Delta Force: The Army's Elite Counterterrorist Unit
by Charlie A. Beckwith, Donald Knox
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charlie A. Beckwith, Donald KnoxEpilogue: C. A. Mobley
Edition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-05-18
ISBN: 0380809397
Number of pages: 365
Publisher: Avon
Book Reviews of Delta Force: The Army's Elite Counterterrorist Unit
Book Review: Marcinko, Haney, Beckwith, Pfarrer - best SF bios ever
Summary: 5 Stars
I initially started reading this after finishing Eric Haney's visceral "Inside Delta Force" and mistakenly felt that it was a bit underwhelming. Haney's book is loaded with memorable action and you feel you're dropped right into the middle of it; from the Delta selection process to hunting down communist guerillas in South America to sniping, you're always right there in the action and you come to crave it. By contrast, Beckwith's book is centered on the nuts and bolts of creating the unit, so I was naturally disappointed after breathless jungle warfare to be reading about turf battles among paper-pushers in the Pentagon. Then there is Operation Eagle Claw - not exactly the operation you want to hang your SF bio on. I recently picked up the book again and I have to say, I could not have been more wrong.
Beckwith's book does not have the hilarity or devilishness of Marcinko's "Rogue Warrior" nor the "in the trenches" action of Pfarrer's "Warrior Soul" and Eric Haney's "Inside Delta Force." What it does have is a top-down look at the system and how things are done at the command level, exactly the things that make Franks' "American Soldier" such a terrific read. It also has Beckwith's attitude. You really come to admire the man through his writing. The world "integrity" would not be out of place emblazoned on the man's chest. He is forthright, brilliant, upstanding, and allergic to bureaucracy, a maverick with a "get it done" attitude but also a teamwork attitude (the SpecOps guys I admire are always the right combination of the two). For Beckwith, maverick never crosses the line to "rogue" and I think he exhibited far more patience with the system than, say, Richard Marcinko (not faulting Marcinko, this is actually a compliment of sorts). Beckwith was a regimented thinker until the SAS set him straight on what the real priorities are. His account of his stay with them truly comes across as a born-again moment. And it was. Beckwith took that maverick attitude and created the most "cut the BS and get the job done and never give up" group of warriors in history. Just read the web accounts of Operation Acid Gambit (make sure you check out Kurt Muse's own account) or the Delta segments in Blackhawk Down and you'll be a believer. You want these guys kicking in the doors.
The fun parts of Beckwith's book are the choices made in the creation of the unit, such as why they chose the .45 as their standard sidearm. Then there is training. Obviously, the shooting house is fun, but nothing tops what they did to actually confirm that they had made great killers, not just great shooters. A fake hostage incident was staged and the Delta guys were lied to about it. They were put on what they thought was a flight to Canada but landed in a rural area stateside, all the while thinking they were in Canada. Canadian actors were used to "brief" the men on the situation and they surrounded the target house, which had initially had real people but now held dummies. They were told to take down the house, which they did, bursting through the doors and filling the terrorist dummies with lead, not touching the innocent dummies, all in the span of less than seven seconds. The men were then radioed that the incident was a hoax and had to be given a period to "calm down" about it. It's classic mental games, but they had to be played to assess the men. No better example of "train as you fight, fight as you train" can be found.
Eagle Claw...this is simultaneously the book's greatest moment and its saddest. It's the greatest in the sense that it was even attempted. Talk about ambitious. Imagine flying a thousand miles into the heart of Iran to rescue scores of hostages in a heavily fortified series of buildings the size of a college campus. The Iranians had heavy machine guns hidden that would, as Beckwith wrote, "chew apart a wall." And it's not like Blackhawk Down in terms of environment. You can run out of Mogadishu on foot, you don't run out of the middle of Iran. Perhaps the most chilling, brutal reality was the number of intelligence assets we had in Iran: Zero. Kudos to Beckwith for admonishing the Carter administration's firing most of the CIA old guard and replacing them with inexperienced apparatchiks.
This book has all of the grit and steely determination you'll find in the other SpecOps bios. What you won't find in other books though is the genesis of a unit, much less the genesis of one as special as Delta Force from the very man who created it. It is quite a blessing for us that Beckwith took the time to not just create his SpecOps baby (no easy birth that), but to also document the process for posterity's sake. The Delta world is a dark one, but its very creator has left us a flashlight that shines back to its Big Bang moment. Two words: Read it.
Summary of Delta Force: The Army's Elite Counterterrorist Unit
The only insider?s account ever written on America?s most powerful weapon in the war against terrorism
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