D E L T A F O R C E 9 INTRODUCTION Six weeks after the invasion of Iraq on March 19 2003 United States president George W Bush announced that the mission to overthrow Saddam Hussein had been ac complished The next step was to locate the deposed dictator who had disappeared as his armies crumbled around him In July that year his two sons were killed But their father’s whereabouts remained a mystery It seemed likely that Hussein was hiding near his birthplace of Tikrit A task force consisting of Delta Force operators and other special forces made at least a dozen raids on suspected locations in the next six months without success On December 13 they captured a man with close ties to Hussein and learned enough to believe that they were close to his location That evening they raided a farmhouse capturing two men One was Hussein’s personal cook The operators combed the area around the farmhouse though there was no sign of the tunnels in which Hussein was reportedly hiding They were about to move away and search a larger area when one man saw something suspicious through his night-vision goggles The bricks and dirt at his feet were arrayed too neatly A piece of thread pro truded from the ground Quickly two dozen fellow operators joined him They scraped away the dirt and saw a plug Weapons at the ready they pulled up the plug Beneath it was a man with a long scraggly beard I am Saddam Hussein the man said I am the president of Iraq and I am willing to negotiate ZzZ After the terrorist attacks in 2001 George W Bush committed the military to discovering the source
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D E L T A F O R C E 11 DISASTER IN THE DESERT Colonel Charles Beckwith was a frustrated man A member of Army Special Forces a force more popularly known as the Green Berets he served a tour of duty in the early 1960s with the British Special Air Service SAS the world’s most highly regarded antiterrorist unit The primary focus of the Green Berets was helping to train the troops of U S allies under attack by other countries However Beckwith believed that the American Army not only needed a Special Forces capability but an SAS one not only a force of teach ers but of doers There was no question that Beckwith was a doer Nicknamed Chargin Charlie for his hard-driving attitude and willingness to engage the enemy Beckwith re peatedly urged the formation of an American unit similar to SAS But his pleas fell on deaf ears Starting with the massacre of 11 members of the Israeli team at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich Germany a wave of terrorism swept through the world Several governments estab lished elite units similar to SAS to combat the emerging threat In 1977 the German group known as GSG-9 freed hostages from a hijacked airliner that had landed in Somalia An impressed U S president Jimmy Carter asked his Joint Chiefs of Staff if the U S military had a similar unit No he was told Army vice chief of staff General Edward Meyer then threw his support behind In 1977 Germany’s GSG-9 unit rescued all 86 passen gers aboard the hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181
