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JohnRich

Book: "Green Team", by Richard Marcinko

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Well, I thought that last excerpt might start a discussion about "friction fissures". Didn't happen. I was away for three days over the weekend, so I guess it's now time to finish up this little series. At least one person seems to be following the story and is anxious to hear how it comes out. So here we go again, continuing with the HAHO canopy descent:
"The problem is that if you lose too much air, the cells will rub together, you'll develop a friction fissure, and it's au revoir, sayonara, doom on you - then splaat.

"These sorts of vagaries are why I always trained in saturation blocks of at least fifty parachute jumps per ten-day training cycle. These jump marathons served two purposes. First, the men flew together enough to build the kind of unit integrity that allowed them to know instinctively what each was doing and react to it. Second, the sheer number of jumps built confidence for those shooters - like Stevie Wonder and Howie Kaluha - who have always believed there is no good reason to throw themselves out of a perfectly good aircraft.

"I eyeballed the altimeter. We were at sixteen thousand feet now - ten to eleven thousand feet above the Kashmund peaks below, and a little more above the valleys and high plateau. That gave me a glide time of ten to thirteen minutes if I could stretch things. I punched the Magellan's computer. We were twenty-three kilometers from target - just over fourteen miles. From experience, I knew that unless I caught an updraft, we'd come down in nine or ten miles, which meant a long walk in the dark.

"I hung in the harness, depressed, and thought of all the other things that could go wrong. The list was very, very long. Finally, after what seemed like a half an hour but was probably about four minutes, the flutter of the canopy went up an octave or so in tone. Simultaneously, the pressure on my sore left ball told me there was a little additional lift in my harness. I checked the altimeter, then started my stopwatch. I was actually climbing. Climbing ever so slowly, but climbing nonetheless.

"Had the rest of my crew caught the change and compensated? I craned my neck to see. I glimpsed three other canopies keeping pace with me. Good. A quick peek at the digital stopwatch told me I'd climbed roughly one hundred feet in two minutes. That translated to fifty feet per minute, versus my previous seventeen foot-per-second fall rate, an altogether fair exchange.

"Under normal circumstances I would have sat back and enjoyed the ride. But here there was too much to think about - specifically, who had burned in. Was it Wonder? He hated jumping, but he was a careful jumper. Nasty had once taken a Humpty-Dumpty fall during a HAHO exercise. And it took all of the king's horses and all of the king's men (not to mention his best neurosurgeons) to put him together again. Tommy T was a great jumper - a natural who loved throwing himself out of planes. So was Duck Foot. Howie Kaluha had made more than one hundred jumps from 25K plus. And Rodent had been on the Navy's parachute team. Of course, none of those quaIs meant shit during combat jumps. But it gave everybody an edge - or it should. Of course, there's always Mr. Murphy around to play havoc with events. Not to mention the Eighth Commandment of SpecWar: Thou shalt never assume. Damnit..."
Final installment to be provided tomorrow.

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Thanks to John Rich for bringing this to my attention. Marcinko's writing is so inspiring. Anyone should be able to write a novel. He could make crossing the street a life and death melodrama.


"I stood on the pedestrian walkway -- some of you may know it as a sidewalk -- eyes narrowing, focusing on the street a few feet ahead. You could be sucked in front of the horseless carriages just by the draft of the wind behind them, created by the exhaust of their combustion motors!

Friends had died crossing streets before. Timmy, Bobby, Harry, Freddy, and all those others with two syllables and a Y at the end of their name. Those vehicles could smash into you, crushing your bones and spilling your blood. Bam! Smash! Like a punch by Adam West! So many ways to slip and fall in front of a vehicle -- the vagaries of rains and wet tarmacadam, gusting winds, tropical typhoons, chickens crossing the road, road debris.

But I had foot protectors -- shoes to you -- made from spun synthetic polymer and Chinese vulcanized rubber substitute. I prayed to God that they would only hold together. Seconds ticked by, then I saw a gap in the traffic. If I couldn't make it across in 10 seconds, requiring a mean horizontal speed of at least 3 fps, I'd be dead. I had to go for it, take my chances! Possibly for one last time, I thought about my own balls, because, dammit, I like to think about them."

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The last installment of the jump story - the landing:
"My reverie was interrupted by the sound of my canopy, which ruffled, popped, and broke into a steady whistle. To anyone who's spent any time jumping, those sounds translate as "the elevator's going dowwwwn, Senor Marcinko."

"The altimeter had me at 9,800 feet. But we'd crested the mountain ridge, we were over rock-strewn foothills-and we were headed in the right direction. With a little more luck we'd wring three more miles out of this ride. I scanned the horizon and saw intermittent flickering out there. Were they villages or camps? Who knew? We'd find out soon enough.

"Landing was as balls-to-the-wall as takeoff. I didn't flare, went straight in, and was dragged face first across one hundred yards of Afghanistani desert. My altimeter was mangled, my nose scraped raw, and the AK I'd carefully slung across my chest butt-stroked me on the right knee-hard. Other than that, my landing was picture perfect. The way I look at it, any jump you walk away from is a good jump.

"I watched as the others came down. Nasty flew in next - flaring nicely and touching down as evenly as if he'd been riding an elevator. Then Wonder landed, teeth clenched. He was sweating. Then Rodent. He dumped air at fifteen hundred feet, circled twice hard right, then flew straight, flared, pulled up, cut away at two feet. and let his chute land by itself. Fucking show-off. Two more to go. They landed a football field away. I went puffing to see who'd made it and found Tommy and Duck Foot balling their canopies.

"We buried out chutes expeditiously-enough to hide them but not as deep or completely as we might have. My feeling was that even if they were discovered, we'd be long gone. No one knew what had happened to Howie. It could have been the chute-sea-rotted silk - or tangled risers. It could have been a fissure. It could have been contaminated oxygen in his 02, bottle. Fuck - it could have been anything. There was no time to dwell on it - we had to push on. We took inventory. We were missing Howie's load: half a pound of plastic, three grenades, ten AK magazines, two detonators, and a pair of gold coins. We'd have to live without them - and Howie, too..."
The team then proceeded to hike 10 miles in the dark, find the enemy training camp, attack it before dawn, and kill all the bad guys. All the canisters of nerve gas were recovered - all except one. Where might that deadly canister be? Oh no! They'll spend the rest of the book tracking down that one.

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thanks John for the laughs...
The skyjumping part is soooooo dramatised and novellised, makes him sound like Super-Whuffo-Wannabe... Does the "military expedition" part (which I believe would be the rest of the book) make him sound like an Army-n00b ?
scissors beat paper, paper beat rock, rock beat wingsuit - KarlM

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I had the chance to meet DEMO DICK at Ft Bragg in 94 I personnally was not impressed by him first off. For someone soo full of him self he seemed to not pull himself away from the dinner plate, first off.
From the point of him being in charge of RED CELL I truly wished they had not screwed that up with the ops they had done. As we could have at least prevented 9-11 from happening in some ways.
His books I feel are a mixture of some facts but mostly more BS then all else. If he was such a great operator why did he spend time in Peterburg, VA not the rigger school but the federal pin>?
Just take what he writes with a grain of salt. If you want to use the books for something else then reading do so. just my two cents on this.
Kenneth Potter
FAA Senior Parachute Rigger
Tactical Delivery Instructor (Jeddah, KSA)
FFL Gunsmith

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thanks John for the laughs...
The skyjumping part is soooooo dramatised and novellised, makes him sound like Super-Whuffo-Wannabe... Does the "military expedition" part (which I believe would be the rest of the book) make him sound like an Army-n00b ?



I don't have any personal experience with special ops soldiering, so I can't really judge. But just like things you see in the news or on TV, when they cover something that you do happen to know something about, you can tell it's off a bit. Like news coverage of skydiving accidents. And perhaps the book has some things like that in it, but there's also a whole lot of other info that's probably correct. For example, when he talked about intense parachute training with 50 jumps over 10 days so that everyone would instintively know what the other team members are thinking in freefall or under parachute - all of us experienced skydivers have friends that we trust and know like that, and it's a special bond which he recognizes.

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Thanks for that - now I'll never be able to cross a street any more without thinking about the incredible hazard I'm about to expose myself to. :D


"Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory." - Leonardo da Vinci
A thousand words...

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Thanks for that - now I'll never be able to cross a street any more without thinking about the incredible hazard I'm about to expose myself to. :D



Hell, part of the reason I'm skydiving is that I got a taste of that incredible danger crossing the street - got hit by a car as a pedestrian (in the crosswalk, crossing with the light). I figured "well, shit, if I can get badly injured doing something 'safe,' I might as well skydive." :D

(And btw, to pchapman I say "Bravo, sir, bravo!")
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." -P.J. O'Rourke

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Thanks for that - now I'll never be able to cross a street any more without thinking about the incredible hazard I'm about to expose myself to. :D



Hell, part of the reason I'm skydiving is that I got a taste of that incredible danger crossing the street - got hit by a car as a pedestrian (in the crosswalk, crossing with the light).

.....................................................................

You would not last in Vancouver, where lights are merely for decoration. Any Vancouver pedestrian - who depends upon lights - will die young!

Next time you visit Vancouver, just think of traffic lights, brake lights, turn signals, etc. as decorations, like the decorations on a Christmas tree.

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In the late summer of that year we lived in a condo in North Dallas that looked across the tollway to the discos and honky-tonks of the Rue St. Bubba. We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength. But there was a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a French restaurant.

"The Great Landry says the Cowboys will be back,'' said the girl.

"Then it must be so," I said, though I knew it was a lie.

"When football season comes, then it will be cold. Like Switzerland. But not now. The cold will come later.

"Pass the Doritos,'' I said, and her eyes shone like the stars over Amarillo.

I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk white BMW and her Jordache smile. There had been a fight. I had punched her boyfriend, who fought the mechanical bulls. Everyone told him, "You ride the bull, senor. You do not fight it." But he was lean and tough like a bad rib-eye and he fought the bull. And then he fought me. And when we finished there were no winners, just men doing what men must do.

And the pain was washed away, but the image of the woman stayed with me like a blessing and like a curse. We went that summer to many clubs. We went to the Longhorn Ballroom and the Palm and to a honky-tonk in Fort Worth that was what Harry's Bar would have been like if it had eighty-five cent Pearl Beer and a barmaid whose peroxide hair could damage your eyes as if you had seen an eclipse.

That night we visited them all, but as we drove home I did not think of the Pearl Beer and I did not think of the peroxide. I did not think of the girl who sat beside me. I thought of the woman of the tollway and I could feel my heart pounding in the heat of the summer night.

"Stop the car," the girl said. There was a terrible look of sadness in her eyes. She knew about the woman of the tollway. I knew not how. I started to speak, but she raised an arm and spoke with a quiet peace I will never forget.

"I do not ask for whom's the tollway belle," she said, "the tollway belle's for thee."

The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was a lie. Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I poured whiskey onto my granola and faced a new day.

Peter Applebome
International Imitation Hemingway

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