Authors: Richard Marcinko,John Weisman
Echo Platoon (47 page)
All entries preceded by an asterisk (*) are pseudonyms.
1
Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.
2
Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.
3
The climbing of the greased Herndon obelisk, named after Commander William Lewis Herndon, USN, is supposed to represent the three most important aspects of life at the United States Naval Academy: discipline, teamwork, and courage. Oh, that those were actually the values they taught there. If they were, we’d have a lot better Navy than we do.
4
Close Quarters Combat.
5
According to current NAVSPECWAR doctrine, it should take no more than four minutes to swim a hundred yards under combat conditions.
6
No, the Stans are not Maurice and his family. They are all those former Soviet republics that are now independent states, like Kazak
stan,
Turkmeni
stan,
Kyrgy
zstan,
and Tajiki
stan,
to name a few.
7
“Leadership,” growls Roy, “can be defined in two words:
‘follow me!’ ”
8
That’s what they’re calling SEAL Team Six these days. In Navyspeak, there’s even an acronym, DEVGRP, which stands for Naval Special Warfare DEVelopment GRouP.
9
Patella
is a silly-sounding word, isn’t it? But lemme tell you, silly or not, it fucking hurts when you smack it the way I did.
10
Tango-in-question.
11
Happily Ever After.
12
Good News and Bad News.
13
Improvised Explosive Device.
14
Yes, I hear you, screaming about why the fuck wasn’t I wounded, given that this bad guy was shooting at me from less than ten feet away. Well, the fact of the matter is that most CQC takes place at less than five yards (most rooms are small); and if you are not trained in CQC shooting, you will miss your target because you will forget every fucking one of the basics of stress shooting and your rounds will go wild. I know of one incident in Detroit, where a gunfight took place on a six-by-eight-
foot
balcony. The bad guy sprayed seventeen rounds out of his Glock at a cop. Said cop emptied his Sig Sauer 226—sixteen shots in all directed at the malefactor. And guess what? Neither one was fucking hit. The cop had to subdue the suspect with his fists—and in doing so, he broke his hand. Believe me, shooting is a frangible skill. That’s why we train the way we do. Only by constant practice can we achieve the ability to hit what we shoot at under the sorts of stressful conditions I’m illustrating here.
15
You want specs? Okay. The Specialized Technical Services (STS) Model 2722 is a generation III low-profile night-vision goggle. It has an unaided horizontal fov (field of view) of 165 degrees, a vertical fov of ninety degrees, and an intensified fov of forty degrees. The unit operates off of two independent lithium batteries, and has two levels of light-intensity controls. Two infrared illuminators give you the capability of operating in zero ambient light. You can wear the 2722 while looking through a rifle scope. You can wear them for parachute ops. They will withstand immersion in salt water for two hours at a depth of three meters. And they weigh a mere seven-hundred grams—just over one and a half pounds.
16
Look it up in the glossary if you can’t figure it out.
17
That’s a dick (but not a Richard) in Azeri.
18
United Nations Security COMmand. The guys who tried, despite Secretary of State Albright’s meddling, to uncover Saddam Hussein’s chemical/biological/ nuclear weapons-manufacturing sites.
19
That’s how Iranians tell you to go fuck yourself.
20
Taped, Tied, and Stashed.
21
The CAR-15 is the short, carbine version of the .223 caliber M-16; much more suited to SpecOps than the bigger weapon.
22
No, his name’s not really Jim Wink. If his name was Jim Wink, it wouldn’t have an asterisk next to it in the index. Asterisks are reserved for pseudonyms.
23
That’s spook-talk for the National Security Agency.
24
Russian slang for fixer and Azeri for asshole.
25
Shit.
26
White phosphorous.
27
Rigid Inflatable Boats.
28
A Schedule C official is a political appointee.
29
SEALspeak for Blow-Job Bill, the Leader of the Free World.
30
AMAN is the acronym for Agaf Modiin, which translates out from the Hebrew as Intelligence Branch of the General Staff.
31
You can read about it in
Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold.
32
“Leaders” are how many Europeans and Middle Easterners refer to editorials.
33
That’s how the ABB designated its assassination squads.
34
Hits like this one cannot be accomplished on the spur of the moment. You want evidence? Okay. When the Israelis went after a notorious Hamas capo named Haled Mesha’al in Amman, Jordan, back in 1996, Mossad put the mission together too quickly. The intel was faulty. The team didn’t stake out the subject long enough to track how he moved, and who went with him. They didn’t work long enough on their extraction routes, or war-game the Murphy factors. The unhappy result was that the Mossad assassins were chased by Haled’s bodyguards, waylaid, and captured by the Jordanians, causing the Israelis a profound political problem with their one true friend in the Arab world, the late King Hussein. As is usual in these sorts of fuckups, the top people in Mossad’s ops division, who’d allowed this travesty of an operation to go forward despite the fact that they were putting their own officers’ lives at risk, kept their jobs.
35
Area of Operations.
36
TECHnical INTelligence, SIGnals INTelligence, and ELectronics INTelligence.
37
Fist of Allah.
38
The photographer’s vest is a wonderful garment. It hangs low enough to hide most weapons from sight. It has eleven pockets into which all sorts of goodies can go. And because my vest was custom built by my friends at the CIA’s Technical Services Division, it has inside pockets that can hold Class III-A ceramic armor plates, although I wasn’t wearing any ceramic plates today.
39
Intelligence Company has a new designator, ever since its cover was blown a couple of years back. But I’m not going to tell you what it is, because the folks there have asked me to keep their identity secure. And if you don’t like that, well fuck you very much.
40
Shabak (sometimes also known as Shin Beth) is the Hebrew acronym for
Sherut ha-Bitachon ha-Klali,
which translates as, “The General Security Service.” Shabak’s overall mission includes counterespionage, counterterrorism, and protective security.
41
A Piece of Cake.
42
Copain
is Frog for
pal
.
43
That’s Kraut for
shithead
.
44
Let me tell you that there are a lot of perfect-score shooters who can’t do fuck-all in combat. That is why I train the way I do, emphasizing stress shooting and nasty conditions and moving targets that fuck with the ol’ Rogue mind. That way, when the
merde
hits the old
ventilateur,
I’ll be able to kill my enemy, while the guy wearing the “Expert” marksman’s medal will be lying dead.
45
You can probably figure out that it stands for Big Burly Guy No. 2.
46
That’s Russkie slang for “I piss on your grave, punk.” To paraphrase Spencer Tracy, I may not know much Russian, but what I
do
know is cherce.
47
Hello.
48
Russkie idiom for “To hell.” Literally, “into the cunt.”
49
The literal translation is “black currants.” It’s Russkie Mafiya slang for
vori
(Mafiyosi) from Georgia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.
50
Article 88 of the Universal Code of Military Justice forbids anyone in the military from making disparaging comments about the civilian leadership of the armed forces. The bottom line is that I may die defending
your
First Amendment rights, but while I wear the uniform of this nation,
I
don’t have any First Amendment rights.
51
The six phases of any SpecWar mission are: Premission, Insertion, Infiltration, Actions at Objective, Exfiltration, and Postmission.
52
Fred runs the newest Kraut CT strike force, known as KSK, or Kommando Spezialkräfte. You can read about him—and it—in
Rogue Warrior: Option Delta.
53
Open Source INTelligence.
54
Whiskey-Number is the code word designator for the National Security Agency’s highest-priority intercepts. Whiskey-Numbers go directly to the president’s desk, eyes only, by way of the DCI. It occurs to me that there will probably be taps put on all my phones because I told you about their existence.
55
Major Robert Roger was the first American SpecWarrior. He led a band of buckskin-clad, flintlock-and-hatchet-carrying commandos during what’s come to be known as the French and Indian War, and he tore the French and the Indians some new assholes with his unconventional tactics. Anyway, in 1759, Roger wrote nineteen Standing Orders to his troops. They are the original Commandments of SpecWar, and they’re as valid today as they were when Roger wrote them. Standing Order Seventeen goes like this: “If somebody’s trailing you, make a circle, come back on your own tracks, and ambush the folks that aim to ambush you.” Well, the technique works whether you’re on a trail in the woods, or the trail of someone trying to track down information. Ergo, Merc made a figurative circle back onto his own track, and was thus able to pinpoint where the queries were coming from.
56
Remember, those are NonGovernmental Organizations.
57
That’s SEALspeak for retired.
58
Lower Than Whale Shit.
59
That’s the way we SEALs refer to West Virginia.
60
Document-In-Question, and of course pronounced “Dick.”
61
Wrong place and wrong time.
62
That’s a Hebrew idiom for sons of bitches. The literal translation is “sons of whores.”
63
Big Ugly Round Thing.
64
It has always surprised me how tangos tend to keep such copious records. If I was a bad guy I wouldn’t want to have evidence around that could incriminate me. But from Che Guevara to Yasser Arafat, from Abu Nidal to Osama bin Laden, they just keep doin’ it. Makes my work that much easier.
65
If you can’t figure it out, look it up in the glossary.
66
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
67
That’s more Russian cop slang for the local Mafiya.
68
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
69
Foreign Service Officer.
70
Shorthand for
chornye smorodiny,
or Caucasian Mafiya (see footnote 49, page 149).
71
The United States Special Operations COMmand, based at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.
72
Yes, I know that Ram-Air chutes are actually not made of silk—in fact, no chutes are made of silk these days. But when I first threw myself out of a perfectly good aircraft, parachutes
were
made of silk. And “silk” is how I still refer to ’em. And if you don’t like it, then go fuck yourself—and buy someone else’s book.
73
Desired Impact Point.
74
Visual flight rules.
75
© 1994–2000, Richard Marcinko and John Weisman.
76
Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion.
77
Remember, that’s the Directorate for the Surveillance of the Territory, France’s internal security and counterintelligence organization.
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