ON WRITING

OK this is where my head is at right now:

I've been writing for years, but I really got serious about ten years ago; the year I lived alone, all by myself in a marble palace on the outskirts of a dusty, sand baked Nowheres-ville, on the edge of the great Sahara. I have the better part of two novels (based on my adventures, exploring the deepest recesses of the human psyche, all alone on the Road to Infinity, etcetera, etcetera . . .) already written down, and ten thousand times more than that bouncing around inside my skull.

What I want to do is save them as pdf's and post them online - a form of e-publishing - release them a chapter a week. For people to read them they click an icon, a dollar per chapter.

How to set this up? I know Pay pal is involved somehow; I put the question out there and true to form the Heroes of Team STORMBRINGER came back with all kinds of detailed instructions . . . give me a week or two to crack the code on this thing and we'll see how it goes from there.

All I know this thing is long overdue - the stories going around in my head have been screaming for an outlet for years now . . . decades even. I know my stuff is good - everybody I've shown it to cries out, "Sean! You've GOT to get your work out there! In the name of all that is Good and Holy, man, you've GOT TO GET PUBLISHED ! ! !" Now we're talking editors, writers - some pretty respectable figures in the literary world here - THE WOMEN even like what I write so I KNOW it's not just macho bravo sierra . . . and then sometime last week suddenly it dawned on me: This is what STORMBRINGER is FOR!

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!"

BTW another journalist/writer has been querying me for technical advice for his sci-fi novels (involving a Special Forces desperado) and I have been feeding him institutional knowledge of the profession. I hardly told him anything about Special Forces . . . little drips and drabs . . . and what little I told him seemed mind-expanding:


Journalist/Writer Guy: I did read that there is some specialization among the SF companies, so that many specialize in some aspect. In addition to specializing in language, maybe one company is more highly-trained in underwater infiltration methods, another in mountain warfare, another in who knows what, and the one best suited (if available) is used in any given mission. So it's not as if all companies and A detachments need to know everything to the same degree. Just as there are focus roles in an A detachment with some cross-training (weapons, engineer, medical, communications, operations, commanders), so individual A detachments have areas of specialty.

Is this correct, or are they all basically interchangeable except with regards to language? I did read that all the 5 active groups are spending significant time in Afghanistan and Iraq despite their geographic responsibility. Maybe the two reserve groups are there as well.

As far as SF compared to Rangers, it appears that the Rangers, while I assume they could be used for any of the 9 SOF missions or 7 collateral activities, engage in more DA, CT, and SR than anything else. Well, I guess some FID. They're light infantry that goes in usually with bigger numbers than SF would. As far as the culture goes, and I know all individuals are different, but from what I understand, Ranger culture is more hooah gung-ho warrior macho than SF. Kind of "give me the target and I'll eliminate it." In, bam-bam, out.

"THIS . . . IS . . . STORMBRINGER ! ! !"

SF is more relationship focused with its UW and FID missions. They still perform DA, SR, and CT missions. They’re deadly snipers (isn't it SF and Marines that have the top sniper training?) But there's also a lot of training friendlies—insurgents, military, and law enforcement. And they're not mainstream soldiers, but more independent-minded. I think someone will shoot me if I say they're the hippies of the military, but that's what I'm getting. They're wearing beards and riding horseback into battle. You probably want to shoot me yourself (grin). Maybe "unconventional" is a better term.

So what of the above is not right? Also, I guess it depends on the current needs, but is my assessment that Ranger’s = DA while SF = UW, FID, SR accurate?


StormBringer: This is going to take me WEEKS to answer - especially since it's tax time of the year and I'm a freelancer, a privateer; my accountant has a love/hate relationship with me.

“Great Patriotic War on Towelhead-ism” - yes, cynicism; sarcasm, black humor - we're allowed to engage in it; we pay the price.

Special Reconnaissance (SR) - it used to be called "Strategic Reconnaissance" to differentiate from "Tactical Reconnaissance" which occurs within a mile or two of the front - "STRATRECON" became "Special Reconnaissance" when it enveloped the various disciplines of reconnaissance - think living in a sniper hide for a week, keeping a recon log, shitting in plastic bags then humping them out - electronic surveillance, photo reconnaissance, clandestine urban operations - teams patrolling the cities of Western Europe for Red Brigades, Red Army Faction cells; later doing the same thing tracking al Qaeda cells - this genre crosses over into "Special Activities" when you involve running cell organizations, collecting HUMINT from assets, etc.


Journalist-Writer Guy: This stuff is gold. Plastic bags of crap? Never in a million years would I think of that. As well as the “spy” crossover. A book I have on my list is Hunting the Jackal and I thought it interesting that it was CIA and SF. But now I see why. And I really like that business about spy versus scout. Take the time you need. I can’t wait to get the rest.


StormBringer: Of course this is the most important mission - "Time spent in Reconnaissance is never wasted." - George Washington said that.

This is the discipline where I made my most money. I was in the Atlanta airport, in the international transit lounge and some old guy was telling me, "I was a spy, I was in Austria after the war," and his wife was nodding her head up and down. I was just nodding and smiling and not saying a word. It was 1995, I was enroute to Sarajevo, and I was in civvies.

For what it's worth, very few intelligence professionals actually meet the dictionary definition of a "spy"; to be a spy, one must betray. I was a scout, a reconnaissance soldier.


Journalist-Writer Guy: “This is the discipline where I made my most money.” Is that a turn of phrase, or do SF actually get paid by the job?


StormBringer: That was turn of phrase but military pay works three ways: you get your base pay, then you get your special pay & allowances (jump pay, special duty pay, language pay, scuba pay, demo pay, housing allowance, cost-of-living-allowance, etc) then there's mission-related pay (TDY pay, per diem, hazardous duty pay, imminent danger pay, combat zone tax-free exclusion, etc).

You end up trying to connect the dots. Twenty-plus years ago I saw a brass plaque hanging over a team sergeant's desk, in one of the team rooms over in Torii Station, Okinawa. It said it all:


"WE'RE LOOKING FOR A LOW-INTENSITY WAR IN A HIGH PER DIEM AREA."

"The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior . . . I'm a little man, he's a great man."



STORMRINGER SENDS



Today's Bird HERE.



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THE ETERNAL MERCENARY - Part II

Barry Sadler (November 1, 1940 – November 5, 1989) was a Green Beret medic in Vietnam, and of course his main claim to fame was as singer songwriter of the immortal BALLAD OF THE GREEN BERETS.

There's another side to the great balladeer of Special Forces, however: Barry Sadler was also the author of the notorious CASCA THE ETERNAL MERCENARY series of novels.

In an earlier era they would have been labelled "pulp fiction."

The "Casca" saga centers on the title character, Casca Rufio Longinius, a Roman soldier who stabbed Christ during the crucifixion, and is cursed to remain a soldier eternally till the Second Coming. The series of novels takes Casca through to the 20th century. Sadler himself wrote only the first few, with the remainder of the original 22 books being farmed out by the publishers to other writers and issued under his name.

There's a STORMBRINGER tie-in, of course: a private in the barracks in the early eighties could not escape these sacred texts. So somewhere between pulling CQ runner duties or one of those stupid details where they'd have you guarding a building and if you got lucky there'd be a jeep or a truck you could sit in to keep out of the rain, bust out your L-shape and read a few chapters of CASCA or CONAN THE BARBARIAN or maybe even MACK BOLAN.

FAST FORWARD: Kuwait, 2001. We were doing this unGodly commute down the National Highway back and forth to this Kuwaiti camp where their guys were pulling their annual training and we were the lucky guys who drew the short straw, which meant we got to train these poor rich slobs who really didn't want to be there.

Anyway our team Warrant Officer was Eric Rojo - not his real name - the best damn Warrant in Special Forces and probably the oldest, and one of the most lethal men I ever had the pleasure of serving next to. A cowboy from Oklahoma who held advanced science degrees and had once worked as a chemist for Exxon; Chief Rojo always got a lot of respect. Anyway Rojo popped this CD into the dashboard; yep, you guessed it; CASCA THE ETERNAL MERCENARY.

Well this was good, and all of us poor slobs who had soldiered through and paid our dues in the early eighties happily listened to the adventures of Barry Sadler's alter-ego, nodding our heads approvingly, knowing that we were receiving Green Beret lore and wisdom straight from the source. We'd tapped into the mother lode, apparently, because Rojo had brought the entire 22-volume collectors edition disk set, and suddenly this deployment began to look a little more bearable.

Of course the Team Captain hadn't been there in the early eighties - the youngest NCO on the team probably had more time under canopy that he had in the Army - he had no idea what this tripe was we were listening to and he couldn't figure out for the life of him what the hell it was all about. Finally on the second day he goes, "What is this sh*t we're listening to?"

Suddenly the CASCA material doubled in value, because IT PISSED OFF THE OFFICER! Because I was the 18F - team intell sergeant and resident philosopher - I spoke up in this serious tone of voice; from the back of the van I started with, "You are ignorant of your Special Forces heritage, Sir . . ."

He came back with, "What? WHAT? What the hell are to talking about ? ? ?"

This was license to push it, and I started getting more and more disrespectful in an oblique way; the Captain hated me so it was glorious fun, of course, and everybody else was digging it. The Captain was going nuts - he had self-confidence issues to begin with - until finally Chief Rojo spoke up, "He's talking about Barry Sadler, Sir."

"Huh? Barry who?"

"You know, the guy who wrote BALLAD OF THE GREEN BERETS."

"Huh? Oh yeah, him. What's that got to do with this crap we're listening to, this Mickey Mouse sh*t that Linnane likes?"

"Barry Sadler wrote it, Sir."

"Huh? What, the song? I KNOW THAT . . ."

"No, the book, Sir."

"Book, what book?" I'm telling you, this Captain was a real specimen - the kind the Brits call a Rupert.

"CASCA THE ETERNAL MERCENARY, Sir - this stuff we're listening to . . ."

The Captain goes, "Huh? What?" a few more times, then starts studying the box the disk came in; like a hog staring at a wristwatch.

Anyway I couldn't do a post about Barry Sadler and not mention CASCA THE ETERNAL MERCENARY - a character that Sadler modeled after himself, apparently, and then set out to emulate.

The Kuwait deployment actually had a couple high points, but it ended bad - real bad - like everything else in that particular twelve-month period. And like every significant event in my life, what happened to my team in Kuwait was eclipsed six months later when the buildings came down in New York and everything changed for all of us, from now and forever more, into . . . eternity . . .
SEAN LINNANE SENDS




Thursday Bird HERE



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ALL ALONE ON THE ROAD TO PERFECTION

. . . somewhere in one of my circumspectful ramblings . . .

The Barbarian Age . . . when Men were Men and Women were . . . 'Breeding Stock' . . .

High Snake Priest encounters Conan, who is trying to infiltrate the Snake Cult by means of ruse & deception.

High Priest: "Tell me, my son, what is it you seek?"

Conan: "Uh . . . infinity?"

Don't Ask Don't Tell - Barbarian-style . . .

High Priest: "Hmmm . . . Your body is young . . . smooth . . . you are very strong, well formed." (Priest displays certain obvious . . . tendencies . . . as he runs his fingers all over Conan's massive, rippling muscles.)

Conan (sensing an opportunity to exploit a weakness in the Snake Cult's defenses): "Perhaps we should go over there, behind those rocks?"

High Priest: "Yes my son, this is good . . . I could . . . "counsel" you . . ."

Conan (getting in on the act): "So these are your garments? Your priestly robes?"

High Priest: "Yes, my son. They are all I have."

Conan: "Good . . ." WHOMP!!!

(Conan decks the High Priest, killing him with a single blow)

". . . they're all you'll ever need!"


In the next scene Conan - dressed in the High Priest's robes - is making his way up the HUGE stairway and gaining access into the Inner Sanctum of the evil Snake Temple, mimicking the other acolytes as he gives the distinctive two-handed Snake Salute . . . and displays the (stolen) jade Snake Cult Amulet . . .

Saturday Night is Bath Night



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