Rogue Warrior by Richard Marcinko

As I read things by and about Special Forces, Richard Marcinko's name kept popping up, so I finally put his first book, purportedly autobiographical, on reserve at the library. Marcinko was one of the driving forces behind the formation of Seal Team Six, which has gained (unwanted?) fame recently for the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Marcinko joined the Navy as a young man, and wangled his way into UDT training, then BUDS, and ended up being deployed to Viet Nam as a newly minted ensign in charge of a platoon of SEALs. He seemed to have the time of his life leading missions against the Viet Cong there, and provides some pretty good tales of his adventures. He never did have much respect for most officers, especially administrative and rear echelon types (his terms for them are a little less polite), and he really was quite an a**hole, if everything he says in the book is true. He's definitely the kind of man you want to have your back when it all hits the fan, but I'm not certain I'd like to hang around with him under ordinary circumstances - he generally liked to start trouble, just for fun.

I was reading a section of the book where he tells about his team doing security testing of other Navy installations, and I kept having this deja vu feeling. Then it came to me - in The Weapon, by Michael Z. Williamson, there's a scenario where Chinran and his special forces are training, and they do almost exactly the same things to some unsuspecting regular forces bases. I wonder if Williamson read this book, and it all stuck in his subconscious somewhere, or if he might have been involved with the original caper, somehow.

I'm sure that Marcinko sanitized his stories for the book a little bit, and there's probably plenty he's not telling, but this book is definitely "adult" fare, anyway. Enjoyed it enough that I put his second book on reserve.

No Easy Day by Mark Owen

 Mark Owen gives us an interesting and compelling account of the mission which finally killed Osama bin Laden, from the point of view of one o,f the members of SEAL Team Six. The book jumps right into the action, as the author is inbound towards the compound in the helicopter that is forced into a controlled crash landing. Unfortunately, we leap away just before touchdown and Mark begins to tell us, as Paul Harvey would say, "the rest of the story".

Owen moves on to the story of how he attended DEVGRU special warfare training, after being on the Navy's SEAL teams for about six years. One of the amusing anecdotes relates to how when DEVGRU began, there were really only two teams available, but one of them was called "Six" just in case the Soviets heard of them, so they'd think we had more teams than we actually did. Richard Marcinko was one of the founders back then - I gotta pick up some of his novels one of these days.

Owen relates some great combat stories from his deployments to the Anbar province in Iraq and the Pakistani border area in Afghanistan. There's some great stuff about his weapons of choice for all you gun nuts out there - and I got to learn some new things about our military hardware, including some funky looking NVGs our special forces use. He also gets into the massive amounts of training and rehearsal that happen long before any missions begin, and some of the difficulties faced by our military families.

Eventually, at long last, he returns to wrap up the book with the story of the raid on bin Laden's compound, and essentially a bullet by bullet account of the incursion. Some of it is actually almost funny, as various REMFs attempt to put their stamp on the ROEs. One of the suggestions was that the SEALs should push bin Laden's car out of its garage and park it on the street with a flashing police light on top of it, so that nearby residents would believe that the police had already responded to any disturbance at the compound, and wouldn't call the police, themselves. In the end, our forces with guns and saying in Pashto, "move along, nothing to see here", got the job done just as well.

A quick read, full of excellent action.

Special Operations by Oliver North

There often seems to be a certain coincidence between what I'm reading and things that pop up in current events. While I was in the middle of this book about the Navy Seals and other Special Forces, the news came over the wires that Seal Team 6 had taken out Osama bin Laden. The other thing that happened was the commisioning of the Navy ship named after Medal of Honor recipient Michael W. Murphy. Maybe I need to read a book about how an economy was saved, next.

I've been rather fond of Ollie North since the days of the Iran Contra hearings, when I heard him being questioned by members of Congress. One of them asked him, "Why did you shred those documents?" His reply was something on the lines of, "Listen, I didn't go out and buy a shredder for myself. The government bought the shredder and put it in my office. It was part of my job to shred confidential documents." with and undertone of "You moron!" Can't recall the name of his autobiography, but I read it back when it hit paperback, and enjoyed it.

This book is based on a television series that Fox News aired and that North hosted a while back, which I never seemed to be tuned in at the right time to watch. It contains interesting information about the makeup of our Special Operations forces, the training that each type receives, and the types of missions that they're generally called to execute. There are stories of their heroism mostly in Afghanistan and Iraq, and probably a merely a small fraction of the heroics that have happened, but these, at least, have been declassified.

This, for me, was not a book I was able to just pick up and breeze through in one sitting. I took it in bits and pieces, as the stories of these men and their selfless sacrifice for their fellow soldiers and others left me in literal tears at times, and I had to walk away. Of course, the story of Seal Team 10, which I hope to read more about in Marcus Lutrell's book, Lone Survivor, one of these days, was featured, as were tales of the Rangers, Marine Force Recon, the Night Stalkers, Delta Force and DEA FAST teams.

I highly recommend this one.

On Combat by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

My son gave me this book for Christmas, after hearing Lt. Col Grossman give a talk to some Marine Corps leadership. It's not the kind of book you just zip through, it really needs to be digested in small chunks. Grossman has had a long career working with soldiers and law enforcement personnel, preparing them for deadly situations and the aftermath. He writes in great detail about both the psychological and physiological effects of conflict. It turns out that Grossman is also a science fiction fan, and he uses quotes from books I'm familiar with here and there in On Combat.

The human body has, programmed into it, fight or flight responses that happen in the midst of conflict, when our lives are in danger. Some of these responses can be overcome or mitigated by the proper training. At normal heart beat rates from 60-80 bpm, our physiological responses are basically normal, but when adrenaline starts to raise our heart rates above 120 bpm, the first thing to go is fine motor skills. Above 145 bpm, complex motor skills also deteriorate. Above 160 bpm, our sight and hearing can be constricted, causing tunnel vision and loud noises to be distorted.

However, with the proper type of training, which may include live-fire paintball combat simulations, professional soldiers or law enforcement officers can become accustomed to heart rates this high, and push the effects of a given heart rate to a higher level. Highly trained athletes can also see the same effects in their performance, from forcing themselves to continue to compete at higher metabolic levels.

Grossman has also worked extensively with PTSD victims, and this book contains a lot of information about the causes and effects of this disorder, and advice for soldiers and law enforcement on how to deal with them constructively. I never knew that during WWI and WWII, there were actually more men disabled by psychological problems than by enemy bullets.

This was a very informative book, and I highly recommend it if you are in a profession likely to involve you in a deadly force situation, or are a family member of such a person.

My Men are My Heroes by Brad Kasal

This is the story of Brad Kasal, a First Seargent with the US Marine Corps, who fought in and was grievously wounded in the battle for Fallujah. I really got involved in some of the early part of this book, as Kasal went into the Corps as an infantry "grunt", trained at MCRD San Diego, went to SOI at Camp Pendleton, was assigned to the anti-tank gunner MOS, got his permanent duty station at Camp Horno, and spent his first overseas deployment as part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit in the Far and Middle East. My son spent his first couple of years as a Marine in almost exactly the same way, so this all hit pretty close to home.
After that, Kasal was deployed for Desert Storm, and later, Operation Iraqi Freedom. Desert Storm was over much too quickly to suit him, and he saw very little action there before returning stateside. However, he and his fellow Marines saw more than enough action when the US returned to Iraq in 2003.
Kasal's ghostwriter spends a lot of time getting all of the details right. So for anyone who's a big military equipment and organization buff, this book is going to be great. Every bit of weaponry used is described in loving detail, and the movements of every batallion, every squad, and nearly every individual Marine is laid out for all of the battles described in the latter half of the book. There's a ton of information about all of the other enlisted men, non-coms, and officers that served with Kasal, their personal inclinations, leadership style, and even the color of their boxer shorts, in some cases.
The shootout in which Kasal is injured - seven gunshot and 48 shrapnel wounds - is graphically described and really gives a good picture of what Kasal and some of the other leaders were thinking about as chaos roared all around them.
The book is really enjoyable for those of us who have military family members, I think, but sometimes the amount of technical details included seemed to bog down the story. I label this one a must-read.