Delta Force Quotes

JEMAINE Lisa? BRET Yes, she's in Delta Force. She's been deployed to Fallujah. JEMAINE But she works in the croissant shop. BRET Yeah, she's got two jobs. She's a pastry chef and a sniper.

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present. Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet. I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.

I was sure the old man knew nothing about the beatitudes, ecstasies, dazzling reverberations of sexual encounters. Cut out the poetry was his message. Clinical sex, deprived of all the warmth of love—the orchestration of all the senses, touch, hearing, sight, palate; all the euphoric accompaniments, back-ground music, moods, atmosphere, variations—forced him to resort to literary aphrodisiacs.

Inherited wealth may be easily squandered, but inherited poverty is a legacy almost impossible to loose.

It’s my job.” “Then thanks for showing up at work today.

I swear to Christ, I’ll reverse haunt your ass if you even think about dying on me. I’ll do séances and get out the Ouija board and call your spirit back to earth and harass you for the rest of eternity if you die. Got it?

everyone you meet is fighting an invisible battle you know nothing about, so you should always be kind.

The author, then in the final stage as a candidate for Delta Force, was asked by the unit's foreboding colonel what he thought of the evaluation's Stress Week. He responded that he was waiting for it to begin, reasoning that, used to responsibility for others while leading a platoon, he only had himself to worry about. However hard the trial, he got four meals a day, nobody shot at, him, and the weather was pleasant.

Although the Delta Force culture is one of quiet professionalism that values humility over self-aggrandizement, that same culture also instills an innate sense of responsibility to always strive to make a contribution to the greater good.

From the vantage point of my warm, comfortable spot on mother earth, I could see off into infinite space and the eternity of time. In just a few hours, I thought, some of us are going to make that leap into eternity. And I will be one of the instruments of that voyage. I may also be one of the travelers....It's going to happen sooner or later. But if today is my day-I'm going to have a cup of coffee first.

I can tell you think being a romantic is a bad thing, and while I freely admit to wanting to find a man to spend the rest of my life with, I do know the world isn’t always sunshine and roses. Most of the time it’s overcast skies and poison ivy. That’s why I read the books and watch the movies I do. If the only way I can experience romance is through my imagination and fairy-tale books and the weddings of English Royalty, I’m going to do it.

the human mind works in three elementary phases: saturate, incubate, and illuminate. Time allows us to saturate our mind with context, so we can incubate and spark the eureka moments of illumination that connect the dots, snap together patterns, and discover the options that allow us to find our paths.

What’s up with Mary and Truck?” Emily asked Fletch once everyone had left. He shrugged. “They like each other, but neither will admit it.” “They’re acting like grade-school kids.” “Yup.” Fletch was smiling. “But it’s amusing as hell. I can’t wait until they both let go of whatever it is that’s holding them back and go for it.

On the drive to Paris, Michelle barely drew breath, speaking to her uncle about her holiday and pointing out landmarks to Delta. Secretly, Delta was relieved. She needed time to acclimatize to the potent force that was Édouard Valois. Sitting beside him in the front of the black Mercedes-Benz, she was all too aware of his presence: his sheer size, his stunning profile, his elegant hands upon the steering wheel deftly controlling the luxury machine, his dynamic and intriguing personality. He was living, breathing masculine perfection.

make a simple plan, inform everyone involved with it, don’t change it, and kick it in the ass.

Lord love a duck, he was lethal.

I always love that 'we' part from a staff officer.

Repetition is the single most powerful lever we have to improve skills, because it uses the built-in mechanism for making the wires of our brains faster and more accurate.

Instead of focusing on the opportunity at hand, risk-averse leaders get treed by the potential risk, and fall victim to the greatest operational failure of all: the failure to try.

What is common sense? It’s knowledge of patterns—both conscious and unconscious.

without the danger there cannot arise the opportunity.

Risk aversion and fear of the unknown are direct symptoms of a lack of context, and are the polar opposites of audacity.

How do perfectly smart people make bad decisions? In an organizational context, it’s almost always the result of a lack of shared reality.

The single best thinking and decision-making tool a leader has is to consistently conduct reality checks by asking a profoundly simple question: “What’s your recommendation?

Love freely given is the best kind of medicine out there.

Being with someone you love means you deal with the shit as well as the roses.

thanks in part to the security force Kincaid paid to watch over the Delta Queen and surrounding parking lots. After all, it just wouldn’t do for someone to get mugged before he could board the riverboat and lose his money in the casino.

Anyone can recognize a pattern; it’s having the courage of your convictions to act on it that matters. Audacity isn’t taking senseless risks, or being rash; it’s a natural by-product of confidence and knowledge, and I was supremely confident in my people and in how much we knew about what was going on around us.

With all the latest whiz-bang technology and massive databases and communications pipes at their disposal, there was a constant self-generated pressure to put all the technology to good use, to do something. Unfortunately, that something was the unending creation of timelines, policies, and plans—the embalming fluid of organizational nimbleness.

Romance isn’t about the outer trappings society has pushed down our throats from the time we were little. It’s showing in all the little ways that you care about the person you’re with. That you’ll protect her if the shit hits the fan, that you’ll provide for her, that you’ll let her choose what she wants to do and where she wants to eat, even if it’s not what you would pick for yourself.

Tacit knowledge is contextualized knowledge of people, places, ideas, and experiences. It involves knowing how to obtain desired endstates, knowing what to do to obtain them, and knowing when and where to act on them. It’s knowledge in practice that’s developed from direct experience and action, and usually is shared only through highly interactive conversation, storytelling, and shared experience.

To find the kinds of people with the type of on-the-ground knowledge that can enable us to understand and connect the dots, we have to imagine how to seek out and listen to them. It’s very rarely the self-styled expert or the academician, though both can make positive contributions to our knowledge base. Rather, it’s the person who has walked the specific ground, lived the specific lifestyle, and possesses a specific psychosocial mind-set whom we need.

The acid test for guy-on-the-ground relevance is whether the individual possesses tacit knowledge, which is developed from direct experience and action in the actual environment. When it comes to tacit knowledge, it is generally true that the closer the person is to the environment, the more likely he or she is to possess tacit knowledge. However, when it comes to tacit knowledge, the word close does not solely connote distance. Close is a holistic concept that entails interaction, understanding, knowledge, and experience.

Years earlier, while briefing Colin Powell on the missions we conducted in Colombia, I mentioned to him that we were successful because we were nimble. We didn’t ask anyone to approve our concepts; we moved first, and figured things out as we went along. Listening intently to the story, he smiled and reflected to me that good leaders don’t wait for official blessings to try things out. They use common sense to guide them because they understand a simple fact of life in most organizations: if you ask enough people for permission, you’ll inevitably find someone who believes that they should tell you no.

Thanks to superior organization, the Egyptian armed forces scored a dual victory, on land and sea, over that second alliance. The fleet of the “Peoples of the North” was entirely destroyed and the invasion route through the Delta was cut. At the same time a third coalition of the same white-skinned Indo-Aryans was being assembled, again in Libya, against the Black Egyptian nation. Yet, this was not a racial conflict in the modern sense. To be sure, the two hostile groups were fully conscious of their ethnic and racial differences, but it was much more a question of the great movement of disinherited peoples of the north toward richer and more advanced countries. Ramses III demolished that third coalition as he had destroyed the first two.... As a result of this third victory over the Indo-Aryans, he took an exceptional number of prisoners. This enabled him to increase appreciably the slave labor force on royal construction sites and in the army. Such was invariably the procedure for acclimating white-skinned persons in Egypt, a process that became especially widespread during the low period. By bearing this in mind, we may avoid attributing a purely imaginary role to people who contributed absolutely nothing to Egyptian civilization.

You probably don’t remember this, and I’m not bringing it up now to embarrass you, but last night you told me that you’d fantasized about me. Well, the feeling’s mutual. You’ve been driving me crazy since the day you moved in. I have made love to you in my mind more than I’m comfortable admitting. But it’s not just about sex. I want to take you out. I want to tuck Annie into her bed at night and read her a bedtime story. I want to sit across from you at the table and watch you smile at something I’ve said. In case I’m not making myself clear, I want to date you, Miracle Emily Grant. You and your daughter.” “Oh.” Emily blushed a fiery red, but didn’t comment further.

Many operations involved intercepting and seizing someone traveling in a moving vehicle, often with bodyguards. The task force would surreptitiously attach a tracking beacon to the target’s car. Delta was already experimenting with technologies that used an electromagnetic pulse to shut a car’s battery down remotely. The unit also used a catapult net system that would ensnare car and driver alike. Once the car had been immobilized, operators would smash the window with a sledgehammer, pull their target through the window, and make off with him, shooting any bodyguards who posed a threat, while an outer security perimeter kept anyone who might interfere at bay. The operators had a name for these snatches: habeas grab-ass.

On the night of September 13, Bill O’Reilly had an exchange with Sam Husseini, a former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, that characterized Fox’s position as it was developing. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and I’ll let you react to it,” O’Reilly said. “We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because …” Husseini told O’Reilly that innocent Afghans would be killed by a protracted air strike. “Doesn’t make any difference,” O’Reilly huffed. “Bill—” “They—it was an act of war.” “No, no. It does make a difference,” Husseini said. “I don’t want more civilians dead. We’ve had civilians dead in New York and now you’re saying maybe it’s okay to have civilians dead in Afghanistan.” “Mr. Husseini, this is war.” “Yeah, exactly. And in war you don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill women and children. Those are your words, Bill.” “Oh, stop it,” O’Reilly said. “You just made the most absurd statement in the world. That means we wouldn’t have bombed the Nazis or the Japanese. We wouldn’t have done any of that, because you don’t want somebody who has declared war on us to be punished. Come on.” “Who declared war on us?” “The terrorist states have declared war, Mr. Husseini!” “Get them. Get the terrorists,” Husseini said. “Cut his mic,” O’Reilly responded, waving his finger across the screen, the lower third of which was covered with Stars and Stripes graphics and a caption that read: “AMERICA UNITES.

Matt Espenshade confirmed that in spite of the deaths of so many of the kidnappers, many more are still at large, including their leaders. Those men might hope to be forgotten; they are not. The FBI has continued its investigative interest in those involved with the kidnapping. The leaders, especially, are of prime interest to the Bureau. And now the considerable unseen assets in that region are steadily feeding back information on these targeted individuals to learn their operational methods and their locations and hunt them down. The surviving kidnappers and their colleagues are welcome to sneer at the danger. It may help them pass the time, just as it did for Bin Laden’s henchmen to chuckle at the idea of payback. If the men nobody sees coming are dispatched to capture or kill them, the surviving kidnappers will find themselves dealing with a force of air, sea, and land fighters s obsessed with the work they do that they have trained themselves into the physical and mental toughness of world-class athletes. They will carry the latest in weapons, armor, visual systems, and communication devises. Whether they are Navy SEAL fighters, DEVGRU warriors, Army Delta Force soldiers, Green Berets, or any of the elite soldiers under United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), they will share the elite warriors’ determination to achieve success in their mission assignment. The news that they are coming for you is the worst you could receive. But nobody gets advance warning from these men. They consider themselves born for this. They have fought like panthers to be part of their team. For most of them, there is a strong sense of pride in succeeding at missions nobody else can get done; in lethal challenges. They actually prefer levels of difficulty so high it seems only a sucker would seek them, the sorts of situations seen more and more often these days. Impossible odds.

Guys like him…they aren’t the flowers-and-candy type. He probably won’t take you out to a romantic dinner. I don’t see him renting a plane and having it fly a banner declaring his love for you.” Rayne giggled and nodded in agreement. “But if you pay attention, you’ll see the signs that he cares. A hand against your back. Asking if you need anything. He’ll make sure you eat before him. He’ll walk on the outside of the sidewalk, making sure you’re away from traffic. The signs will be there, but they won’t ever be the big romantic gestures most women crave.” “He wraps my wrists and ankles every morning. He took my nasty snot-filled tissues yesterday without making a big deal out of it. He let me have as much cream cheese on my bagel this morning as I wanted, even though it meant I used most of it and he only had a little bit.” Penelope nodded. “Exactly. They’ll swear until they’re dead as a doornail that they aren’t romantic, when in reality, what we see in the movies and on TV as ‘romance’ is just smoke and mirrors. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have their brand of romance than Hollywood’s.

Then I remembered something I’d read that Teddy Roosevelt had said: “It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who strives…who spends himself…and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

the onetime Delta Force commander Dalton Fury

What did I receive from this lineage? Things I consider to be very valuable: a good raw intellect and a good tough body. A sense of independence and a realization that wherever I am is my home. A sense of humor. A sense of personal honor that results in a touchiness common to our people. We are easily offended and prone to violence when offended. When the only thing you own is your sense of honor, you tend to protect it at all costs.

I am a nomad, son of an ancient line of nomads. The larger part of my family line is made up of the Scots-Irish, a people descended from that peculiar mixture of the Celts of the northern British Isles and the invading Danes and Norsemen. The result was a landless, illiterate, anarchic, and warlike people who were always difficult, if not downright impossible, to govern. They were a race the British Crown rightfully viewed as dangerous rebels,

2014    Raid in Northern Syria In an attempt to find kidnapped journalist James Foiley as well as other American hostages, Delta Forces operators were inserted into northern Syria on 04 July 2014. Per information from witnesses, after tearing down anti-aircraft weapons, the Delta Forces operators attacked an ISIS base.  The ISIS base was torn down and all ISIS soldiers were killed at the cost of an American who sustained wounds during the operations. The operation was a failure since no hostages were found.

2014    Capture of Ahmed Abu Kahattala The Delta Force captured Ahmed Abu Kahattala on the weekend of 14 to 15 June 2014. The Delta Forces operators worked with contingent elite Intelligence Support Activity Operators who managed to track Ahmed Abu Khattala. The FBI agents made the arrest during this mission.

Men dream of starting over. Not even necessarily with another woman. They dream of a clean slate, of disappearing, of walking off a plane on a layover and making a new life for themselves in a strange city--Grand Rapids say, or Nashville. They dream of an apartment all of their own, of silence, of joining Delta Force and fighting in Iraq, of introducing themselves by the nickname they'd always wished they had. Of a time and place where they can use everything they know now that they hadn't known then--that is, before they were married. And then they might be happy.

Thanks to superior organization, the Egyptian armed forces scored a dual victory, on land and sea, over that second alliance. The fleet of the “Peoples of the North” was entirely destroyed and the invasion route through the Delta was cut. At the same time a third coalition of the same white-skinned Indo-Aryans was being assembled, again in Libya, against the Black Egyptian nation. Yet, this was not a racial conflict in the modern sense. To be sure, the two hostile groups were fully conscious of their ethnic and racial differences, but it was much more a question of the great movement of disinherited peoples of the north toward richer and more advanced countries. Ramses III demolished that third coalition as he had destroyed the first two.... As a result of this third victory over the Indo-Aryans, he took an exceptional number of prisoners.

Jon Stone was more Joe’s friend than mine, though ‘friend’ probably wasn’t the right word. Jon was a private military contractor, which meant he was a mercenary. He was also a Princeton graduate and a former Delta Force operator. His primary client was the Department of Defense. Same boss, different pay grade. Pike

of Talent, author Dan Coyle emphasizes his belief that

The Battle of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, was part of Operation Restore Hope. We remember it now as “Black Hawk Down” from the novel (and subsequent film) of that name by an on-the-scene journalist, Mark Bowden. Army Rangers paid a heavy price for not looking “too intimidating” or “like invaders,” valiantly fighting while stripped of the equipment they requested. Had the administration not ignorantly meddled with events, the 160 Special Forces operators of Army Rangers and Delta wouldn’t have taken so many casualties. And here is what the Clinton Machine didn’t comprehend: Our guys wouldn’t have had to inflict as many casualties either, shooting their way out against 4,000–6,000 Somalis with an entire city of civilians trapped in the crossfire. The Rangers became a legend that day but lost eighteen fine men and suffered seventy-three wounded.

Les longues nuits semblaient ne s'écarter qu'à regret de la ville, pour quelques heures. Une grise lumière d'aube ou de crépuscule filtrant à travers le plafond de nuées d'un blanc sale se répandait alors sur les choses comme le reflet appauvri d'un lointain glacier. La neige même, qui continuait à tomber, était sans lumière. Cet ensevelissement blanc, léger et silencieux s'étendait à l'infini dans l'espace et le temps. Il fallait déjà allumer les veilleuses vers trois heures. Le soir épaississait sur la neige des tons de cendre, des bleus opaques, des gris tenaces de vieilles pierres. La nuit s'imposait, inexorable et calmante : irréelle. Le delta reprenait dans ces ténèbres sa configuration géographique. De noires falaises de pierre, cassées en angles droits, bordaient les canaux figés. Une sorte de phosphorescence sombre émanait du large fleuve de glace. Parfois les vents du nord, venus du Spitzberg et de plus loin encore, du Groenland peut-être, peut-être du pôle par l'Océan arctique, la Norvège, la mer Blanche, poussaient leurs rafales sur l'estuaire morne de la Neva. Le froid mordait tout à coup le granit, les lourdes brumes venues du sud par la Baltique s'évanouissaient tout à coup et les pierres, la terre, les arbres dénudés se couvraient instantanément de cristaux de givre dont chacun était une merveille à peine visible, faite de nombres, de lignes de force et de blancheur. La nuit changeait de face, dépouillant ses voiles d'irréalité. L'étoile polaire apparaissait, les constellations ouvraient l'immensité du monde. Le lendemain, les cavaliers de bronze sur leurs socles de pierre, couverts d'une poudre d'argent, semblaient sortir d'une étrange fête ; les hautes colonnes de granit de la cathédrale Saint-Isaac, son fronton peuplé de saints et jusqu'à sa massive coupole dorée, tout était givré. Les façades et les quais de granit rouge prenaient, sous ce revêtement magnifique, des teintes de cendre rose et blanche. Les jardins, avec les filigranes purs de leurs ■ branchages, paraissaient enchantés. Cette fantasmagorie ravissait les yeux des gens sortis de leurs demeures étouffantes ainsi qu'il y a des millénaires, les hommes vêtus de fourrures sortaient peureusement l'hiver des chaudes cavernes pleines d'une bonne puanteur animale. Pas une lumière dans des quartiers entiers. Des ténèbres préhistoriques.

a real treat: we went out to the

There have been three major slave revolts in human history. The first, led by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus against the Romans, occurred in 73 BC. The third was in the 1790s when the great black revolutionary Touissant L'Ouverture and his slave army wrested control of Santo Domingo from the French, only to be defeated by Napoleon in 1802. But the second fell halfway between these two, in the middle of the 9th century AD, and is less documented than either. We do know that the insurgents were black; that the Muslim 'Abbasid caliphs of Iraq had brought them from East Africa to work, in the thousands, in the salt marshes of the delta of the Tigris. These black rebels beat back the Arabs for nearly ten years. Like the escaped maroons in Brazil centuries later, they set up their own strongholds in the marshland. They seemed unconquerable and they were not, in fact, crushed by the Muslims until 883. They were known as the Zanj, and they bequeathed their name to the island of Zanzibar in the East Africa - which, by no coincidence, would become and remain the market center for slaves in the Arab world until the last quarter of the 19th century. The revolt of the Zanj eleven hundred years ago should remind us of the utter falsity of the now fashionable line of argument which tries to suggest that the enslavement of African blacks was the invention of European whites. It is true that slavery had been written into the basis of the classical world; Periclean Athens was a slave state, and so was Augustan Rome. Most of their slaves were Caucasian whites, and "In antiquity, bondage had nothing to do with physiognomy or skin color". The word "slave" meant a person of Slavic origin. By the 13th century it spread to other Caucasian peoples subjugated by armies from central Asia: Russians, Georgians, Circassians, Albanians, Armenians, all of whom found ready buyers from Venice to Sicily to Barcelona, and throughout the Muslim world. But the African slave trade as such, the black traffic, was a Muslim invention, developed by Arab traders with the enthusiastic collaboration of black African ones, institutionalized with the most unrelenting brutality centuries before the white man appeared on the African continent, and continuing long after the slave market in North America was finally crushed. Historically, this traffic between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa begins with the very civilization that Afrocentrists are so anxious to claim as black - ancient Egypt. African slavery was well in force long before that: but by the first millennium BC Pharaoh Rameses II boasts of providing the temples with more than 100,000 slaves, and indeed it is inconceivable that the monumental culture of Egypt could have been raised outside a slave economy. For the next two thousand years the basic economies of sub-Saharan Africa would be tied into the catching, use and sale of slaves. The sculptures of medieval life show slaves bound and gagged for sacrifice, and the first Portuguese explorers of Africa around 1480 found a large slave trade set up from the Congo to Benin. There were large slave plantations in the Mali empire in the 13th-14th centuries and every abuse and cruelty visited on slaves in the antebellum South, including the practice of breeding children for sale like cattle, was practised by the black rulers of those towns which the Afrocentrists now hold up as sanitized examples of high civilization, such as Timbuktu and Songhay.

many of the human and material extremes that were the keys to the Delta’s identity either as the “South’s south,” or “America’s Ethiopia” were shaped not by its isolation but by pervasive global and national influences and consistent with interaction with a federal government whose policies often confirmed the Delta’s inequities and reinforced its anachronistic social and political order as well … the social polarization that is synonymous with the Mississippi Delta may be observed wherever and whenever the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and power overwhelms the ideals of equality, justice and compassion and reduces the American dream to a self-indulgent fantasy. As socioeconomic disparity and indifference to human suffering become increasingly prominent features of American life, it seems reasonable to inquire whether the same economic, political, and emotional forces that helped to forge and sustain the Delta’s image as the South writ small may one day transform an entire nation into the Delta writ large.16

understand the importance of looking at things as they are and not as they were

The art of war is the art of out-thinking your enemy with strategies and tactics such as disguises, deception, diversions, and stealth

She rested her head on the seat behind her, and closed her eyes. She whispered to no one in particular, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Damn,” he whispered to himself, cutting off his thoughts. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Fine, maybe you’re a bit of a Neanderthal when it comes to relationships. You’re not perfect. Great. I get it. But, Ghost, you are romantic.” When Ghost began to shake his head in denial, or disgust, Rayne wasn’t sure which, she put her hand on his knee. “Let me finish.” Waiting until he finally nodded, she continued. “You’ve paid for every single thing we’ve done today, from the taxi, to lunch, to tipping the concierge at the hotel. When we were walking to the subway station, you put yourself between the traffic and me when we were on the sidewalk. You protected me from the crowds as we got in and out of the subway. You let me sit, while you stood near me, making sure no one got too close. You even carried my suitcase from the taxi to the hotel. Seriously, Ghost, you do these things and don’t even realize you’re doing them. That is a sign of a man who knows how to treat a woman. That’s what women think is romantic. Screw flowers, they’ll just die sooner rather than later. And even if you leave without saying goodbye to a woman, I’ll bet everything I own you take very good care of her before you take off…don’t you?

GB officers constituted the main force at Stone and were selected from among the baddest-ass military units—SEALs, Marine Force Recon, Air Force Parajumpers, and the Army’s Combat Applications Group (formerly know as Delta Force). They wore civilian clothes and were equipped with the most advanced light weaponry on the planet.3

Hochschild wonders about the false self we create when we turn our happiness on and off like a light, when we use emotion as a commodity in the workplace. As women, we were taught to use our emotions at home, too, as a service to our families. ... The manufacture of happiness actually leads to emotional burnout. There's an ironic correlation between forced cheerfulness and depression. ... Delta Airlines, which institutionalized positive emotional management in the 1970s, now spends nine million dollars a year paying for antidepressants for its employees and their dependents. (Fuck Happiness, 64).

Delta Force Operator Captain Brian “Hutch” Hutchinson hated group therapy almost as much as he hated the mind-warping meds.

French Canadian treat.

Benoit began life in the year 1889, with the coming of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. There was never any plan to run track through the plantations south of Rosedale, but James Richardson, the largest individual cotton grower in the world at that time, offered the railroad free use of his land if, in turn, the company built him a station. James was the eldest son of Edmund Richardson, a planter whose holdings at one time included banks, steamboats, and railroads. He owned three-dozen cotton plantations and had a controlling interest in Mississippi Mills, the largest textile plant in the Lower South. His New Orleans-based brokerage house, Richardson and May, handled more than 250,000 bales of cotton every year. Edmund Richardson was not always so prosperous. By the end of the Civil War, he had lost almost his entire net worth, close to $1 million. So in 1868, Richardson struck a deal with the federal authorities in Mississippi to contract labor from the state penitentiary, which was overflowing with ex-slaves, and work the men outside prison walls. He promised to feed and clothe the prisoners, and in return, the government agreed to pay him $18,000 a year for their maintenance. The contract struck between Richardson and the State of Mississippi began an era of convict leasing that would spread throughout the South. Before it was over, a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions that were in many cases worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves. Confining his laborers to primitive camps, Richardson forced the convicts to clear hundreds of acres of dense woodland throughout the Yazoo Delta. When the land was cleared, he put prisoners to work raising and picking cotton on the plowed gound. Through this new system, Richardson regained his fortune. By 1880 he had built a mansion in New Orleans, another in Jackson, and a sprawling plantation house known as Refuge in the Yazoo Delta. When he died in 1886, he left his holdings to his eldest son, James. As an inveterate gambler and drunk, James decided to spend his inheritance building a new town, developed solely as a center for sport. He bought racehorses and designed a racetrack. He built five brick stores and four homes. In 1889, when the station stop was finally completed for his new city, James told the railroad to call the town Benoit, after the family auditor. James’s sudden death in 1898 put an end to his ambitions for the town. But decades later, a Richardson Street still ran through Benoit, westward toward the river, in crumbling tribute to the man.

How did you end up in all this? Working for Rubicon, I mean?’ She shot him a look, and he wondered if he had touched on a sore point. Lucy guided the Land Rover past a sluggish tanker truck and set her gaze on the view through the grimy windshield. ‘It’s no big deal,’ she said, at length. ‘I was Army green for a good while. No job for a lady, so my mom used to say. But I got a good eye, and I like guns. Delta was recruiting for Foxtrot Troop, so I opted in. Stayed for a tour.’ ‘I thought that was a myth,’ said Marc. ‘About Delta Force having an all-female squad . . .’ ‘Sure it is,’ Lucy replied evenly. ‘Just like it’s not true that British Intelligence has its own covert strike teams.’ ‘Fair point,’ he allowed. ‘Uncle Sam may be old-fashioned, but he ain’t stupid. Sometimes girls can get where boys can’t

After the United States entered World War I, Southern landowners had a new means of ensuring their laborers remained on plantations—the threat of the draft. In the summer of 1918 the army’s provost marshal, General Enoch Crowder, issued a “Work or Fight” order to all local exemption boards, allowing them to draft men who were not engaged in employment. Crowder’s order essentially federalized the local vagrancy laws that were already pervasive throughout the South. It was now up to the small-town sheriff, mayor, constable, and justice of the peace to identify “vagrants” and turn them in to the local exemption board to be shipped off to war. In the Delta, local defense councils adopted an identification system that required all blacks to carry a card listing their place of employment. The defense council requested national support in forcing “our negro labor to stay on the job six days in the week or they will be inducted into service.

In love with the leader of Vanguard, an ex-gang member, ex-Delta Force commander, and a guy who shoots first and asks questions later. Also known as Jax Mercury.

If she didn’t go, she’d wonder

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Quoting page 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

Put the bitch aside and fight for your man, Mary. He needs you.

We fight hard, we play hard, and we love hard. That’s just the way it is.

War has also taught me that each one of us contains every ingredient of the human recipe. By varying measure we are all cowards and brave men, thieves and honest men, selfish and selfless men, malingerers and champions, weasels and lions. The only question is how much of each attribute we allow—or force—to dominate our being.

If you don’t respect fear then there’s no way you can handle it. Fear can be damn dangerous, but if you can come to grips with it, wrestle it, understand it, then you’ve got a chance to work around it.

what technology could account for a living, breathing, bulletproof wolf, a beast that seemingly disappeared in midstride but left behind a chunk of its decaying flesh? What military or intelligence program can pull off a trick like that? What invisible soldier repeatedly slipped into Ellen Gorman’s locked bathroom (see page 239) and removed her towel and hairbrush? What Delta Force commando infiltrated her kitchen and unpacked her groceries from the cabinets? How many covert operatives did it take to surreptitiously invade the Gorman home for the purpose of taking the spatula out of the frying pan so that it could be hidden in the freezer? Which tough-as-nails marine was assigned the vital but routine task of switching the salt into the pepper shaker and the pepper into the salt shaker? To put it mildly, it’s a bit of a stretch.

I was a Delta Force operator on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, among other places. No one even knows we were in the Congo, you understand?” Brenna nodded. “I do. But that doesn’t mean I care, or that I even believe you.

The Admiral is one smooth talker on the radio. Most important in this business was his willingness to risk everything for his fellow man, an unhealthy but common trait among air force combat controllers.

During their brief history the newly formed Special Operations Forces had already achieved a notable record, but they had yet to tackle a major rescue of the magnitude of the Lady Flamborough hijacking. The orphan child of the Pentagon, the Special Operations Forces were not molded into a single command until the fall of 1989. At that time the Army's Delta Force, whose fighters were drawn from the elite Ranger and Green Beret units and a secret aviation unit known as Task Force 160, merged with the top-of-the-line Navy SEAL Team Six and the Air Force's Special Operations Wing. The unified forces cut across service rivalries and boundaries and became a separate command, numbering twelve thousand men, headquartered at a tightly restricted base in southeast Virginia. The crack fighters were heavily trained in guerrilla tactics, parachuting, wilderness survival and scuba diving, with special emphasis on storming buildings, ships and aircraft for rescue missions.

Stone, rock god. Now up on his rotation: “Play That Funky Music” by Wild Cherry. Jon jerked and whirled to the beat pounding his home above the Sunset Strip like a one-man boy band wrecking crew, every cell in his body a pulsing celebration. Jon Stone, naked as a jaybird, sixteen days back from a security stint in Turkmenistan on the northern Iranian border, had banked so much cash in the past twenty-four hours he buzzed with a burning energy. And play that funky music ’Til you die! Jon Stone sold death. Jon, who had spent thirteen years with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, six of which as a Delta Force officer, was a private military contractor. As such, he sold the services of those who could deliver death and those who could defend against death. Business was booming.

Minor also recalled that once Strider was in the legislature, he was not the same man that the world saw in Sumner during the Till murder trial. Although he is remembered for regularly insulting the black journalists in the hot, crowded courtroom in Sumner, his election to the Senate after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced him to deal with a black constituency that finally had the power of the ballot. Yet Strider would have been happy to rid the Delta of its black citizens. In February 1966, he cosponsored a bill to relocate Mississippi blacks to other states, as a new farm bill was making it harder for laborers to earn a living. A proposed relocation commission would seek federal funds for the removal of those who wanted to go. “If they (Negro farm workers) feel like they are put upon or have to live in tents and opportunities are brighter somewhere else, we’ll be glad to get them there,” said Strider’s cosponsor, Senator Robert Crook of Ruleville.96 Nothing ever came of the proposal, however.

One of the keys to survival in the wilderness is quality preparation. If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.

Whether in combat, business, or your personal life, to master any situation, no matter how complex; learn the lesson of Delta Force, of Lewis and Clark, and even John Walker Lindh: When in doubt, develop the situation!

That’s frustratingly common. “I’ve evaluated thousands of quartz samples from all over the world,” said John Schlanz, chief minerals processing engineer at the Minerals Research Laboratory in Asheville, about an hour from Spruce Pine. “Near all of them have contaminate locked in the quartz grains that you can’t get out.” Some Spruce Pine quartz is flawed in this way. Those grains, the washouts from the Delta Force of the quartz selection process, are used for high-end beach sand and golf course bunkers—most famously the salt-white traps of Augusta National Golf Club,16 site of the iconic Masters Tournament. A golf course in the oil-drunk United Arab Emirates imported 4,000 tons of this sand in 2008 to make sure its sand traps were world-class, too.

Rayne heard Ghost open the door to the house and when he didn’t immediately appear, went looking for him. She found him standing in the laundry room, staring at what she saw was simply a load of dirty clothes she hadn’t yet put into the washer. Ever since she’d asked to borrow the car while he was at work for the last week or so, Ghost had been picked up by Fletch and dropped off after work by one of the other guys on the team. This was the first time she could remember him coming into the house through the garage, and thus through the small laundry room. “Ghost? What are you doing? Are you all right?” He looked up at her. “You’re doing our laundry.” “Yeah? So? It was dirty. You didn’t want to walk around in nasty, smelly clothes did you?” Rayne had no idea what his deal was. Ghost dropped his duffle back on the floor and came toward her. “You’re doing our laundry.” “Yeah, Ghost. I am,” she repeated. “Ours. Our laundry.” “Did you hit your head today? I’m seriously worried about you.” Ghost picked her up by her waist and set her down on top of the washing machine. “I fucking love coming home and walking into my house and seeing your panties mixed up with my boxers. To come home and know you’re here. Waiting for me. You have no idea. None.” Chills broke out on Rayne’s arms and legs at Ghost’s words, but he didn’t stop. “This is what we fight for. This is what we’re willing to die for.” “For me to wash your dirty clothes?” Rayne had no idea what he was getting at. She wasn’t trying to be snarky, her question was genuine. Ghost leaned his head against hers and closed his eyes. She could feel his hands squeeze her waist and move up under her T-shirt to her lower back, where he stroked. She knew he understood exactly what he was doing. He wasn’t absently caressing her; he was running his hands over her tattoo, over their tattoo.

All my life, since I’ve worked with the team, we’ve rescued people, we’ve killed, we’ve gone into any and every situation, no questions asked. And every time I’ve come home to an empty house. I’ve done my own laundry, cooked my own food, cleaned my own space. I fucking love coming home to you, Princess. You make everything I’ve done, every sacrifice I’ve made, worth it.” “Ghost—” “I love you. I know it’s fast. I know people will call me pussy-whipped, but I don’t give a shit. You’re mine. I left you once, I won’t do it again. You were given to me to cherish, to protect, and to love. I’m not fucking that up again.” “Oh my God.” “I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m not even asking you to move in with me, although I’ve loved every second of you being here.

Hell, buy twelve boxes of tampons and three bottles of prenatal vitamins. That’ll confuse the clerk for sure.

Do you have any questions for me?” “What kind of physical activity is she cleared for?” Ghost asked with a straight face. “Oh my God, you did not just ask that,” Rayne hissed and smacked Ghost lightly on the arm.

Five hundred years ago, in the years leading up to the War, there was a Fae kingdom in the southern part of the continent. It was a realm of sand surrounding a lush river delta. The Black Land. There was no crueler place to be born a human—for no humans were born free. They were all of them slaves, forced to build great temples and palaces for the High Fae who ruled. There was no escape; no chance of having their freedom purchased. And the queen of the Black Land … ” Memory stirred in his face. “She made Amarantha seem as sweet as Elain,” Mor explained with soft venom.

In the third and fourth centuries B.C. the Red River Delta sustained two kingdoms, Au Lac and Van Lang, whose people the Chinese called simply southern, or Yuéh (Viêt in Vietnamese). During the ten centuries of Chinese suzerainty the Viêt peoples settled slowly into a new ethnic and cultural pattern. Vietnamese history began in Chinese writing, and the Vietnamese nation took shape along the political and cultural lines of force emanating from China.

Pulling back long enough to mumble, “Hey, sweetheart,” he put his hand on her back, pressing her harder against him. He didn’t give her a chance to respond. Taking her mouth again, Hollywood swore he heard birds singing and bells ringing. It was ridiculous, but nothing in his entire life felt as good as Kassie’s lips and tongue moving under his own.

All I’m saying is that I’m glad she found a man like you.” Chase’s chin fell to his chest in relief. It wasn’t that he needed Sean’s approval, but he sure was glad he had it. “Thanks. Means a lot.” “But if you hurt her, there’s nowhere on this planet you can hide from me or my brothers,” Sean concluded. Chase couldn’t help it. He chuckled. That was what he’d expected Sean to say when he claimed Sadie as his. “Right. Glad we got that out of the way.

Pages 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a laborer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labor was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty laborer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

the key to success on all battlefields—past, present, and future—has very little to do with electronic whiz-bang gadgets and top-secret technologies; instead, it’s all about how you think, how you make decisions, and how you execute those decisions

Yeah, I’m a geek, I knew what all that stuff was. When you’re out on a long deployment you play games to pass the time, and one of my favorites was old school Dungeons and Dragons. Geek I’ll take, call me a nerd and I’ll kill you with my pinky. Delta Force, yo.

By refocusing my mind on my mission, my responsibility to my men’s welfare, and then putting any thoughts of me completely out of the equation, I was able to recognize and adapt to a hauntingly familiar pattern of modern-day battlefield behavior while it unfolded in front of me (a leader misled by technology and misguided by hubris trying to make life-or-death decisions without the context of the guys on the ground). One

The power of the guiding principles shared in this book, such as “Always listen to the guy on the ground”; “When in doubt, develop the situation”; and “Don’t get treed by a Chihuahua

Getting treed by a chihuahua is a metaphor for making decisions without context. Context is the reality of the situation around us. Without context, our minds have a tendency to take shortcuts and recognize patterns that aren’t really there; we connect the dots without collecting the dots first. Overreacting, underreacting, and failing to do anything at all are all symptoms of “getting treed.

Don’t get treed by a chihuahua!” Before making mission-critical decisions, always ensure that you have context. It’s common sense.

In combat, when leaders make decisions without context, the cost is mission failure, and all too often, the price is paid with the blood of their men.

You have to take care of yourself, but you should only do so after you have taken care of the mission, and the men. Never put your own personal well-being, or advancement, ahead of the accomplishment of your mission and taking care of your men. . . .