandi, explicitly mentioning his belief that being armed was ridiculous, but we said nothing. He went on to challenge us on the wisdom of an armed westerner trying to fight his way out of a Taliban ambush, and we still said nothing. We never thought we could fight off a Taliban ambush on our own, but Linda was not taken in an ambush. She was kidnapped by Taliban associates on a main road, something that would never happen to us. Gun-wielding Westerners introduced a lot of friction into a kidnapping equation, which was the point of being armed.

I immediately emailed Willi 1 and Dewey to explain that Linda Norgrove was a British national working for the American USAID contractor DAI on the Idea New program. Idea New duplicated our (CADG) technique of low-profile unarmored cars, singleton international program managers, wearing local dress, attempting to blend in with the locals as much as possible, etc…, but they were not armed. Dewey called me on Skype which he (incorrectly) thought the NSA couldn’t hack to ask what we had, which wasn’t much. He told me to stand by to support one of Willi 3’s assets, which was inbound and might need comms, guns, or money.

As was typical for Willi 3’s network, his guy found the kidnappers by the 29th of September and passed on their names, some fuzzy cell phone pictures, their chain of command, and a working theory for the kidnapping. The crew that had grabbed Linda had been identified in my order of battle reporting a month prior when they arrived from Pakistan, and that report was added to our targeting package. Willi’s access agent linked up with us, and he was exhausted. We let him sleep for a day, fed and refitted him with serious walking around money before he returned to Kunar.

Dewey passed our reporting onto both MI6 and the American DIA; the Brits read everything we wrote, and the Americans ignored everything we sent. President Obama talked the British Prime Minister into allowing the American military to take over the case because the Regional Command (RC East) was 100% American. On the 30th of September, the American military took over the kidnapping case. On the 1st of October, I received a call from the RC East Human Terrain Team asking me to come in to “talk with a friend.”

“About fucking time,” was my curt response.

Thirty minutes later, I was introduced to a DIA agent in the Human Terrain Team office. He looked like every other DIA agent I had met: bearded, in his mid-30s, slim, fit, and wary. I was taken to a separate office so we could talk alone, and the first question he asked was if I knew Linda Norgrove. I was stunned and looked at him hard to see if he was jerking my chain. I then asked a question I hated asking: “Do you know who I am”? He did not; he claimed to have never heard of the Eclipse Group, Dewey Clarridge, or the Pentagon private spy ring. It appeared he was telling the truth, not that I cared, so I asked what they had so far, and he said the grid where her car was found. I didn’t believe that for a second but didn’t care because I came bearing gifts.

Instead of trying to explain the mountain of information we had on the kidnapping – primarily via Willie 3’s excellent network, we walked down to the Human Terrain Team office, where my friend Kerry Patton lent us his desktop computer. I pulled up our AfPakrp.org website and scrolled to report #825, which was a summation of reports 820, 823, and 824, and cross-referenced report 621a, which was when the Taliban kidnap team leader, Mawlvi Baseer, first popped up on my network. Dewey had resorted to putting our products on a password-protected internet site after the New York Times hit pieces successfully ended our original contract. With the loss of the contract, we lost our man in Kabul, who had been placed there specifically to feed our intel products into the ISAF intelligence flow.

Ski and I jocked up for a trip into Kunar Province. Do we look like dudes you can kidnap during the day?

The DIA agent was stunned; Kerry said, “I told you, man, you should have listened to us sooner; these guys are the shit.” I told him to call me if he had any additional questions, knowing he had a lot to digest and would want to hustle over to the CIA building on the other side of the airfield. He asked me if there was anything he could do for me, so I requested a case of German sparkling mineral water. I had heard through the grapevine that the CIA had flown in hundreds of cases..

On October 3rd, I asked for another meeting to inform my DIA contact our guy was at the outer cordon in the upper Dewagal Valley and about to slip into the village of Dineshga, where he thought Mawlvi Baseer was keeping Linda. I gave him our agent’s Thuraya sat phone number and the three cell numbers he had recently reported for the head kidnapper, Baseer. On the 6th of October, our spy was back outside the cordon, having located Linda. The DIA called me in because they had intercepted his sat phone calls and now knew where Linda was. When I arrived at FOB Fenty, the DIA agent was almost giddy with excitement and gave me a case of German sparkling mineral water from the CIA stash.

He asked if we could send our access agent back inside Dineshga to identify Linda’s exact location. Willi 3 had anticipated this and already agreed to send his man back. I asked how the SEALs would ID our guy as friend, not foe, and was told I’d be briefed on exactly how to do that when the time came. I knew that was bullshit, as did Willi 3. Our man went back, made an innocuous sat phone call from just outside the building housing Linda, and then rapidly exited the scene. A few hours later, the SEALS launched and raided the compound we had identified as containing Linda. In the ensuing melee, one of the SEALs accidentally killed her with a fragmentation grenade when he mistook her for an armed combatant.

At that time, I had been living in Afghanistan for four years. Willi 3 had lived there off and on for over thirty years. Human Intelligence operators working in a country like Afghanistan needed to have years of time on deck before they could become remotely proficient at gathering legitimate intelligence. Without that deep knowledge and relationships forged over years and years, any attempt at creating a spy ring would result in getting taken to the cleaners by willy Afghans, as demonstrated by the ridiculous Netflix show, or taken out back and shot in the head.

With four years of continuous service in the country, I qualified as a trusted liaison with ISAF and to outfit and harbor an access agent. I could have never found Linda with my assets, which were considerable back when the Pentagon paid us regularly. Willi 3 was the only Eclipse operative I knew (and I knew only four of the dozens in Eclipse) who had the ability to conduct human intelligence operations at that level. He was fluent in Dari and Pashto and had spent enough time developing the relationships required to run legitimate HUMINT spy rings.

Our intelligence agencies are incapable of duplicating the Eclipse Group because they refuse to put in the time on the ground or accept the risk that comes with living and working with the Afghans. The night we lost Linda, I was stopped and detained by Unit 02 – the CIA-sponsored Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Team for Nangarhar Province. But that’s a story another time – if you want to hear it, hit me up in the comments section.

The IDF: Modeling Competence over Equity

I join the freedom-loving peoples of the world in congratulating the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)  for eliminating the genocidal bastard Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar was the head of Hamas and claimed that when the time came, he would stand and fight, dying as a martyr. When the time came, he was running away with a fake ID and a pocket of donor dollars, hoping to go to the ground in Rafa. You remember Rafa, the town the spinless cowards running the United States, United Kingdom,  France, Canada, and Egypt told the Israelis to avoid. Cackling Kamala even warned Israel about Rafa, saying, “She had studied the maps,” whatever that meant.

Yahya Shin-was after playing a game of FAFO with a competent military.

Israel is modeling the consequences of valuing competence over diversity in national leadership, intelligence organizations, and a hard-fighting army. They are not constrained by ridiculous rules of engagement from on high. Compare and contrast what we have watched the IDF do over the past year to how we handled fighting terrorists embedded inside Afghan communities. This conversation between Shawn Ryan and Nick “The Reaper” Irving is most informative on that exact topic. You should watch all five hours of this podcast to understand the quality of the human capital wasted by our feckless national leaders and their yellow generals.

There are enough warning signs about our hollow military and its morally bankrupt leadership for a hundred blog posts. From drone swarms loitering over our military bases. unmolested, the Pentagon killing hundreds with an experimental drug treating a virus that was not a threat to servicemen, to an army helicopter rotor washing civilian hurricane relief supplies, the signs that our military is broken cannot be ignored. But I want to focus on the one area I find the most upsetting: women in our combat arms.

West Point and the Naval Academy will roll into the weekend with undefeated football teams. If you look at those teams, you will notice they resemble Israeli combat formations in that they are all male. Our military leadership insists that there are no differences between men and women in mental capacity or physical strength despite several millennia of human experiences and our own lying eyes.

Men and women are born with dramatically different capabilities, which can be seen every time a woman’s national soccer team is beaten by an under-15 boys’ squad. It’s not polite to mention that fact, which most of us find merely amusing. But when women are inserted into ground combat units, the delusions of our elites are no longer funny. One of the many reasons our military faces a recruiting and retention crisis is this callous disregard for the lives of enlisted men who are saddled with females in combat zones.

The boys who thumped the women’s team were Texans which might explain it maybe. . .

Let me tell you about women in combat. On a warm summer day, I witnessed a Marine Corps patrol walking through the Nawa Bazaar in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. I could see the point man was furious, as were the men behind him, and stopped to watch. Then I saw why; the men were carrying the weapons and body armor of their female “Lioness” Marines. The women were stumbling in a gap-mouthed stupor, hanging onto the body armor of the man in front of them. The locals crowding the bazaar were laughing and openly mocking the Marines. It was such a sad spectacle that I couldn’t take a picture of it; I was too embarrassed

What’s the current perception of the Marine Corps Lioness program? A quick Google search reveals dozens of articles about the trailblazing female Marines or the Special Ops: Lionesses TV show. That TV show stars Zoe Saldaña, who is 45, Nicole Kidman, who is 56, and Morgan Freeman, who is still kicking at 86. Can you imagine people that old on the battlefield? It’s a joke, insulting to our intelligence, but it’s a reality for too many of the idiots comprising our elite managerial class.

So, how is the recent deployment of paratroopers into the Middle East going? Unlike my deployment to Beirut in 1983, the current mission is not the subject of informed debate in the regime media. We have no idea where these troops are or what they are doing. Everything the Pentagon does now is top secret. Whatever these troops are doing, it does not impact the conflict that allegedly caused their deployment. One more display of gross incompetence at the national command level.

The Marine Corps Lioness program paid dividends only because our generals were incapable of the tactical adaptation of warning residents in targeted areas to get out before we came in. No military in history has done more to prevent civilian collateral damage than the Israelis. But once warned by them, the civilians who stay risk becoming collateral damage because the Israelis prioritized winning battles and preserving their troops over rules of engagement designed to appease their political masters.

Congressional cowards reacting to protestors who are not from Antifa or Black Lives Matter or unhinged women shrieking at conservative Supreme Court nominees.

The IDF is delivering a master class on intelligence operations and conducting ground combat operations. There are no women at the pointy end of their spear, just as there are no women from Ukraine or Russia slugging it out in the trenches of Ukraine.

There shouldn’t have been any American women at the pointy end of our spear during the 20 years we spent replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. But our senior generals aren’t as competent as Isleali generals, so they came up with workarounds that made female congresspeople swoon while leaving our best warriors like Nick Irving alone, exposed, and unable to call in the fire support they needed to survive. A military organization that places winning collegiate football games over the lives of its soldiers and Marines is not worthy of our support or admiration. They have earned nothing but our contempt.

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