This is me when out in the field tired and sweaty. This was one of the only close-up pictures I had handy.
There is an implicit intimacy to our relationship, you and me. When you pen a lifestyle column like this one, personal stuff invariably serves as fodder for our weekly adventures together. If you have followed this Friday afternoon lunacy for more than a little while, you end up knowing more about me than perhaps you might wish to. That can be a two-edged sword.
Dave Barry is kind of my hero. Second only to perhaps the Apostle Paul, that guy is my hands-down favorite writer. He wrote a regular column for The Miami Herald that would often just leave me in stitches. Dave’s humor column was syndicated in newspapers across the country. I looked forward to each and every one. I own an embarrassing collection of his books.
Even today, whenever I refer someone for a colonoscopy, I encourage them to Google “Dave Barry Colonoscopy” a couple of weeks before. That will put them in the right mindset to have someone ram a giant snake-like medical instrument up their backside. If you have a free moment, check it out. You’ll thank me later.
Dave Barry was a very successful writer. His work was adored by millions. He won the Pulitzer Prize. By contrast, I pretty much write for ammo money. However, a guy can always dream …
Along the way, however, I felt like I kind of got to know Dave. I enjoyed the adventures he had raising his two kids. I knew each of his dogs by name. I followed along through his three marriages via details he shared in his regular columns. Tidbits of his style sneak into my work with some regularity. One of my favorites of Dave’s many inspired references was his use of letters from “Alert Readers” as column fodder. I do that myself from time to time as well.
Most of your letters and emails are kind and supportive. A few are deranged. One guy, and you know who you are, absolutely despises me because I maintained my dog Dog (both her name and her species) outside while living in the Deep South. Dog and I enjoyed each other’s company for 15 years before she died of natural causes.
However, this gent has repeatedly called me a “heartless bastard” for not letting my smelly outside dog sleep inside with the humans. He’s clearly not from the Deep South, where it is so warm and temperate. Alas, we eventually just agreed to disagree.
I recently received a most fascinating email from an alert reader. Paraphrased, it read, “Have an observation for Dr. Will Dabbs: You, sir, bear a strong resemblance to President Grover Cleveland’s wife, Frances … Keep up the great writing and thanks.”
My editor forwarded it on with this addendum, “Not sure if that was meant to be a compliment, an insult, or merely an observation …” As you might imagine, I immediately Googled Grover Cleveland’s wife Frances.
Frances Clara Folsom was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1864. Her dad and Grover Cleveland were law partners. Mr. Cleveland was 27 when she was born. Grover bought Frances her first baby carriage. The girl’s father was killed in an accident when she was seven.
Cleveland wasn’t yet married when he was first elected President at age 48. While rumors swirled concerning his love life — he was, after all, arguably the most eligible bachelor in the country — most enlightened observers expected him to propose to Frances’ mom, Emma. Imagine everyone’s surprise when old Grover proposed to the mere child whose first baby carriage he had purchased many years before.
This is Frances Cleveland. She supposedly died in 1947,
some 19 years before I was born. Or did she?
When they wed, Grover was 49 and Frances was 21. She was the youngest presidential spouse in American history. Yeah, that’s kind of creepy. However, by all accounts, they got along swimmingly. They ultimately had six children, though not all survived into adulthood. Frances was the only First Lady to deliver a baby in the White House.
Grover Cleveland was the only U.S. president to serve as chief executive, be defeated, and then win the same office again later. Frances, therefore, served as first lady of the United States from 1886 to 1889 and then again from 1893 to 1897. Frances was, likewise, the only first lady to serve two non-consecutive terms.
According to Wikipedia, the country adored the president’s radiant child bride. She read all of her letters personally and actually suffered orthopedic injuries from all the repeated handshaking. She maintained a close personal relationship with the White House staff, something that was, at that time, without precedent. When she left the executive mansion for the last time, she wept openly. After Grover’s death in 1908, Frances remarried five years later. By all accounts, she was a fine, upstanding woman who did credit to both her husband and her office.
So, I have now been accused of being a time-traveling transgender first lady. That’s a first for me. My people all hail from Virginia, Alabama and Mississippi. To my knowledge, I could not have been related to Mrs. Frances Cleveland. However, I included pictures of both of us. I think she favors my mom, herself an objectively beautiful woman. Draw your own conclusions …
This is Frank Bernard Dicksee’s 1885 painting Chivalry. All proper young men aspire to experience such as this.
What if your entire professional career distilled down to a single event? Imagine that you have one of the hardest jobs in the entire world. You have worked, struggled, sacrificed, and bled to reach the absolute pinnacle of your particularly grueling profession. You have toiled and trained countless days, weeks, months, and years so that at that one perfect crystalline moment you would be ready. Then out of the darkness, you place your hand on a terrified young woman who is hurt, sick, and hopeless and you say, “Jessica, it’s okay. I know you’re scared, but you’re going to be okay. We’re the American military, and you’re safe now. We’re gonna take you home.”
This is BUD/S–Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL. BUD/S is the place where baby frogmen get their start. Young men endure such as this for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is the hope that they might someday get to rescue a terrified young woman from the clutches of some evil terrorists.
One nameless member of the US Navy’s SEAL Team 6 got to utter those very words on the evening of 25 January 2012. While for Jessica Buchanan that was likely the single most moving thing she had ever heard, that was likely a pretty epic moment for that Navy SEAL as well. Just thinking about it gives me the willies.
Somalia is where hope goes to die. That is one seriously messed up place.
The Place
If hopelessness and depravity were minerals you dug up out of the ground, Somalia would be where you’d go to find them. I’m not sure if it is their dark angry religion, their generational legacy of abject squalor, or some heretofore unidentified toxin in the food or water, but something about Somalia just isn’t right. Not meaning to seem all judgy, but we were just trying to keep those people from starving and they fought us like there was no tomorrow. It’s honestly fairly surreal.
This is a picture of a Russian PTKM-1R top-attack anti-armor mine that a friend sent me from Ukraine. This horrible thing sports both acoustic and seismic sensors to detect passing armored vehicles.
The Reality Of It
Arguably the greatest scourge in modern warfare is mines. These diabolical monsters are cheap, easy-to-use combat multipliers. It takes literally no talent to sow a decent minefield. Once activated, these things just sit quietly and wait for something juicy to wander by. They kill and maim efficiently, effectively, and indiscriminately. The problem is that in many to most cases there is no way to turn them off.
We civilized folk really cannot imagine how horrible it must be to try to raise kids in a war zone.
Mines are emplaced most commonly from a state of desperation. There are seldom accurate maps produced that document their locations. Even if there were, those maps would never be 100% reliable. Older generation mines lack a self-destruct system, so they can remain in place for years if not decades after whatever war that spawned them is complete. At that point, hapless farmers or children playing can trip over the things with predictably horrible results. So it was with Somalia.
Part of the tragedy that is Somalia stems from some unfortunate geography. Most of it, however, is because some people really suck.
Somalia is a simply horrible place in the Horn of Africa. It is home to some 17 million people. The nation’s terribly unfortunate geography synergistically combines with some epically bad governance to produce cyclical famines and friable infrastructure. In 1993 we lost seventeen servicemen killed and another hundred or so wounded just trying to keep local Somali warlords from seizing international food aid and using it to enhance their personal power. Nineteen years later in 2012, you’d think we’d have learned our lesson. However, with the benefit of hindsight, I suppose we didn’t.
The Setting
Jessica Buchanan and her husband Erik were trying to save the world.
In October of 2011, American Jessica Buchanan along with a Dane named Poul Hagen Thisted were working through the Danish Refugee Council in Somalia on a wide-ranging demining project. Their stated goal was to teach Somali children how to survive in a mine-rich environment. That seems an honorable pursuit to me. However, one motley contingent of Somali pirates apparently felt otherwise.
This is a still from the epic Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips. Somali pirates put the scum in scumbag.
With the uptick in maritime attacks off the eastern coast of Somalia, the free world’s navies began patrolling these pirate-infested waters regularly and aggressively. Shipping companies also posted armed security contractors onboard their transiting vessels. As a result, the pirates’ traditional hunting grounds dried up. In response, these bottom-feeding parasites began prowling inland for Western aid workers like Buchanan and Thisted.
I suppose no good deed goes unpunished. Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped and abused because she was trying to help some of the most profoundly impoverished kids on the planet.
Jessica Buchanan was an English teacher from Ohio out to save the world. While traveling cross country in a trio of land cruisers en route to the city of Galkayo, Jessica’s group was attacked by the aforementioned Somali pirates. These modern-day brigands kidnapped Buchanan and her Danish friend before driving them for hours with weapons pointed at their heads. The two captives were later forced to walk throughout the night to a militarized compound in Galguduud some 90 miles inland from the Indian Ocean. There they remained…for 93 days.
Much of Somalia is a lawless wasteland. It looks like something out of a dystopian movie.
It’s not that the United States government had forgotten about Jessica. It is simply that her captors were a bunch of greedy unwashed psychopaths. They demanded $45 million to release their captives. Negotiations eventually resulted in an offer of $1.5 million cash, but the pirates felt that they could do better. Meanwhile, Jessica was getting sick.
We take modern medicine for granted. In an austere environment, however, little things can quickly become big things.
Jessica had a thyroid condition that demanded daily medication she was no longer receiving. In addition to inadequate food and unsanitary water, she developed a urinary tract infection (UTI). Out here in the World, that’s a week’s worth of antibiotics and a little cranberry juice. In the desert wastes of Somalia, an untreated UTI meant a slow miserable death. It eventually became clear that something had to be done.
The Op
The 1990 action classic Navy SEALs was a simply epic watch. While this promotional still is indeed compelling, the SEALs in the movie never once used M-4-variant rifles. Odd that Bill Paxton’s version (top right) is missing its front sight base.
I have it on reliable information that movies are not actually real. However, the rescue of Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted was movie-grade awesome. It all started with a tactical parachute jump out of an American cargo plane.
SEAL Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force are the very tip of the spear.
The players were DEVGRU—the US Navy’s SEAL Team 6. These high-speed frogmen were still riding high after having killed Osama bin Laden roughly five months before. Now on the ground in eastern Africa, 24 operators covertly ditched their chutes and formed up for a cross-country march to the Somali pirates’ evil lair.
Holing up in a remote survival compound looks good on paper. However, when your opponent wields surveillance drones and satellite imagery that just makes you easier to find.
The pirates had done their part to help out. As they were now conducting terrestrial operations, that meant a discrete static compound irrevocably tied to geography. This fact facilitated aerial surveillance. By the time they parachuted out of that airplane, the SEALs knew exactly what they would be facing.
I suspect that being on the receiving end of this sort of pain would be pretty darn unpleasant.
Jessica later said that she and her captors heard what sounded like rodents scurrying in the bush. Her guard shouted an alarm to his comrades, and then the whole world exploded. At this point, Buchanan had no idea that these were American special operators. At the time she feared al-Shabaab terrorists or a rival pirate mob. She later confided that she did not think she could survive being kidnapped yet again.
Every soldier or cop lives to be that guy who rescues the fair damsel from certain death.
Throughout it all, Buchanan and Thisted just curled up and tried to be small. Now nearly delirious with malnutrition and disease and expecting death at any moment, the American captive heard those words she had long dreamt of hearing. I obviously wasn’t there, but I can guarantee you that whoever first reached Jessica on that horrible chaotic night had trained their entire professional life for that specific moment.
The pirates who kidnapped Buchanan and Thisted didn’t have long to regret their poor life choices.
SEALs do their best work at night. The pirates really never had a chance. They unlimbered their AK’s, but the SEALs, equipped with state-of-the-art night vision and the finest intelligence and logistics support on the planet, were an unstoppable force. In moments, the SEALs had killed nine pirates. There were unconfirmed rumors that they might have captured another three, but I couldn’t find any references to what became of them. Piracy as a career path doesn’t offer much of a retirement plan.
Jessica Buchanan was in no shape for a long forced march through the desert to their extraction PZ, so the SEALs just carried her.
When she was rescued, Jessica was shoeless and unable to walk. One of the burly SEALs just threw the thin woman over his shoulder and jogged to safety. As they waited for the exfil helicopters the SEALs made a circle around the captives. When they heard what they thought were pursuing pirates, the frogmen physically shielded them with their bodies.
Once they were safely aboard the helicopter one of the SEALs gave Jessica a folded American flag. She later said, “I just started to cry. At that point in time I have never in my life been so proud and so very happy to be an American.” I hate to tell you this, but if you can read that without being moved then something about you is broken.
Buchanan and Thisted were soon back home with their loved ones. If ever you have wondered why we support the US military through our tax dollars, this is it.
Buchanan and Thisted made full recoveries. Thisted later stated that his lucky break was being captured with an American. None of the attacking SEALs received so much as a scratch.
The Weapons
The HK416 was developed as a result of an initiative through the Army’s Delta Force.
DEVGRU and the Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta are our Tier 1 counter-terrorist units. They are as highly trained and exquisitely equipped as our great nation is capable of making them. The end result is the most capable military force in the world. Their standard assault rifle reflects that same rarefied mantra.
The HK416 is surprisingly heavy in the flesh. However, it represents the current state of the art in small arms technology.
The HK416 was a collaborative effort in the late 1990’s between Delta and Heckler & Koch. Representing a holy melding of the M-4 carbine and the short-stroke, piston-driven gas-operated system pioneered in the ArmaLite AR-180, the HK416 combined world-class reliability with superlative ergonomics. The end result changed the game a little bit.
Both France and Norway have adopted the HK416 as their standard infantry weapon.
Nowadays the HK416 has been officially adopted by the militaries of France and Norway. The US Marine Corps also fields the weapon in a slightly modified form as the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle. The HK416 maintains a sterling reputation for accuracy and reliability.
The Aftermath
There was indeed a happy ending to this story…unless you like greedy bloodthirsty pirates, in which case you’re just out of luck.
One of the ways Jessica coped with her protracted captivity was by imagining that she and her husband Erik might someday have a baby. These episodes eventually evolved to the point where she visualized her child, a boy, alongside the two of them in a place of complete comfort and safety. As the weeks stretched into months and her health began to fail this exercise helped keep her strong.
This was Jessica and Erik Buchanan’s little boy a short while before they formally met him.The Buchanans celebrated Jessica’s rescue with an unexpected child.
Jessica and Erik were reunited at a military base in Italy. She was thin, emotionally wrecked, and traumatized both mentally and physically. Four weeks later she began throwing up. The nausea got progressively worse until it manifested almost every time she ate. Jessica naturally assumed it was a function of the rich food to which she had become so unaccustomed.
Soon thereafter, she had a positive pregnancy test. 8.5 months after her rescue she and Erik welcomed their son. God’s got a weird sense of humor sometimes, but that strikes me as a pretty cool way to commemorate her rescue.
Castor canadensis, the North American Beaver, is a tree-eating machine.
Will noted the industrious little monsters killed 27 of his wife’s dogwood
trees in a single season. One paid the ultimate price …
Trust me, I’m a professional. Blowing stuff up is one of the few marketable skills I retain from the military. While the practical applications for high explosives in both martial and commercial endeavors are well established, such volatile stuff also makes a simply splendid way to kill a lazy Saturday afternoon with your kids.
My rural farm and my wife are the only two good investments I have ever made. I was ever-deployed someplace saving the world, and my bride is a fastidious money manager. As I have never really understood the stock market, we leveraged our nest egg into a modest piece of rural Mississippi dirt.
The farm is a big wooded valley sporting rugged old growth forest. Slicing through the middle is a small year-round creek. This creek was originally subdivided by a dozen robust beaver dams.
The local Soil Conservation Service came out and surveyed the place for free. They told us where to site a permanent dam and divined its manifest geological particulars. Aside from seemingly limitless piles of dead terrorists, this represents one of the precious few examples wherein I got some tangible return on the frankly breathtaking volume of taxes Uncle Sam demands. Now all that remained was to remove the fruits of the beavers’ toil so we could move in with a track hoe and dirt pan.
Blasting caps look vaguely like cartridge cases. These are each crimped
onto a length of time fuse, lit — and then the fun starts!
Technical Details
Pre-9/11 it was easier to buy explosives than it was to purchase a handgun. At least in the Deep South, all you needed was a driver’s license and an excuse. A quick trip to a neighboring town to meet a licensed explosives dealer did the trick. No kidding, back then we did the deal, paperwork and all, in the parking lot of a church. Ah, the good old days.
These were binary charges. The solid component came in a green plastic cylinder looking eerily similar to your kids’ bottles of bubble stuff. The liquid bit came in a separate container. When separated these two components were fairly inoffensive. Once onsite you simply opened the screw top off the explosive charge, poured in the liquid and replaced the cap.
A dirty little secret is it’s actually quite easy to improvise explosives from industrial farm chemicals. The challenge is acquiring the material needed to precipitate a high-order detonation. In this case, blasting caps and det cord did the deed.
Blasting caps look vaguely like cartridge cases and can be fired via an electrical current or a length of time fuse. Detonating cord is simply magnificent stuff. Det cord has a PETN explosive core, resembles thick clothesline and is waterproof.
To prep these charges for detonation, you wrap a length of det cord around the charge and secure it in place with duct tape. You then form a bight in the other end of the det cord around a blasting cap and secure it with duct tape as well. We then bored a hole deep into the beaver dam using a hefty steel rod.
You need to get the explosive underneath whatever it is you want moved. You then snake the det cord out someplace dry and affix the cap. Though Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would likely spontaneously conflagrate at this revelation, my two young sons aged 6 and 10 helped me rig my charges. With meticulous supervision, they even did one each solo. Nonetheless, they remain productive law-abiding adults today.
Before 9/11 it was strikingly easy to buy binary explosives, detonating cord and blasting caps. Like everything else in life, it’s massively more complicated nowadays.
Showtime
We always used at least two minutes’ worth of time fuse. You need sufficient time to ignite the fuse and then walk to a safe place while getting a little bit bored. Once the charges detonated the kids were free to run up to the smoking hole and get showered in copious falling mud and goo. A grand time was had by all.
About halfway through this exercise the kids scampered up to the site of our most recent shot and began screaming in glee. I ran over to join them in time to encounter the world’s most profoundly unfortunate beaver. Apparently the poor inquisitive rodent had meandered over to see what all the fuss was about — just as two of our trunkline charges detonated. The resulting blast launched the creature some 30 meters up into the tree line, leaving him most undeniably demised. We laughed until our faces hurt.
Ours has become an awfully soft culture these days. The very mention of guns and the manly arts is adequate to precipitate the screaming habdabs in many of the less durable members of society. However, I can attest an afternoon spent with two little boys, a case of binary explosives and a handful of superfluous beaver dams can make for some mighty fine memories.
