This was an experiment as I was tooling around to figure out how I want to do the text for the cover of the book. I don't know if I will use this or not but it looks pretty cool as a desktop background. At the moment the kindle version of the book is done and the word file for the paperback is 99.9% done. Once the cover comes in I will be hammering both formats out ASAP.
More pockmarks from decades of warfare.
This place was like crawling around an MC Estcher sketch.
The approach up to the entrance.
The edge of the compound.
This should give you an idea of the kind of terrain you encounter in this part of the world. Off road driving skills are a must.
Team picture. Myself on the far left with the SR-25 and spotting scope at my feet. Next to me is a sniper buddy with the .300 WinMag and two other team members with suppressed M4 rifles.
When I first saw this castle I thought it must have been built by Alexander the Great's troops when he fought his way through Afghanistan thousands of years ago. Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed to learn that it was built sometime in the 1960's.
The dirt ramp up to the castle entrance wrapped all the way around the hill. Up on the parapets was a DShK heavy machine gun. Needless to say, it was a very defendable position and as you will see it had been fought over several times over the decades.
Myself on the ramp up to the entrance. We were invited up to take a look around by the guards who occupied the fort.
Another view (with team mate's head in the foreground!) of the interior of the castle. The design was kind of haphazard, a sort of labyrinth, probably from having been rebuilt so many times.
Me and a team mate with a few of the guards. I'll have some more of these pictures up this weekend.
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Myself on the right wearing the Tru-Spec combat shirt and a team mate, center, wearing the Army combat shirt.
*Sigh* Damn Marines embarrassing us again. Let's get back on topic.
This top is the first generation combat shirt is sold by Tru-Spec, a well known uniform manufacturer. Following in Crye Precision's footsteps, Tru-Spec made their own combat shirt and sold it at a reduced price. In some regards I think it shows. For one thing the sleeves are too short. Most soldiers tend to roll them up anyway, so this may or may not matter to you. Secondly, I didn't like the material that the soft portion of the shirt is made of. It feels to much like a cotton t-shirt to me, not the kind of thing you want to wear in the desert.
Notice that the fabric spans across the shoulders on the back of the shirt. As I found out later when attempting to have my own shirt made, there is a very good reason for this. Another point is the turtle neck collar. It's uncomfortable, but it also prevents the straps on your kit from chaffing your neck, another important point that was initially lost on me when I had my own shirt made.
My first attempt. Most of the guys on my team went over to the Turkish guy who worked in a nearby sew shop in Iraq and requested that he make these tops for us. Eventually, he got to the point that he knew exactly what we wanted as soon as we came walking through his door. He actually did a very good job. He moved the pockets up onto the sleeves, attached the velcro for call sign patches, and sewed an Under Armor shirt into the DCU shirt sleeves. It's very comfortable, but with one big flaw.
Tru-Spec knew one thing I didn't. Without that span of fabric across the back, the shirt stretches, as the Under Armor t-shirt is made to do, creating a sagging effect. The shirt can now bunch up or pull out from under the straps of whatever chest rig or body armor you are wearing. Generally though, if you pulled the shirt under the straps of your body armor, the weight alone would keep everything in place. These shirts were a life saver when working in Iraq during the summer.
Sun burned and with the strap of my body armor digging into my neck. Not cool.
I had this one done by a sew shop outside Ft. Campbell when I got back from deployment. She kept the t-shirt without cutting it, literally just sewing it into the shirt sleeves of the BDU top. Not the preferred method, but it does work pretty well. This time I was smart enough to have that strip across the back left in place, however, I should have had the collar left as well. I found that while doing kit runs that my gear would ride up and chaff my neck without a collar there. Other than that, it is very functional. At the time, taking a t-shirt and fatigue top and paying a sew shop 20 bucks to make one of these for you was ideal as opposed to paying hundreds of dollars to one of the many companies making combat shirts. However, I did a quick search and found that the Tru-Spec shirts are going for a very reasonable 60 dollars so that might be the way to go.
Here is a picture of myself taking part in some Call For Fire (CFF) training in Afghanistan. It was my first time and you can tell my virgin status because I'm holding the cheat sheet in my left hand and the hand mic in my right as I talk to the Cobra pilots. Over all I thought the Marine Cobra pilots were impressive as hell, they certainly didn't have many of the restrictions that regular Army pilots had.
Coming in on a gun run. As the CFF mission comes in, the pilot heads towards the target while angling up into the air.
Next he comes hurling downwards like cresting the peak of a hill on a roller coaster.
Lined up with the target that has been pin pointed by ground troops the Cobra opens up with it's minigun and hoses the target down. In this instance, we are just training by calling in gun runs on some empty connex containers.
These pilots would fire on targets so close to us that we would get showered with hot brass as the helicopter flew overhead. You could hear it dropping all around us like rain drops.
The real fun came during the night portion of this training. We were pin pointing the targets down range with infrared lasers mounted on our rifles. Because of the dust kicked up from previous gun runs, our lasers were blocked out by the cloud of debris about fifty yards in front of us. The pilots thought that we were intentionally targeting something fifty yards to our front and went ahead and lit that area up, the minigun almost putting lead down in our laps.
I have to confess that I never really "got" reenactments before. I had heard stories about Civil War reenactors starving themselves and spooning with each other in their confederate war camps in the name of authenticity. I had a SERE instructor who was a great guy, but his descriptions of the Rev War reenactments he participated in, namely sleeping in a lean to's in January, sounded pretty nutty.
Studies and Observations Group, or SOG, was highly classified during the Vietnam War. In fact, not much information about them was available at all until the 1990's. Reading between the lines, I suspect that there is still a fair amount of activity that SOG was involved in that has not been made publicly available. There are a couple of books out and some grainy photos released, but the Modern Forces website really brings history to life.
The attention to detail is pretty amazing and I'm sure the people involved spent a lot of time putting together the uniforms and equipment to such a high degree of historical accuracy. The full color images and close in shots of the equipment used really gives an idea of how SOG operated, a perspective you don't really get from the older 1960's era photography. When you have the chance I highly recommend taking a look at the pictorials in the SOG section of the website. A few Vietnam veterans who served in SOG have also contacted the website and provided exclusive photographs and interviews, a must read for anyone researching Special Forces units and missions during the Vietnam War.
Okay, so I've been having some issues with the last image being low-resolution. I might still try to make it work since viewers will only see the thumb nail in Amazon but what does everyone think of this as an alternative? Thanks to everyone who has been leaving feedback so far!