SPECIAL FORCES SERGEANTS MAJOR DON GREEN BERET ONE LAST TIME

By Master Sgt. Donald Sparks, Special Operations Command, Europe

Feb 8, 2010

Photo credit Master Sgt. Donald Sparks

Sergeants Major Brian Bushong (left), and Larry Reeb, 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), listen to Barry Sadler’s ‘Ballad of the Green Beret’ during their retirement ceremony January 21.


STUTTGART, Germany - Twenty-five years ago, two men joined the Army one week apart at different locations. Nineteen years ago, they both became Special Forces sergeants. Earlier this year, they finished their careers together as brothers-in-arms and leaders in the SF community.

Sgts. Maj. Brian Bushong and Larry Reeb bid farewell to their fellow Green Beret brethren of 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) during a retirement ceremony held Jan. 21 in Panzer Hall.

Maj. Gen. Michael S. Repass, commander, U.S. Army Special Forces Command (Airborne), praised the two warriors for their distinguished service.

"When you joined the Army, you were given a check to serve, to go in harm's way and to do the nation's business," Repass said. "You've cashed in with your service and commitment to our nation."

Bushong, a former anti-tank gunner, decided to become a Special Forces Soldier because he wanted more of a challenge and also because he was inspired by members of his family who served honorably in World War II and the Korean War.

"My father shared his experiences of combat from his time in Korea," said Bushong. "The heroes who served as part of the 'Greatest Generation' were my uncles, and they inspired me."

Reeb, who described himself as, "nothing more than a poor son of a mountain man from Kentucky," originally joined the Army as a crew chief on a UH-60 helicopter. In 1987, during a support mission in Beirut, his bird hauled a Special Forces team to a location and he said, "I want to be one of them.

"I could tell they were a tight, focused, camaraderie team and that appealed to me," he added. He earned his green beret in 1991 as well, and became a Special Forces communications sergeant.

Both men recalled their many operational contributions to missions all over the world.

Bushong took part in Operation Assured Response in 1996, evacuating nearly 1,000 Americans and embassy personnel from Monrovia, Liberia.

"It was a very hostile environment," he said. "Normally, we don't get to do missions for our own people, but having the opportunity to protect our own citizens and protecting their lives meant a lot to me. I still have a sense of satisfaction from what we did."

Reeb mentioned that the personal highlight of his career was deploying with his company to Afghanistan and returning from deployment with all of his men. Ten of his Soldiers earned Purple Hearts during their tour of duty.

"I went out on every mission with those men," Reeb said. "As a company sergeant major, I can truly say those men motivated me."

At the end of the ceremony, both men faced the next generation of warriors who proudly wear the green beret, while listening to the Ballad of the Green Beret echoing throughout the center.

"We all have that certain kind of DNA," Bushong said of Special Forces Soldiers, with a grin. "It's no coincidence of who we are and what we do."



I served with both these men - they are both honorable and worthy, and I'm glad to see they made it to Sergeant Major. One thing I will tell you is that Reeb character scared me more than any bad guy I ever faced down - he's that crazy and I say that in a good way - and that's the God's Honest Truth.

SEAN LINNANE SENDS


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CAPTURED ! ! !

Scratch one phony wannabe . . . S.L.


OFFICER IMPERSONATOR ARRESTED IN DEADHORSE, ALASKA


The imposter William Clark






August 28th, 2010 04:03 PM

FAIRBANKS -- A man who served prison time for impersonating an Army officer at the scene of an Oklahoma bridge collapse has been arrested in the North Slope community of Deadhorse. William J. Clark, 37, had outstanding warrants in five states, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported Saturday.

The director of the North Star Council on Aging contacted Fairbanks police earlier in the week after Clark displayed a handgun. Though Clark posed as a military police officer, the woman told police she thought he was mentally ill or a jail escapee.

Despite the outstanding warrants, Fairbanks police let Clark go because he did not show up as a convicted felon in a statewide database. A national database was not checked until it was too late.

A hunter who read a newspaper article about Clark contacted police, reporting that he met a man in military fatigues who fit Clark's description, said Fairbanks police Sgt. Eric Jewkes.


That would be THIS article, no doubt - referenced in STORMBRINGER


The man believed to be Clark mentioned he was going to Deadhorse, more than 400 miles north of Fairbanks. North Slope Borough police found Clark at the Prudhoe Bay Hotel on Friday and he was arrested without incident, Jewkes said.

Clark is expected to be flown back to Fairbanks within the next few days.

Clark's most recent stint in jail ended in August 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.


Yeah, well, you're about ready to go back to the Big House there, Big Boy. I wonder what prison's like in Alaska in the wintertime?


This month a Davenport, Iowa, television station reported that Clark is suspected of passing a bad check at a computer store in April. The man who passed the check reportedly said he needed a laptop for his deployment to Afghanistan.


The merchant of that store in Davenport brought that information to our attention HERE.


Fairbanks police also are investigating Clark as a suspect in several cases of bad checks being passed off around the city, Jewkes said. Similar fraud charges are anticipated in Juneau.


This news is significant on many levels: A) a bizarre con man whose criminal scams involved disgracing the uniform of U.S. Special Forces has been brought to justice, B) thankfully nobody was hurt despite the fact this unbalanced individual was armed, and C) media reports on this issue - and the conduct of persons involved - seemed to echo information posted here on Blog STORMBRINGER. If in fact postings here contributed to the apprehension of William Clark, then this is quite possibly the first known instance of human tracking via the resources of the Internet.

I received training and experience as a tracker during my time as an instructor at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, and subsequently used those skills throughout my career, to this very day. Several aspects of a classic tracking operation came into play during the saga of William Clark, i.e. persistence (the track may go cold, but the trail can always be picked up again); the psychology of tracking (getting inside the head of the person you're tracking - avoiding the scenario of the hunter becoming the hunted); and modern technology - which usually involves using vehicles, aircraft, and specialized optics.

In this case the power of the Internet was harnessed to spread the word, and the tracking operation was conducted like a game three-tiered chess across five dimensions; the three dimensions of the physical world, the dimension of time and the dimension of the virtual world.

In urban operations technique known as "hiding in plain view" is used, which is the art of masking one's identity via ruse and deception. That concept works fine down by the Koenigstrasse in Stuttgart but doesn't get you too far in a rural environment like Alaska where William Clark obviously stood out like a sore thumb.

Just this afternoon I was telling my brother that the trail may go cold, but it never goes away. I knew we were going to get him, sooner or later.

This is a good omen.


SEAN LINNANE SENDS



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HOW DO WE FIGHT THEM?

Consider: if we had lost World War II, we would have been held accountable for war crimes, for vaporizing the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden down to the ground, and for taking apart Hamburg and Stuttgart, brick by brick.


Hiroshima, Japan 1945


But we won - against armies of dedicated fanatics inspired by their charismatic leaders and their ends-justifies-the-means ideology. And the way we won was by vaporizing cities, burning them down to the ground and taking them apart brick by brick.



Dresden, Germany February 1945


Now we are involved in another global conflict, that has the capability to morph into a greater threat to Western civilization than Fascism was in the thirties and the forties, if we let it. Inspired by their morally bankrupt ideology, our enemies seem willing to sacrifice themselves as human weapons systems. They strap explosives to their bodies in order to take out as many 'infidels' as possible and get access to those 72 Virgins waiting for them up in Muslim Heaven. And for every one of them we take out, ten or more seem willing to step up to take his place.


It's the ultimate game of Whack-a-Mole


How do we fight such an enemy?


Easy.


Think back a minute to World War II; we faced fanatical enemies then. But consider how relieved those self-same fanatics were when the shooting stopped and they realized they'd just been given a second chance at life. Members of the Waffen SS, of the Japanese Kamikaze Corps, were so relieved when it became apparent they were no longer required to give their lives for a cause that was so obviously hopeless.

This just goes to show how truly rare a thing a true fanatic is. Nietzche wrote of an ideal that doesn't really exist in daily life.

Proof positive is the modern phenomena of the Islamist terrorist suicide bomber.



The individuals carrying out these attacks are actively recruited, heavily indoctrinated, and then drugged immediately prior to carrying out their suicide missions. Beyond the spiritual rewards in the afterlife and the guarantee of a place with God for the attacker's families, there are social, cultural and material incentives including vast celebrity, cash bonuses and/or free apartments. Saddam Hussein had a reimbursement program where the family of every Palestinian suicide bomber was paid up to $25,000 for a successful mission:



This materialistic aspect of the rewards program is very telling; this represents a chink in the armor of the Islamic terrorists' fanaticism.

Deny the enemy this aspect of their recruitment program, and watch their pool of willing volunteers dry up.

I suggest that, just as World War II evolved from a war of maneuver on the battlefield to a 'war of the cities'; we adopt a similar strategy of attrition. Basically; "You kill one of ours, we kill ten thousand of yours."

There is no reward for your family. Basically, the result of a suicide terrorist attack will be the elimination of your family or tribe three generations back, and the utter destruction of your town or village right down to the foundation stones.

Very quickly we will see our 'fanatical' enemies lose their ardor for engagement with the infidel. If we had adopted such a strategy after the taking of our embassy in Tehran in 1979, after the Beirut bombing in 1983, or after Mogadishu in 1993, we certainly wouldn't be having half the problems we're having with Islamic Fundamentalists we are having now.


A basic truism of the Philosophy of STORMBRINGER is that if you find yourself in a war, the stupidest thing to do is anything other than whatever it takes to win it. And if you're going to fight a war, you can't half-step it; that's what we did in Vietnam and we all know how far that got us.


But what about the widows and orphans we will have created? Won't they be willing to pick up the struggle, for vengeance, and out of a sense of purposelessness after having lost their complete social support structure?

We're creating them already, anyway - there must be a Civic Action program in place to assist the victims of war (which there already is) - and an effective Psychological Operation campaign spreading the correct themes that we help good Muslims - Kuwait in 1990-91, the Kurds during the same time frame, Bosnia 1995-97, Kosovo 1999, the liberation of Afghanistan 2002, the liberation of Iraq 2003, the relief programs in Indonesia and Malaysia following the tsunami of 2004, ongoing relief programs in Muslim countries around the world.

US military assistance, Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 2004


We can even point out our President has a Muslim name, that he comes from a Muslim family:



Educate them against the hatred and lies the mullahs spread in the madrassas; show them how many Muslims have perished at the hands of Islamist-inspired suicide attacks. Then show them the greatness and goodness of civilization and invite them to come to the table. A free-passage program, an excuse to abandon a futile cause.

We're talking the ultimate carrot-and-stick campaign. Come over to us, you can be a Muslim but you don't have to kill yourself and other Muslims, and you get all the good stuff. Strap bombs to yourself and your entire world comes to an end - for you, your family, for everybody.


Forever.