Blackhawk Down takes place in the 1990’s during a famine and massive civil war. A United Nations peacekeeping group was sent in to help, but the main portion of these withdrew. The Somali Militia declared war on these remaining forces and the Army rangers, Delta Force and the 160th SOAR were sent to Somalia to try capture the self-appointed president Mohammed Farrah Adid. Adid was taking Red Cross food shipments, the UN forces cannot engage them head on, to gain even more control over the population because of the famine. The Rangers and Delta force capture a warlord selling weapons to the militia outside of Mogadishu. After the warlords, capture a plan is created to capture two of Adid’s top advisors, Omar Salad Elmi and Abdi Hassan Awale …show more content…
Qeybdiid. After the Lieutenant in charge of one Ranger chalk suffers a seizure he is replaced with a specialist who has never seen combat, forcing the platoon sergeant to take charge and lead the men into battle. The force is made up of experienced soldiers as well new troops who had just been recently assigned to Mogadishu.
The operation still goes forward, and the advisors are captured by Delta Force. The Rangers and escort helicopters come under very heavy fire though One of the Ranger chalks is dropped over a block away by mistake. PFC Blackburn is heavily injured when he falls from a Blackhawk and three Humvees are used to escort him back. Blackhawk Super-Six-One is shot down by a RPG and crashes in the city. The pilot and co-pilot die on impact, two men survive, and one is mortally wounded but makes it out on another helicopter. The ground forces are told to change course and converge on the crash site but are stopped by the militia and end up getting lost within the city while taking heavy casualties. During this time two Ranger chalks reach the crash site and set up a perimeter. Another Blackhawk, Super-Six-Four, is shot down, but since the other chalk of Rangers is pinned down taking heavy casualties ground forces are unable to reach it. Four soldiers are inserted at the crash site where they discover the pilot is still alive. This other site is quickly overrun though and only one soldier is captured and taken to …show more content…
Adid. The ground forces are still unable to reach the first crash site and have to return to base to await reinforcements form the Tenth Mountain Division including Pakistani and Malaysian Soldiers to extract the tapped soldiers. Once night falls the Somali militia launches a large scale sustained assault against the men trapped at Super-Six-One’s crash site. They are held off through the night by strafing runs from and rocket attacks from Little Bird helicopters. Eventually the Tenth Mountain Division reaches the crash site and manages to extract all the wounded and dead. However, room quickly ran out and a handful of soldiers were forced to run from the crash site back to UN safe zone. At the end battle there were eighteen dead Americans and dozens more injured. The death toll for the Somalis they had over five hundred dead and more than one thousand injured. Lessons Learned • Do not get comfortable because the enemy has not yet threatened you during missions.
• Do not leave gear behind because you do not think you will need it since the enemy has yet to bother you on
missions. • Always go through Precombat checks and precombat inspections. • Prepare for a mission to be longer than the estimated time in case of an emergency. • Nothing in a combat zone is ever easy, even a simple snatch n grab. • It is always better to be overly prepared than underprepared especially in a combat situation. • Being more technologically advanced than your enemy does not always mean you have the upper hand. • Always assume the enemy knows as much if not more than you do. • When operating within an urban environment it is very difficult to discern who is an enemy and who is a civilian. • If the population look up to and admire the person who is being hunted, it becomes very difficult to obtain actionable intelligence to make a plan with. Protection offered by the people can thwart satellites and elite troops. This was the case with Aidid which is why the Rangers and Delta went after two of his Lieutenants. • Even though there may sometimes be a steep price to pay it is worth it once the objective is achieved. • Always have a backup plan for when the enemy is engaged. • Have more than one relief unit available to provide support and perform search-and-rescue missions. • Do not underestimate the enemy and their ability to gain support from the locals. This will rapidly increase the size of the enemy. • Know civilian considerations and the possibility for civilian casualties. • Never take the same routes and flight patterns in and over a city. • Any type of armored support would have been able to punch through the roadblocks making the rescue much easier. • Training and discipline can beat, or at least hold off, a force of greater numbers. • Have multiple exfil routes out of the area. • Be prepared for the plan to go wrong. The person who finalizes the plan is the enemy.
...ch Battalion. COL Freeman dedicated the reserves to regain the position lost by George Company. Rangers and the reserves regained the position. CCF endured their first tactical loss, while Eighth Army would not be defeated again. 23rd RCT were relieved by Task Force Crombez of 1st Cavalry Division.
Black Hearts was about the 2005-2006 deployment of the 101st‘s second brigade‘s 1-502nd (First Strike) to Iraq. The book more specifically honed in on Bravo Company and their first platoon’s decent into complete madness throughout the deployment. The 1-502nd and its commander Lt Col Kunk, was tasked with the mission of getting control of and hold the land in-between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Kunk was a particularly difficult man to get along with. He would explode and go on a tirade over just about anything, big or small. This caused serious problems at meetings when he only wanted things his way and would personally attack his commanders who he thought he could not trust. This area had been recently dubbed as the “Triangle of death”. The cities that were in this area were Yusufiyah, Mahmudiyah, Lutufiyah, and notably a thermal power plant that was never finished that housed many insurgents almost like a FOB. Bravo Company was sent to take care of a particularly nasty part of the Battalion’s AO; The north-western-side that encompassed Yusufiyah and the unfinished thermal power plant. Upon arrival to Iraq and to their AO, Bravo Company was to take over the duties of the 48th infantry brigade who was there before them. After riding around with the 48th Brigade to learn how things were being run, Bravo Company started to realize how scared the 48th were to even leave the wire. Any patrols that needed to be done were done in a Humvee that just raced around the area and got back to the FOB ASAP. Once they fully took over their AO from the 48th they started on building up fortifications and doing patrols of the area. One road in particular, Route Sportster, had been giving patrols and Humvees trouble since it was always laden...
Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier is a work notable not only for its vivid and uncompromising account of his experience as a member of the Wehrmacht in World War II, but also for its subtle and incisive commentary about the very nature of war itself. What is perhaps most intriguing about Sajer’s novel is his treatment of the supposedly “universal” virtues present within war such as professionalism, patriotism, camaraderie, and self-sacrifice. Sajer introduces a break between how war is thought about in the abstract and how it has actually been conducted historically.
...ce again they were pinned down from three sides and the only way to not be shot was to jump down the mountain side again, which they did. However, once Luttrell stopped falling down the mountain he realized that he had lost sight of Axelson. Sadly, Axelson was found by the Taliban and shot and killed, leaving Luttrell all alone. After just two hours of fighting Luttrell was the only American left in the fight. At this time in the battle it was almost night time, so Luttrell tucked himself under a rock to hide from the Taliban for the night. When he woke up, he started to walk down the hill and found a stream of water. This was a huge relief for Luttrell for not having water a good amount of water for the past day. When he reached the stream he jumped right in. However, when he got out he was standing face to face with a man. This man’s name was Mohammad Gulab.
Tony Horwitz’s book titled, “Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War” is about the crucial invasion in U.S. history that resulted the start of the Civil War and describes how John Brown helped plan the invasion of Virginia. At the start of the book, Horwitz begins with depicting John Brown’s early life including childhood to adulthood. John Brown was born on May 9, 1800 in the unfriendly peaks of Torrington, Connecticut. When he was eight years old, his mother passed away which made him go through a drastic trauma such as feeling nervous and awkward towards other women.
How one man would die just to take the life of another man and how that man John Wilkes Booth could have not been stopped. In Killing Lincoln by Bill o'reilly John Wilkes booth can not be stopped on his plan to assassinate the president of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln. First the Assassination of Lincoln really messed up the Confederates joining the Union again and made it a lot hard also it put John Wilkes Booth as the number one most wanted fugitive.
The battle began to go wrong from the start of the operation. While moving into position Razor 03 began to take fire from al Qaeda soldiers on the ground. Razor 03 was hit by an RPG which severely damaged the aircraft a...
The troops were being sent in because warlords were allowing their people to starve to death. The world had sent food, and the warlords hoarded it. The world had decided to stop this. Today's mission was to invade the Habr Gidr clan that was in Mogadishu Somalia. The clan was led by Mohamed Farrah Aidid, but that day's targets were two of his lieutenants. They were to be arrested and imprisoned with other clan members that had already been captured.
From there it jumps backwards to before the deployment. It goes back to Colonel Todd Ebel taking over 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. He was tasked with taking over a particularly rough area of Iraq, to do so he sent the 502nd or as they were known, the Black Hearts. They were identified by the black patch that each would where on the side of their helmets. There initial task was to replace the guard unit that was currently in the area of operations and to continue the mission from there, this would prove to be very challenging. He divided up his work by giving Lieutenant Colonel Tom Kunk the eastern more urban area of the “triangle of death”. LTC Kunk is described as a straightforward and engaging leader. He was harsh and did not get along very well with his subordinate leaders constantly putting them down and butting heads with them.
First-person shooter is a video game genre centered on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through a first-person perspective; that is, the player experiences the action through the eyes of the protagonist. The first-person shooter shares common traits with other shooter games, which in turn fall under the heading action game. From the genre's inception, advanced 3D or pseudo-3D graphics have challenged hardware development, and multiplayer gaming has been integral. After masses of video game evolution, along came the call of duty series.
The book Outlaw Platoon written by Sean Parnell is a soldiers’ tale of his platoon in one of the most dangerous places on earth. This book is a non-fiction riveting work that tells the story of a platoon that spent sixteen months on an operating base in the Bermel Valley, the border of Pakistan. This mission the men were sent on was part of a mission called Operation Enduring Freedom. This book is extremely relevant to the war that we are still fighting in Afghanistan and the humanitarian work that continues. We still have men in this area fighting and losing their lives everyday. It is the focus of ongoing political debates and the purpose of our involvement there is an ongoing question in the minds of many Americans. In writing this book, Parnell makes it clear in his author’s notes that he indeed was not trying to pursue one political agenda over another. His goal as not to speak of all members of the platoon and expose their identities and the types of soldiers they were but instead to showcase some of the men’s bravery and abilities during the war. Parnell believed that he owed it to the men to write something that would show the world what these men go through during combat in an honest and raw account. Another purpose of Parnell’s in writing this book is an attempt at making sure these men are given a place in American war history.
The one warlord at the time, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, was stealing shipments of food from the U.S. to the starving citizens in the rest of Somalia. The U.S. did not like this, so they set up a plan to capture Aidid and his men in a building near the Bakaara Market. The U.S. just got done defeating Saddam Hussein’s army in the first Gulf War. Before the war, Hussein had one of the largest armies in the world. The U.S. defeated them in a couple of weeks and gave them a massive amount of confidence going into this raid to try to capture Aidid.
The Viet Cong regiment was attacking from concealed positions astride the road. Sgt. Long abandoned the relative safety of his armored personnel carrier and braved enemy fire to carry wounded men to evacuation helicopters. As the platoon fought its way forward to re-supply advanced elements, he constantly exposed himself to enemy fire at close range to provide needed supplies. He inspired his comrades by fearlessly standing unprotected to stop the enemy as they attempted to mount his carrier. When the enemy threatened to overrun a disabled carrier nearby, he again disregarded his own safety to help the severely wounded crew to safety. As he was handing arms to the less seriously wounded and reorganizing them to press the attack, an enemy grenade was launched onto the carrier deck. Immediately recognizing the imminent danger, he shouted a warning to the crew and pushed to safety one man who had not heard his warning over the roar of battle. He then threw himself over the grenade to absorb the blast and save the lives of eight of his fellow soldiers. Sergeant Long died of Multiple Fragmentation Wounds from
Based on a true story, the movie ‘Lone Survivor’ features four Navy SEALs that set out on a mission to Afghanistan with orders to capture and kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah. The Navy SEALS are detected by villagers and the mission was compromised. Ultimately, the mission had been discovered and the men found themselves surrounded by dozens of Taliban soldiers. One of the Navy SEAL soldiers managed to dispatch to base and retrieve assistance but the Taliban shoot down the helicopter. During battle, three of the Navy SEAL soldiers were killed leaving one still alive.
Hours earlier the Marines assigned to assault beaches of Koh Tang were finding it much more difficult to obtain their objective. The helicopters were being engaged with heavy weapon fire. Of the first four helicopters sent in, three were shoot down or seriously damaged. Contrary to the intelligence briefed of a few lightly armed Cambodian militias, the beach assaulting Marines faced