TIP OF THE SPEAR

Made-up Military Sci-Fi Adventure or Fictionalized History? Eh, both, I guess.

I despise it when someone sends me a YouTube link without any context; so much so, that I’m going to waste a whole blog telling you why you might want to watch this one.

BY DOC SPEARS

El Salvador is in the news a lot lately—due in no small part because they’re helping us out with our own crime problem—because their tiny country is touted as being one of the safest in the hemisphere. They make no bones about how that came to be; after literally decades of violence, they established a very no-tolerance policy that places its citizen’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness above the feels of those who sympathize with psychopathic criminals.

There was a time that the danger to El Salvador was not satanic drug gangs. It was terror at the hands of Marxist revolutionaries, who like all statists, believed their plan for a people’s paradise was so awesome that they were willing to maim and kill as much of the populace as it took until folks accepted their ideas as mandatory.

(Spoiler alert: the good guys won the 10-year civil war in El Salvador. Sadly, now there’re 10x more communists in our own institutions than there ever were wreaking havoc in 1980s El Salvador.)

I was there a lot during the height of the turmoil. And of all the things I did in Special Forces and since, it’s experiences from that period of my life that intrude into my thoughts almost daily.

My first book for Galaxy’s Edge—Dark Operator—was largely inspired by what I did and saw there (and other places—same for the rest of the series).

It took a long time for that series to catch on, mainly because it was so different than the other stories from the Legionnaire universe. Definitely my attempt at a thriller-type adventure that emphasized realism, both in setting and in how a special operator does things; albeit contained in the shoot-em-up universe of Legionnaire.

Here’s a secret; guys from my tribe tolerate—not embrace—most fiction based around the activities of any type of special operations. Because? Most authors have not a clue what constitutes special operations or the actual skill sets of a special operator.

Most entertainment about special operations-type stuff is nothing but bad tropes about “special” soldiers who are so because they do something better than the common soldier; like run faster, lift heavier weights, shoot better, etc., and that their abilities to do special missions are a result of those things. I’m here to tell you, me and mine base the likeability of any of those types of books and movies on what the least annoying or stupid part about them is.

While elite abilities are true about special operators, the main ingredient that defines them is their intelligence. Because actual special operations mean being the tip of the spear of a foreign policy objective; and 99 times out of a hundred, that doesn’t involve assassinating someone or blowing something up. It means working silently, often with diplomats and the clandestine services; by, with, and through the folks of the country your own government is trying to shape—all to avoid ending up embroiled in a full-scale overt war in the region. It’s how it is in the here and now, and it’s how it’d be if you were in Dark Ops and the tool of the House of Reason.

Special Operations historian Bud Gibson has a YouTube Channel called The Reconnaissance Cast. He specializes in the history of the secretive Special Forces projects of the Vietnam War, like the Studies and Observations Group, and reached out to me, curious about a rumor that our teams from Panama had a disproportionately high number of former Vietnam SOG-vets, which I confirmed. We had plenty of Vietnam-era SF, SOG, and Detachment-A Berlin guys, who all came to Panama to get the chance to run missions in El Salvador. He asked me about the war and the conditions placed on Special Forces there, and I agreed to step up and try my best to put it in perspective; it’s a part of special operations and American history that remains secretive and virtually unacknowledged.

We just hit the 38^th anniversary of remembrance of the first Special Forces’ combat death in the El Salvadoran Civil War. He was a good friend of mine. I was at an outpost in another part of the country, listening on the radio as his brigade was attacked, unable to do anything for him.

When someone sends me a link to a YouTube video there is an approximate 1% chance I’ll watch it—especially if it’s longer than about 3 minutes. Not trying to be a jerk, but who’s got that kind of time on their hands? Not me.

So if you do take the time, here’s what I tell—a lot of it for the first time anywhere:

1. Why did Central America almost fall to one Marxist revolution after another? (Hint: like a lot, it was the result of the fecklessness of a guy named James Earl Carter Jr.)

2. If all of our southern neighbors were getting ready to fall behind a new iron curtain, why didn’t our country respond in a way proportionate to the emergency? (Hint: post-Vietnam, our country adopted the mentality of a beaten dog.)

3. Didn’t Reagan change all that? (Hint: Congress hamstrung the plan—BIG TIME.)

4. Yeah, but weren’t there “death squads” and severe human rights abuses by the government forces? (Hint: there were. And we went there to stop them. And we did. And it would’ve happened faster if we hadn’t been so hamstrung.)

5. Weren’t the guerillas just poor peasants fighting for freedom? (Hint: I bet you’ve never heard about the atrocities the guerillas committed on their own countrymen!)

6. How hard could it have been? It’s not like the poor guerillas had any support! (Hint: the entirety of the worldwide Marxist/communist terror network was at work to see the U.S. fail in El Salvador.)

7. Why didn’t we know Special Forces was there fighting a war at the time, and why don’t we now? (Hint: because from the beginning our government’s plan was for us to operate with plausible deniability. Which is one of the many reasons it was a mission for Special Forces—We. Don’t. Talk. About. What. We. Do.)

Why did I agree to talk about it now? Because it’s been almost 40 years, and there are less and less of us all the time who remain to tell the story. And it deserves to be known; by the current and future operators of Special Forces, and by the country we fought for.

Anyway, there’ll be a part two and part three of the interview, and I’ll put them up in the next blogs with a shorter synopsis for each, because I hate it more than anyone when someone just posts a YouTube link.