Free Not a Good Day to Die by Sean Naylor

Delta’s six-month operator training course, newcomers were assigned to an assault troop. A few handpicked veterans would graduate to the squadron’s reconnaissance and surveillance, or “recce,” troop. Smaller than the other troops, the recce troop’s missions included penetrating enemy lines unseen, watching enemy positions, and sniping. (The use of the British abbreviation recce, rather than the more American recon, reflected Delta’s roots as an organization modeled along the lines of the British Special Air Service, or SAS, by its founder, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, who had served with the SAS as an exchange officer.) For reasons of operational security and practicality, Delta, now known also by its cover name of Combat Applications Group, was a very self-contained organization. The rest of the unit consisted of superbly trained and equipped mechanics, communications specialists, intelligence analysts, and other support troops, plus a headquarters staff. In addition, Delta had an aviation squadron based elsewhere on the East Coast, which also flew missions for the CIA.
    The first Delta squadron to deploy as TF Green for the war in Afghanistan was B Squadron. It came home in December. A Squadron took its place, but only for a few weeks. By January 1 A Squadron had been replaced by another commando element. But these operators were from SEAL Team 6 and went by the name Task Force Blue.
    Formed in 1980, SEAL Team 6 recruited its personnel from the rest of the Navy’s SEAL teams. The unit’s job was to conduct the same sort of antiterrorist direct action missions in which Delta specialized, but in a maritime environment. In other words, if terrorists threatened a cruise ship or an oil rig, Team 6 would likely get the call to take care of the situation. But the unit got off to a rocky start.
    Richard Marcinko, the unit’s charismatic and hard-drinking founder and first commanding officer, was a legendary SEAL. But his flamboyant—some would say cowboylike—personality proved divisive within the team and the wider SEAL community. He changed command in 1983, but the damage to the team’s reputation did not pass so easily. Marcinko’s abrasive personality and the freewheeling, devil-may-care attitude he imprinted on the new organization ensured that for the rest of the decade many Delta soldiers viewed their Navy counterparts with suspicion verging on scorn. In 1990, Marcinko was sentenced to twenty-one months in jail after being convicted of several charges in connection with a scheme to use his former Team 6 colleagues to bilk the U.S. Treasury of over $100,000. His conviction further tarnished the reputation of the organization he had built from the ground up.
    It took a few years, but after Marcinko’s departure, Team 6 slowly gained a measure of professionalism and respect. It also expanded, but, lacking Delta’s extensive support structure, it never grew to more than about a third of the size of its Army counterpart. Like Delta, the team acquired a cover name—Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DevGru—and matured so that by the early 1990s even some Army special operators felt its professionalism matched Delta’s. But as Team 6 became more proficient, the scorn Delta felt toward it evolved into antagonism as the Navy operators began to encroach on Delta’s turf, taking on land-based direct action missions that had been Delta’s exclusive preserve. Some of the bitterness—which was mutual—could be attributed to the fierce rivalry that had always existed between the respective special operations communities of the Army and Navy, from which both units recruited most of their men. One Navy officer who worked closely with both Army and Navy special ops forces described their relationship as “at best analogous to a sibling rivalry, and at worst, to a marriage coming apart.”
    Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the higher headquarters for both units, instituted a joint training regimen in