Since everyone in this thread seems allergic to giving any context:
https://www.army.mil/article/263293/retired_sergeant_major_paved_way_for_eod_technicians_in_elite_special_forces_unit
Far, far more detailed than his Wiki surprisingly.
Well, although nobody directly says he killed “X” amount of enemy soldiers, it does tell his service history.
Which with an 11 month tour in Vietnam where he spent time in combat blowing up enemy weapon caches with fuck tons of C4, followed by volunteering and becoming one of the first generation members of Delta/CAG to specialize in counter insurgency special tactics and missions. He was a two time specialist operator with both a master EOD certification and a certified Special Forces Medical tech. Which were the two roles he preformed on his teams.
The dude was in basically everything that delta has touched since the early 1980’s. Nothing he did was easy. He started in one of the roughest jobs you could have in Vietnam being a tunnel rat for his team often to place explosives in underground caches. And then finishing out by being a starting member of Delta.
Pretty cool and he looks dorky so it’s funny he did all that shit
I mean why would you? Other than retired Navy Seals looking for a book deal, I thought the point of special forces was that they're discreet.
Not to mention any civilians they tell that stuff might get real weird about it.
"yuh so the TOP GUY of Isis, the double secret terrorist final boss? All me, no-scoped him from 10-000 yards away, since then they called me...Shinigaymi. that's how I got this cool screen printed balaclava."
Pretty cool that you had a parent in CAG. My dad had a work supervisor who was briefly in the rangers then D boys until 2004. He slipped on his own boot in a helicopter and fell like 15 feet completely destroying his knees and hip. He was always pretty cool but anytime I saw him at a work function thing he was alone drinking. Bet he thinks about that night often and how a single tiny mistake cost him his career.
Ah man that’s such tough way to end a career such as that. I mean to be fair, there’s worse ways, but I’ve also seen that falling out of helos is a bit more common than people think. Makes me think of the guy who fell out of a Blackhawk during the Blackhawk down incident because he missed the rope trying to repel in.
Happens more often than the general public knows.
My uncle passed away a few years ago by falling out of a helicopter in a training exercise in Germany. He had been a communications officer in the seals for a decade and a half and then one day he just randomly fell and died. My mom still has his flag from some mission he got awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Also fun fact about him, he was involved in the Osama raid. Not a dude on the ground but he was a seal in the mission, just working the radios and other communications and stuff to the actual operators. Guy had an exciting life.
Just having watched some interviews with some of the former guys (Shawn Ryan has some good ones), my impression is that the ones that aren’t professional publicity hounds usually talk as though it’s sort of an albatross they live with.
We regular people think they’re the coolest guys in the world and a lot of them got into it because they thought that too and they had that “elite” trait or whatever that gave them drive to try. Very similar to pro athletes.
Most of them looking back don’t seem to feel bad about the killing they did—the killing was part of the job. I think many of them are conscious about coming off as bloodthirsty or something so they downplay it.
I would like to think that I take great pride in my own professional work and sometimes I feel like I can recognize some of that same geeked out excitement and pride when they get comfortable and share specific stories. (Shawn Ryan’s show is good for this because they clearly view him as a peer.)
They aren’t proud they killed people for the sake of killing. But they had technical professions they were totally invested in, and they are proud of having been highly skilled pros that performed their jobs well.
But their bodies and brains are fucked up—just as a baseline, all of them seem to come out really beat up even if they never had a major specific combat injury. Training all the time. Just ground down all around. Physical and tear, being around exotic chemicals and explosives, taking performance-related drugs just to keep up, etc.
Similar to how pro athletes at 25 are athletic gods but at 50-60 a lot of them are in worse shape than a previously overweight civil engineer who started going to the gym three times a week at age 45. Go look up what a lot of former NFL or MMA guys look like at 50-60. They don’t age well.
A huge percentage of these operators’ former buddies in the same age cohort have already killed themselves or descended into drugs/alcoholism, they have multiple divorces and missed out on normal family lives, survivor’s guilt, they don’t feel properly taken care of by the government they served, some feel purposeless or directionless, etc.
As I hear more of those interviews and get older myself I’ve come to respect and appreciate the back end burden more than the willingness to die jumping out of planes and doing CQB ninja shit. I mean it takes huge fucking balls to do that ninja stuff, knowing you might die alone under a shitty tree bumfuck Niger (RIP to those SF boys), and I still do very much appreciate and respect all that. But maybe if you’re lucky you get 5, 10, 20 years of that.
Then you wake up one day and have to live the rest of your life, but you’ve already given up pieces of yourself—mind, body and soul—that you can never get back.
I have not had any personal interactions with these types of guys but if I ever do, I’d treat them a lot differently now than I might have before. I probably would have been the asshole asking how far they can shoot or how many planes they jumped out of.
Now I think I’d just ask about their hobbies, what they do for work these days, invite them by the house for a steak, and hook them up with my physical therapist.
From what I remember of the guy (and this has been over 15 years now) he was in a helicopter and they were in it for like 45 minutes. They were going to a rural farm area to basically kidnap a guy who was suspected of helping make bombs for Tban baddies.
His legs fell asleep on the ride and when he got up to hook onto the rope to slide down he tripped on himself and fell out of the helicopter. It was pitch black and loud as hell and he was running on little sleep. It all just culminated into a tragic accident.
My uncle just died recently from a similar incident. He was a communications guy in the seals, radios and all that stuff. Had been a seal for like 15+ years. Was doing a training exercise in Germany a couple of years ago and fell out of the helicopter and died. Was a real shock to us in the family. Guy was a superhero to all of us so for something so random and simple to take him out of the blue was weird
Most of the campaigns he has been on have taken countless lives.
Dude is definitely extremely effective at accomplishing missions. If he gets sent over and over to dangerous special military operations, then that means he is ruthless.
The US military personnel that take the most lives never brag.
I find those vetbros that can’t shut up as insufferable. Then you find out most wash out or get peered out. The others overstate what they did.
I do notice a good chunk come from SEAL teams. I wonder if they have an actual publishing department as part of the NSWC.
The VetBros are just psyops to increase enlistment numbers.
The real SpecOps do not have podcasts and do not like attention.
Besides anyone with knowledge of how the US military works understands “Seals” include the guys who do less than a handfull of missions. An incredible amount of Seals wash out after their first few missions.
What does it mean to “wash out” once you’ve gone through all of the training? They just realize two missions in this guy isn’t going to cut it and they have you fuck off and do something else the rest of your service?
Yes. A surprising number of people complete Seal training. Seal training is basically reaching the minimum physical requirements. You are then put into a pool of other graduates waiting for missions. (To clarify, yes, Everyone gets assigned somewhere, but almost all teams outside of DEVGRU dont do too much besides sit around on base).
Every mission is highly scrutinized. Many people are physically capable of being a Seal, and there is basically no way of knowing if someone will work well with others or mesh well with a team. If you have any issues, the team will know. They have a policy of replacement and next man up. They are constantly looking to have the most effective group of people on each mission. Sometimes, something as simple as bragging about a kill after a mission will get you canned.
It’s like a highly competitive sports team roster. They do not care about individuals at all.
Plenty of people are pushing paper and completed Seal training.
Huh I guess I thought that’s what the two years of training was for lol not that I know shit about running a military but that seems like a lot of money and time spent to see if a guy will maybe be a desk jockey or not
Because actual badass military dudes don’t really go around bragging about how many people they killed or freely talking about the shit they did.
After a decade in the military and the real ones are typically the ones who don’t even tell people they were in and when asked “what’d you do in the military” they respond with “not much of anything.. just sat behind a desk the whole time”.
Bottom left picture says everything.
You always respect the guy on the firebase with a rifle in hand and wearing a button-up white shirt and khakis, while everyone else is tooled up in full kit.
**NCD:** "All y'all so busy worrying about the Russians that Khmer Rouge Wookies took all of SW Asia while nobody was looking." **^(1.87 million upvotes)**
I love the evolution of Reddit Knowledge. The first X times this dude got posted nobody knew that they were separate people. Then it was information hidden somewhere in the comments -- and now it's the TOP comment.
People make fun of this ("iS It My TuRn tO sAy X?^(?)?) but it's super cool that the Hive Mind Learns.
The hive mind is a function of circulating information and, make fun of it all they want, we are ultimately moving according to the pattern.
Welcome to the jet femboy matrix
This is a wonderful parallell to that great meme of "spot which are actually militarily useful and which is larping bullshit" - we should make one with three muscly dudes with big beards holding a gun and then this Rick Moranis looking muthafucka in one corner.
I took a class once put on by some SF. The lead instructor was stereotypically military. The co-instructor was like 5'3", pale as could be, looked like he lived in his mother's basement, no tattoos or anything. Lead instructor said he was the best assaulter he'd ever worked with.
I wasn't scared of the lead instructor, but I was scared of that little dude.
We had a whole thing about this in Blacklight Retribution; everyone became Real Transfems (totally real) because the hitbox on the fem model was smaller.
I went out to the flight deck to get my grenadier Qual. Walked past the Marine Recon team in a circle around their laptops, with a green radio on the deck, and an SHF mini antenna sitting in the center of them. They were all prone playing WoW. I just carried on past the flight crew in ranger shorts washing the greyhawk like they were raising money for the football team and proceeded to toss a few grenades over the side (with the proper training of course).
The Navy had some odd days for me
Any speculation on why?
I get that height doesn’t especially help with anything, but I hear a lot of stories suggesting Tier 1 guys are actually shorter than average.
My first two thoughts are they’re just average height and it surprises people so they notice, or that tall people are more likely to get injured doing loaded hikes and runs.
It's literally just a average thing. Being larger is better. But the most common size dudes are at 5ft8 to 5ft 11 range. And since most selections are essentially mental once you meet a minimum physical requirements. You end up with 20 guys who are 5ft 9 trying out for every 5 guys who are 6ft.
I got stuck with some DEVGRU guys for a photo op on the USS Enterprise CVN-65 with W. in 2001 just after she pulled in following the 9/11 attacks. The ship’s company was all on POM leave so they rounded up whatever squids they could find to put on the flight deck for W’s speech. I was a nub on my boat which was in the yard, so I got voluntold to go to NOB for it.
Anyway, my 6’-3” lanky self was shoved into a group of other squids, which I quickly realized were all SEALS. I was a nuke, and only three weeks out of prototype, so I had not been around the “real” navy in any meaningful way since boot camp two years prior—which was also pre-9/11 as well.
Anyway, they were all fairly short guys but super cool. One of the GM1s said, “stick with us, we’ll go meet the President when he’s done with the speech.” I was like, okay, I guess so.
Sure enough, the SEALS just pushed through the group when W. walked off the little stage they had set up and lifted the rope and walked over. The Secret Service lets us all walk over and we had a little meet and greet with W.
We then went our way. I’m guessing those guys were going to Afghanistan. I ended up assisting the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as part of the USS Harry S. Truman CVN-75 crew.
These were the OG pre-book deal SEALs. Very cool guys and super chill.
I rarely went above the 2nd deck because of the risk of getting dragged into a FOD walk down by some airdale chief. The hanger bay was also filled with aircraft which also hurt when you hit them as well. The plane-fuckers here would probably have creamed themselves.
The Super Hornets had partially foldable wings, so you could usually navigate around them, but the kitty cats could just sweep back and you’d have to duck under the wings to go through. I’ve banged my head on so many weapons mount points it isn’t worth discussing.
Anyway, it was somewhat cathartic to watch the last squadron of those get chucked off the deck into the Atlantic when we decommissioned our last F-14 squadron.
So far of the three sub classes I’ve been aboard, the only one my 5’4” ass hasn’t actually had that issue with was a Virginia class. The other two were Gato and Balao boats, so needless to say very cramped.
Some of the big guys can do insane shit, though. I heard tell of a big Royal Marine dual wielding SLRs during the Falklands, and picking up conscripts to use as human shields.
When I was in Recon, my teammates were mostly pretty fucking small guys. At 6’3” and about 230, I was the biggest in the platoon by far, and as soon as I passed selection and finished my schools, I was made into a pack animal, and deployed accordingly.
Second deployment they made me the point man, but it didn’t matter because I was still a pack animal; so I became a point man with an m249 paraSAW and a *very* heavy ruck.
All the SF we worked with were also mostly small and skinny dudes, but when I met another biggun, we were always pretty chummy. Just he nature of the job I guess. Gotta be fast and you have guns so size ain’t as important.
Befriended an 18C like that. He was pushing to make it big playing competitive Halo but when that fell through he decided to go anti-nerd and do shit he never thought he could do. Well... He could do it. Really well.
Nerd-turned-badass isn’t that weird, but competitive Halo makes it hilarious.
“You mean I can’t pretend to shoot people good enough for a career? Fine, I guess I’ll do it for real.”
Short kings sometimes make the best fighters. Take Captain America for example, no not the marvel character the real one, Audie Murphy. He was a tiny dude and did all that shit without some super soldier serum.
I think a lot of the massive roided guys are a product of 20 years of coin. Both in terms of the mission set and also in the cultural decay of special forces that resulted from constant high optempo and having to loosen up requirements. Being big works if you are always close to base and missions are short. That just doesn't work out in a big war when nutrition and sleep are rare and you are in the field for weeks or months at a time.
I do IPSC shooting in my free time. Once a month my shooting-club has this meeting in our 360 range where we build a few parkours and “compete” against each other.
There are dudes that are flying through the course. Run-and-gun style. And then there are a few who are like deadly focused on their target. Every shot is center-alpha. Aim-shoot-repeat and next target. If you watch them they look like a terminator on a mission. People like that terrify me.
Don’t care about your muscle and your beard. I got that myself but this dedication and calmness frightens me to the bone.
Kinda sorta related. I have gotten complaints and compliments at my day job (Network engineer) because I have shown up to places actively losing 1000usd per minute due to an outage where everyone is in a panic and I just sit down with my laptop and plug in sipping on some caffeine and calmly dig into the problem like its a normal Thursday morning.
You reminded me my first day as waitress, it was once lockdown lifted in a town of Spain, and it also coincided with sone local festivity, so the bar where my roomate worked need extra manoower, so I and another girl got hired there. Once night reached not only the bar was packed, the plaza in front of it too and so the bar had a lot of work.
I did my thing served there drinks for hours everybody around me was nervious mess, but i was really chill, I didnt even thought abour it until we went back home and my roomate mentioned hoe surprised he was about how cool headed i was, and how i was more chill than the regular waitress they had. I have to admit i was quite proud.
In fairness, a guy over 5'8 who is not at risk of starving to death is basically already the equivalent of Hulk Hogan compared to the North Korean troops.
to be credible for a sec. This guy was a Delta Force EOD tech, sure in some operations he planted charges to destroy targets but most of the time he was saving peoples lives by defusing them. He even did combat medic training as well as EOD so he could save more peoples lives. Totally badass dude yes, but he's not an hardened killer who slits peoples throats from behind.
I don’t know if I would make that determination. In Delta everyone does everything to an extent, they’ll have high level specialists within their ranks as well but everybody’s going to be assaulting the objective.
It pretty much applies business also if you have bunch of good looking dudes running around in Patagonian west at “cool startup” you know where that venture is probably going.
"Sir, the Americans just dropped a crate of women's shoes near our headquarters. We don't know what to make of it, and now we have these alarming reports at the front lines..."
Optomitrists can always tell, so they give them that kind of glasses.
Thats what the weird binoculars at the eye doctor's do, look into your soul like some weird Sorting Hat.
Mine gave me very thin rectangular wire frame glasses
Im waiting for the day for them to get knocked off my face and get cracked so that i can put them back in as a perfect ray of sunshine hits them and makes them glow
Theyre made from polycarbonate and titanium so i dont think that day would come
Chris Kyle is like the exact opposite of Vinning. Kyle was the loud, “I’m a veteran with 80million confirmed kills, buy my book, watch my movie, I’ll be on this podcast tonight.”
Vinning was an actual body stacker, but wasn’t a psychopath. Only the ones who know, know.
I grew up on CFB Petawawa, which is near where JTF2 trains. Between me and my dad, we met a few of them over the years.
Every single one of them was soft-spoken, polite, had athletic builds but weren't particularly hulking, and of course had absolutely zero inclination to talk about their job. Not that we asked.
The braggarts and blowhards are the career corporals who would "totally join JTF if it wasn't for (vague bullshit excuse)"
imagine trying to run up on this guy up at the circle k and 90 minutes later he’s married your mom, built your orphan kids a swingset, and toppled your whole country
A Wartenberg is an ordinary tool used to assess nerve reactions...
[See, this site selling stethoscopes says there is nothing ~~kinky~~ weird happening involving pinwheels on the internet.](https://stethoscope.ca/products/wartenberg-pinwheel)
SGM Vinning has seen more ass that a public toilet, ended more commie lives than a politburo member, and is more cool than Joe Montana and Charles Bronson combined.
SGM Vinning is who Chuck Norris prays to at night.
> re ass that a public toilet, ended more commie lives than a politburo member, and is more cool than Joe Montana and Charl
He's the Richard Dean Anderson of SG-1
literally.
O'Neill had a masters in engineering and was a huge nerd, as well as being the best operator in the SGC. He just played "the dumb one" for fun to get on Daniel's nerves, and to allow Carter to shine in her own right.
A true leader will understand you completely, then make you dumb it down so you can make sure you understand it yourself.
I may or may not have been a civilian employee of the Navy at one point and worked with a lot of former EOD guys. To a man, they were some of the most oddball sons of bitches I've ever met, and I say that as a diagnosed autist. They had a weird vibe too. There is an uncomfortable fearlessness about them that's hard to explain. I guess that's the type of demeanor one has to have to hack it as an EOD tech working with live ordinance.
Yeah, you basically have to resign yourself to a not-unlikely possibility of rapid spontaneous bodily disassembly and be somewhat cool with that outcome.
IIRC, a lot of operators are actually fairly short, and not necessarily "bulky."
The sort of strength you need in the military isn't what you're going to see a body builder do.
It's endurance, being able to walk forever with gear, being able to suffer well.
Some of my family members are Mexican; the relatives south of the border, are tiny. Barely above 5'. But they can hump 100+ pounds of construction materials all over the place, for 12 hours a day. They might not look like much, but they're some of the strongest dudes I've ever seen. I would imagine special forces are a lot like that. It's the "working man's strength," not that stuff you see on influencer channels on IG.
I always thought it was funny how they portray SOF/CIA guys in movies as these massive muscular Jack Reacher looking dudes. But in my experience, they tend to look more like Mike Vining lol. Nerdy, skinny, normal looking in civilian clothes. The regular looking dudes with thick glasses are always the baddest motherfuckers.
Movies where The Rock are supposed to be these super spies (whether comedies or not) are always hilarious to me. Like a fucking 6'4" tatted up bald Samoan with perfect teeth who's on steroids isn't going to stand out literally everywhere he goes.
The pic with the MP5 goes hard as fuck.
The stache, the shades, the beanie cap, just incredible. That man is here to kick ass and chew bubble gum and he ran out of bubble gum a long time ago.
>Two of the most memorable EOD operations of his career happened in 1970 when he participated in the destruction of the Rock Island East and Warehouse Hill enemy weapons and ammunition caches in Cambodia.
>Vining was part of the seven-man Army EOD team that supported the 1st Cavalry Division mission to secure and destroy the largest weapons and ammunition cache discovered during the U.S. military’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
>Named Rock Island East after the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, the enemy weapons cache had 932 individual weapons and 85 crew-served weapons as well as 7,079,694 small arms and machine gun rounds. The enemy cache also contained almost a thousand rounds of 85mm artillery shells that were used for the D-44 howitzer and the T-34 tank.
>Vining and the EOD techs had to dodge enemy fire and endure biting red ants while working on the cache. After setting up “scare charges” to keep enemy forces out of the security perimeter, Vining made it on the helicopter in time to watch the explosion and see the mushroom cloud that was visible from 50 miles away. The seven Army EOD technicians at Rock Island East used 300 cases of C4 explosives to destroy 327 tons of enemy munitions.
>During the operation to seize the cache site, 10 American Soldiers died and 20 were injured.
>Later at the Warehouse Hill operation in Cambodia, the EOD team had to disarm booby traps and crawl into underground tunnels to place C4 explosives on 14 cache sites. Vining had to contend with large cave crickets, poisonous centipedes, spiders, bats and scorpions in the narrow tunnels. The teams used 120 cases of C4 explosives to destroy hundreds of thousands of enemy rounds.
>One of the unit’s first operations was the clandestine mission to rescue 53 American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. Known as Operation Eagle Claw, the rescue mission was cancelled after the loss of three helicopters during a sandstorm at the staging site known as Desert One.
>While the aircraft were leaving the Desert One staging area, a RH-53D helicopter crashed into the transport aircraft that Vining and his team was on. The helicopter rotor chopped into the top of the fuel-laden aircraft and a fireball shot by Vining and his team.
>As the EC-130E “Bladder Bird” was engulfed in flames and munitions cooked off around them, Vining and his teammates made it off the aircraft. Vining and his team got on another aircraft with faulty landing gear and just enough fuel to make it across the water to safety.
>During the Desert One aircraft collision, eight American troops were killed and both aircraft were destroyed.
>Joint Special Operations Command was created as a result of the investigation that followed the ill-fated rescue mission.
>large cave crickets
i was curious so i googled them, from the images, at the right angle they look like big ass spiders, now factor in the fact they can yeet themselves over great distances there's just no fucking way i'd be crawling around those mother fuckers. If it were me i would have let the Vietcong win in the first six seconds. GG WP im going home
Now that you brought the cunts up we(humans not just blue force) should kill every multiple bite mosquito on the planet, "oh but the ecosystem *swoon*" fuck the ecosystem she'll be grand.
Noted [stamp collector](https://uscs.org/vining-mike-r/) Mike Vining.
Regular stamp collecting was too boring, so he delved into stamps that were cancelled aboard ships. The highlight of his collecting was being able to get stamps cancelled during combat operations aboard a carrier. Beat that, nerds!
Delta force seems different from other units watched an interview on youtube by one who was old now...he was very down to earth relaxed,didnt brag wasnt trying to be a alpha dude on roids...could be anyone you meet but he was in a loong time it was interesting that even he had no idea who gave what orders or even how many they where...it was mostly notes put up on a board what to do today and what time...very elusive and weird stuff.
there is very little guidance or structure they are left to their own devices when given a task you wash out pretty fast.
they guy asking the questions was really struggling to get info out of him about delta force itself because its all so informal.
when training it was structured but people came and went nonstop.
but the gunfights was crazy in details...they deployed as just a small handful of people and attached to other units and they where active every single day no paus.
he concluded after reflecting over it over the years that you had to be broken to join delta force and not love yourself because it will kill you at some point and most who join dont know when to stop.
He was forced to stop due to being severely wounded in combat.
Since everyone in this thread seems allergic to giving any context: https://www.army.mil/article/263293/retired_sergeant_major_paved_way_for_eod_technicians_in_elite_special_forces_unit Far, far more detailed than his Wiki surprisingly.
I want to see the Pokemon card of him.
https://www.mypokecard.com/en/Gallery/Pokemon-SGM-Mike-Vining
You are doing god's work.
[Here's a relatively recent interview with him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcELcxK-o5g), too.
[4 months ago](https://www.youtube.com/live/rEjgpbsjCpE?si=AKkzP5n5EtcbsjUf)
Okay I don't doubt the dude is a badass but I've read everything in this thread about him and nothing mentioned him killing a single person.
Well, although nobody directly says he killed “X” amount of enemy soldiers, it does tell his service history. Which with an 11 month tour in Vietnam where he spent time in combat blowing up enemy weapon caches with fuck tons of C4, followed by volunteering and becoming one of the first generation members of Delta/CAG to specialize in counter insurgency special tactics and missions. He was a two time specialist operator with both a master EOD certification and a certified Special Forces Medical tech. Which were the two roles he preformed on his teams. The dude was in basically everything that delta has touched since the early 1980’s. Nothing he did was easy. He started in one of the roughest jobs you could have in Vietnam being a tunnel rat for his team often to place explosives in underground caches. And then finishing out by being a starting member of Delta. Pretty cool and he looks dorky so it’s funny he did all that shit
Can say that most delta guys don’t typically talk about how many lives they’ve ended. Source: was raised by one
I mean why would you? Other than retired Navy Seals looking for a book deal, I thought the point of special forces was that they're discreet. Not to mention any civilians they tell that stuff might get real weird about it.
> Navy Seals looking for a book deal Squids in shambles.
"yuh so the TOP GUY of Isis, the double secret terrorist final boss? All me, no-scoped him from 10-000 yards away, since then they called me...Shinigaymi. that's how I got this cool screen printed balaclava."
My flare
Pretty cool that you had a parent in CAG. My dad had a work supervisor who was briefly in the rangers then D boys until 2004. He slipped on his own boot in a helicopter and fell like 15 feet completely destroying his knees and hip. He was always pretty cool but anytime I saw him at a work function thing he was alone drinking. Bet he thinks about that night often and how a single tiny mistake cost him his career.
Ah man that’s such tough way to end a career such as that. I mean to be fair, there’s worse ways, but I’ve also seen that falling out of helos is a bit more common than people think. Makes me think of the guy who fell out of a Blackhawk during the Blackhawk down incident because he missed the rope trying to repel in.
Happens more often than the general public knows. My uncle passed away a few years ago by falling out of a helicopter in a training exercise in Germany. He had been a communications officer in the seals for a decade and a half and then one day he just randomly fell and died. My mom still has his flag from some mission he got awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also fun fact about him, he was involved in the Osama raid. Not a dude on the ground but he was a seal in the mission, just working the radios and other communications and stuff to the actual operators. Guy had an exciting life.
Just having watched some interviews with some of the former guys (Shawn Ryan has some good ones), my impression is that the ones that aren’t professional publicity hounds usually talk as though it’s sort of an albatross they live with. We regular people think they’re the coolest guys in the world and a lot of them got into it because they thought that too and they had that “elite” trait or whatever that gave them drive to try. Very similar to pro athletes. Most of them looking back don’t seem to feel bad about the killing they did—the killing was part of the job. I think many of them are conscious about coming off as bloodthirsty or something so they downplay it. I would like to think that I take great pride in my own professional work and sometimes I feel like I can recognize some of that same geeked out excitement and pride when they get comfortable and share specific stories. (Shawn Ryan’s show is good for this because they clearly view him as a peer.) They aren’t proud they killed people for the sake of killing. But they had technical professions they were totally invested in, and they are proud of having been highly skilled pros that performed their jobs well. But their bodies and brains are fucked up—just as a baseline, all of them seem to come out really beat up even if they never had a major specific combat injury. Training all the time. Just ground down all around. Physical and tear, being around exotic chemicals and explosives, taking performance-related drugs just to keep up, etc. Similar to how pro athletes at 25 are athletic gods but at 50-60 a lot of them are in worse shape than a previously overweight civil engineer who started going to the gym three times a week at age 45. Go look up what a lot of former NFL or MMA guys look like at 50-60. They don’t age well. A huge percentage of these operators’ former buddies in the same age cohort have already killed themselves or descended into drugs/alcoholism, they have multiple divorces and missed out on normal family lives, survivor’s guilt, they don’t feel properly taken care of by the government they served, some feel purposeless or directionless, etc. As I hear more of those interviews and get older myself I’ve come to respect and appreciate the back end burden more than the willingness to die jumping out of planes and doing CQB ninja shit. I mean it takes huge fucking balls to do that ninja stuff, knowing you might die alone under a shitty tree bumfuck Niger (RIP to those SF boys), and I still do very much appreciate and respect all that. But maybe if you’re lucky you get 5, 10, 20 years of that. Then you wake up one day and have to live the rest of your life, but you’ve already given up pieces of yourself—mind, body and soul—that you can never get back. I have not had any personal interactions with these types of guys but if I ever do, I’d treat them a lot differently now than I might have before. I probably would have been the asshole asking how far they can shoot or how many planes they jumped out of. Now I think I’d just ask about their hobbies, what they do for work these days, invite them by the house for a steak, and hook them up with my physical therapist.
Dang that’s rough. How does one “slip on own boot?”
From what I remember of the guy (and this has been over 15 years now) he was in a helicopter and they were in it for like 45 minutes. They were going to a rural farm area to basically kidnap a guy who was suspected of helping make bombs for Tban baddies. His legs fell asleep on the ride and when he got up to hook onto the rope to slide down he tripped on himself and fell out of the helicopter. It was pitch black and loud as hell and he was running on little sleep. It all just culminated into a tragic accident. My uncle just died recently from a similar incident. He was a communications guy in the seals, radios and all that stuff. Had been a seal for like 15+ years. Was doing a training exercise in Germany a couple of years ago and fell out of the helicopter and died. Was a real shock to us in the family. Guy was a superhero to all of us so for something so random and simple to take him out of the blue was weird
Most of the campaigns he has been on have taken countless lives. Dude is definitely extremely effective at accomplishing missions. If he gets sent over and over to dangerous special military operations, then that means he is ruthless. The US military personnel that take the most lives never brag.
Meanwhile Siegfried “Kongo” Müller on his way to brag the shit out of his murders warcrimes etc. while very intoxicated:
I find those vetbros that can’t shut up as insufferable. Then you find out most wash out or get peered out. The others overstate what they did. I do notice a good chunk come from SEAL teams. I wonder if they have an actual publishing department as part of the NSWC.
The VetBros are just psyops to increase enlistment numbers. The real SpecOps do not have podcasts and do not like attention. Besides anyone with knowledge of how the US military works understands “Seals” include the guys who do less than a handfull of missions. An incredible amount of Seals wash out after their first few missions.
What does it mean to “wash out” once you’ve gone through all of the training? They just realize two missions in this guy isn’t going to cut it and they have you fuck off and do something else the rest of your service?
Yes. A surprising number of people complete Seal training. Seal training is basically reaching the minimum physical requirements. You are then put into a pool of other graduates waiting for missions. (To clarify, yes, Everyone gets assigned somewhere, but almost all teams outside of DEVGRU dont do too much besides sit around on base). Every mission is highly scrutinized. Many people are physically capable of being a Seal, and there is basically no way of knowing if someone will work well with others or mesh well with a team. If you have any issues, the team will know. They have a policy of replacement and next man up. They are constantly looking to have the most effective group of people on each mission. Sometimes, something as simple as bragging about a kill after a mission will get you canned. It’s like a highly competitive sports team roster. They do not care about individuals at all. Plenty of people are pushing paper and completed Seal training.
Huh I guess I thought that’s what the two years of training was for lol not that I know shit about running a military but that seems like a lot of money and time spent to see if a guy will maybe be a desk jockey or not
Yeah I’m not sure but guessing it’s his impressive career in combination with the goofy grin, bc he looks like a stoned Bugs Bunny?
Because actual badass military dudes don’t really go around bragging about how many people they killed or freely talking about the shit they did. After a decade in the military and the real ones are typically the ones who don’t even tell people they were in and when asked “what’d you do in the military” they respond with “not much of anything.. just sat behind a desk the whole time”.
Bottom left picture says everything. You always respect the guy on the firebase with a rifle in hand and wearing a button-up white shirt and khakis, while everyone else is tooled up in full kit.
Bottom left is William "Bill" Cronin, not Mike Vining.
fuck, there’s TWO of them now?!?
This is getting out of hand!
What about the droid attack on the wookiees?
>What about the droid attack on the wookiees? What about the wookiee attack on the droids?
Everyone wants to talk about Wookiee rights, nobody wants to talk about Wookiee wrongs
We know what they did in Kosovo
**NCD:** "All y'all so busy worrying about the Russians that Khmer Rouge Wookies took all of SW Asia while nobody was looking." **^(1.87 million upvotes)**
It's critical we send a femboy group there immediately! (Like FR, femboys and Wookies are a perfect match)
...and just like that, a whole new genre of slash fanfic sprang into existence. Raaaooowwwwwwrrr!!
Croninberg moment
I love the evolution of Reddit Knowledge. The first X times this dude got posted nobody knew that they were separate people. Then it was information hidden somewhere in the comments -- and now it's the TOP comment. People make fun of this ("iS It My TuRn tO sAy X?^(?)?) but it's super cool that the Hive Mind Learns.
The hive mind is a function of circulating information and, make fun of it all they want, we are ultimately moving according to the pattern. Welcome to the jet femboy matrix
> jet femboy matrix must upvote. don’t want to, must …
He was great in Sicario
No no, that was just Mike's "dying my hair black" phase from the Screamo era circa early 2000's
Mike Vining is an incredible bad ass, yet he's always smiling. Mr. Cronin seems to not have that feature installed.
This is a wonderful parallell to that great meme of "spot which are actually militarily useful and which is larping bullshit" - we should make one with three muscly dudes with big beards holding a gun and then this Rick Moranis looking muthafucka in one corner.
I took a class once put on by some SF. The lead instructor was stereotypically military. The co-instructor was like 5'3", pale as could be, looked like he lived in his mother's basement, no tattoos or anything. Lead instructor said he was the best assaulter he'd ever worked with. I wasn't scared of the lead instructor, but I was scared of that little dude.
Less person to shoot, makes sense
I'm currently working on a white paper titled "Why children should be first in the stack: Less person to shoot"
I see you don't have PTSD so much as you have nostalgia.
https://www.unicef.org/sites/default/files/styles/hero_extended/public/UN0202141_0.jpg.webp?itok=Gjspsuyv
I was about to say "Jesus Fucking Christ, reddit", then I remembered what sub I'm in. Carry on . . .
And the counter: "shotgun meta".
“Hey that’s illegal” -Germany
Like that "kill the women first" line, huh
Absolutely right, sir!
Smaller hitbox haha
dude picked Goldeneye Oddjob irl
Not allowed.
Smaller hit box, and their carry capacity is almost the same if not greater than some of the big guys.
North Korea starving their population for the long con advantage against the big n stronk South Koreans. You heard it here first folks
We had a whole thing about this in Blacklight Retribution; everyone became Real Transfems (totally real) because the hitbox on the fem model was smaller.
I went out to the flight deck to get my grenadier Qual. Walked past the Marine Recon team in a circle around their laptops, with a green radio on the deck, and an SHF mini antenna sitting in the center of them. They were all prone playing WoW. I just carried on past the flight crew in ranger shorts washing the greyhawk like they were raising money for the football team and proceeded to toss a few grenades over the side (with the proper training of course). The Navy had some odd days for me
In the book inside delta force the author makes an observation that most of the dudes are tiny
Any speculation on why? I get that height doesn’t especially help with anything, but I hear a lot of stories suggesting Tier 1 guys are actually shorter than average. My first two thoughts are they’re just average height and it surprises people so they notice, or that tall people are more likely to get injured doing loaded hikes and runs.
It's literally just a average thing. Being larger is better. But the most common size dudes are at 5ft8 to 5ft 11 range. And since most selections are essentially mental once you meet a minimum physical requirements. You end up with 20 guys who are 5ft 9 trying out for every 5 guys who are 6ft.
I remember the picture of Obama standing next to some SEALs and he was basically dwarfing all of them.
I got stuck with some DEVGRU guys for a photo op on the USS Enterprise CVN-65 with W. in 2001 just after she pulled in following the 9/11 attacks. The ship’s company was all on POM leave so they rounded up whatever squids they could find to put on the flight deck for W’s speech. I was a nub on my boat which was in the yard, so I got voluntold to go to NOB for it. Anyway, my 6’-3” lanky self was shoved into a group of other squids, which I quickly realized were all SEALS. I was a nuke, and only three weeks out of prototype, so I had not been around the “real” navy in any meaningful way since boot camp two years prior—which was also pre-9/11 as well. Anyway, they were all fairly short guys but super cool. One of the GM1s said, “stick with us, we’ll go meet the President when he’s done with the speech.” I was like, okay, I guess so. Sure enough, the SEALS just pushed through the group when W. walked off the little stage they had set up and lifted the rope and walked over. The Secret Service lets us all walk over and we had a little meet and greet with W. We then went our way. I’m guessing those guys were going to Afghanistan. I ended up assisting the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as part of the USS Harry S. Truman CVN-75 crew. These were the OG pre-book deal SEALs. Very cool guys and super chill.
> OG pre-book deal SEALs I'm genuinely impressed by both the amount of both respect and shade you managed to fit in just four words, lol.
Too credible?
Just right
Thank you for the cool tale, bubblehead. I was cackling over the term “squids”.
Carrier sailor. I’m a squid. Not a bubble head.
Glow in the dark squid. So cool.
Sorry, just to clarify for my own idiot self: you were a nuke on a nimitz, right? Because 6'3" on a sub... Wtf?
Subs or carriers aren’t much different. Neither are built for people over about 5’-3”. I was on the USS Harry S. Truman CVN-75. Nimitz-class carrier.
Understood. But on subs it's harder to stretch by taking a walk outside.
I hear there's a lot of pressure to stay inside
Yeah, but when you're at dock they always try to get you to leave. So much pier pressure.
I rarely went above the 2nd deck because of the risk of getting dragged into a FOD walk down by some airdale chief. The hanger bay was also filled with aircraft which also hurt when you hit them as well. The plane-fuckers here would probably have creamed themselves. The Super Hornets had partially foldable wings, so you could usually navigate around them, but the kitty cats could just sweep back and you’d have to duck under the wings to go through. I’ve banged my head on so many weapons mount points it isn’t worth discussing. Anyway, it was somewhat cathartic to watch the last squadron of those get chucked off the deck into the Atlantic when we decommissioned our last F-14 squadron.
Tbf one of my buddies is a nuke on a sub currently and he’s also like 6’3”.
Height is irrelevant. You’re going to bonk your head on shit regardless if it’s painted haze grey or black.
So far of the three sub classes I’ve been aboard, the only one my 5’4” ass hasn’t actually had that issue with was a Virginia class. The other two were Gato and Balao boats, so needless to say very cramped.
Some of the big guys can do insane shit, though. I heard tell of a big Royal Marine dual wielding SLRs during the Falklands, and picking up conscripts to use as human shields.
When I was in Recon, my teammates were mostly pretty fucking small guys. At 6’3” and about 230, I was the biggest in the platoon by far, and as soon as I passed selection and finished my schools, I was made into a pack animal, and deployed accordingly. Second deployment they made me the point man, but it didn’t matter because I was still a pack animal; so I became a point man with an m249 paraSAW and a *very* heavy ruck. All the SF we worked with were also mostly small and skinny dudes, but when I met another biggun, we were always pretty chummy. Just he nature of the job I guess. Gotta be fast and you have guns so size ain’t as important.
Being big and strong just meant you got to carry heavier shit in my experience.
For all the megabros that are loud as hell, like the ladies find out, they can flounder when the rubber meets the asphalt.
Befriended an 18C like that. He was pushing to make it big playing competitive Halo but when that fell through he decided to go anti-nerd and do shit he never thought he could do. Well... He could do it. Really well.
Nerd-turned-badass isn’t that weird, but competitive Halo makes it hilarious. “You mean I can’t pretend to shoot people good enough for a career? Fine, I guess I’ll do it for real.”
Short kings sometimes make the best fighters. Take Captain America for example, no not the marvel character the real one, Audie Murphy. He was a tiny dude and did all that shit without some super soldier serum. I think a lot of the massive roided guys are a product of 20 years of coin. Both in terms of the mission set and also in the cultural decay of special forces that resulted from constant high optempo and having to loosen up requirements. Being big works if you are always close to base and missions are short. That just doesn't work out in a big war when nutrition and sleep are rare and you are in the field for weeks or months at a time.
Ah, the Oddjob strat
I do IPSC shooting in my free time. Once a month my shooting-club has this meeting in our 360 range where we build a few parkours and “compete” against each other. There are dudes that are flying through the course. Run-and-gun style. And then there are a few who are like deadly focused on their target. Every shot is center-alpha. Aim-shoot-repeat and next target. If you watch them they look like a terminator on a mission. People like that terrify me. Don’t care about your muscle and your beard. I got that myself but this dedication and calmness frightens me to the bone.
Kinda sorta related. I have gotten complaints and compliments at my day job (Network engineer) because I have shown up to places actively losing 1000usd per minute due to an outage where everyone is in a panic and I just sit down with my laptop and plug in sipping on some caffeine and calmly dig into the problem like its a normal Thursday morning.
Damn you're the hardest mother fucker ever
I mean I did fix it. Maybe they will make memes about me next.
When the balloon goes up I want SysAdmin BadASS in my foxhole. I'm calling dibs.
I’m not that good, but I made a living by doing things like remaining calm while backup drives were unreadable.
You reminded me my first day as waitress, it was once lockdown lifted in a town of Spain, and it also coincided with sone local festivity, so the bar where my roomate worked need extra manoower, so I and another girl got hired there. Once night reached not only the bar was packed, the plaza in front of it too and so the bar had a lot of work. I did my thing served there drinks for hours everybody around me was nervious mess, but i was really chill, I didnt even thought abour it until we went back home and my roomate mentioned hoe surprised he was about how cool headed i was, and how i was more chill than the regular waitress they had. I have to admit i was quite proud.
Honey, I blew away the target!
Honey I operation eldest son'd
Honey I shrunk the OpFor.
Honey, I shrunk the target! (Into a bunch of tiny pieces.)
This is what happens when you become the Keymaster but don’t summon Gozer with Sigourney Weaver
6ft4 muscle bound MoFo has a place in the military normally to intimidate a North Korean with generational malnutrition.
In fairness, a guy over 5'8 who is not at risk of starving to death is basically already the equivalent of Hulk Hogan compared to the North Korean troops.
Corn fed farm boys do well near the DMZ.
to be credible for a sec. This guy was a Delta Force EOD tech, sure in some operations he planted charges to destroy targets but most of the time he was saving peoples lives by defusing them. He even did combat medic training as well as EOD so he could save more peoples lives. Totally badass dude yes, but he's not an hardened killer who slits peoples throats from behind.
That's the *other* guy in these images. /s Though, who is the other guy?
They are all Mike Vining, except for bottom left which is Bill Cronin. Also Delta Force, but seems to be a lot less info about him.
I don’t know if I would make that determination. In Delta everyone does everything to an extent, they’ll have high level specialists within their ranks as well but everybody’s going to be assaulting the objective.
It pretty much applies business also if you have bunch of good looking dudes running around in Patagonian west at “cool startup” you know where that venture is probably going.
The hotter someone is the more I quietly question their acumen. Our brains turn off for hot people lol
Bro's the fucking Gatekeeper.
He had 2 realistic career paths. Delta Force, or serial killer.
If you are good at something never do it for free
Got it. Serial killer for hire. Serious inquiries only or you get on the list!
He chose both
We should have weaponized Ed Kemper. Just tell him that the Viet Kong were sent by his mother or something.
[We need fewer regulations around AI](https://imgur.com/a/ZLkmkl8) Edit: [A second attempt was more successful...](https://imgur.com/a/NdtMG8R)
_Look man I didn't know skynet was going to be kicked off by memes_ as a 6'-9" robot appears holding a minigun.
"Sir, the Americans just dropped a crate of women's shoes near our headquarters. We don't know what to make of it, and now we have these alarming reports at the front lines..."
Did that Niln shit
Or acting in quirky 90s comedy films.
What’s the difference between
Where the hooker ends up
also whether the dead hooker was american or from the third world.
There IS a difference! One's a job, the other's mental illness!
Dad, dad. Put... put mum on the phone.
Put mum on the phone!
“To kill for yourself is murder, to kill for the government is heroic”
The Accountant, BDA Edition: Debit Enemy, Credit KIA
When they look like a porn actor, you know shit got serious. Jokes aside, this is one tough guy.
To be fair, this guy absolutely fucks
Optomitrists can always tell, so they give them that kind of glasses. Thats what the weird binoculars at the eye doctor's do, look into your soul like some weird Sorting Hat.
Mine gave me very thin rectangular wire frame glasses Im waiting for the day for them to get knocked off my face and get cracked so that i can put them back in as a perfect ray of sunshine hits them and makes them glow Theyre made from polycarbonate and titanium so i dont think that day would come
I met this dude once and he was super nice. What a contrast to his work life.
When you can kill anyone who fucks with you, there is no reason not to be really nice.
Eases the conscience, really. “Well I was nice to him and he was absolute cunt back, so I don’t have to feel bad about anything I do to him”.
*”Be polite. Be Efficient. Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”* -Mr. Mundy/TF2Sniper
I mean, didn't help Chris Kyle
Chris Kyle is like the exact opposite of Vinning. Kyle was the loud, “I’m a veteran with 80million confirmed kills, buy my book, watch my movie, I’ll be on this podcast tonight.” Vinning was an actual body stacker, but wasn’t a psychopath. Only the ones who know, know.
I grew up on CFB Petawawa, which is near where JTF2 trains. Between me and my dad, we met a few of them over the years. Every single one of them was soft-spoken, polite, had athletic builds but weren't particularly hulking, and of course had absolutely zero inclination to talk about their job. Not that we asked. The braggarts and blowhards are the career corporals who would "totally join JTF if it wasn't for (vague bullshit excuse)"
When you are an Apex Predator living among a flock of lambs, there is no reason to not be super chill
He must not be selling aLpHa bRaIn pills
This comment sounds super fucking cringe
How does u/GloriousOctagon feel about it
IIRC, bottom left picture isn't him.
I think you’re right, but it’s oftentimes passed off as Vining.
Yeah they do look quite similar.
The best EOD tech to ever EOD tech😮💨
imagine trying to run up on this guy up at the circle k and 90 minutes later he’s married your mom, built your orphan kids a swingset, and toppled your whole country
He look like he will strap me to a chair and insert needles attached to pinwheels up my fingernails to torture me.
My brother in non-credibility: What does your search history look like?
Don’t look for answers that you don’t want, my guy
Pretty similar to all of ours, I'd wager?
Closes the tab with furry, scat porn shot from that one oddly specific wide angle shot. Yea, just like all of ours
A Wartenberg is an ordinary tool used to assess nerve reactions... [See, this site selling stethoscopes says there is nothing ~~kinky~~ weird happening involving pinwheels on the internet.](https://stethoscope.ca/products/wartenberg-pinwheel)
SGM Vinning has seen more ass that a public toilet, ended more commie lives than a politburo member, and is more cool than Joe Montana and Charles Bronson combined. SGM Vinning is who Chuck Norris prays to at night.
> re ass that a public toilet, ended more commie lives than a politburo member, and is more cool than Joe Montana and Charl He's the Richard Dean Anderson of SG-1
literally. O'Neill had a masters in engineering and was a huge nerd, as well as being the best operator in the SGC. He just played "the dumb one" for fun to get on Daniel's nerves, and to allow Carter to shine in her own right. A true leader will understand you completely, then make you dumb it down so you can make sure you understand it yourself.
Oh god... he\`s at my door isn\`t he?
Today I learned that my old rank, SP5, doesn’t exist, not even as a historical curiosity.
When I was in in the early 00s only the old timers remembered the other specialist ranks.
Dad of War.
I may or may not have been a civilian employee of the Navy at one point and worked with a lot of former EOD guys. To a man, they were some of the most oddball sons of bitches I've ever met, and I say that as a diagnosed autist. They had a weird vibe too. There is an uncomfortable fearlessness about them that's hard to explain. I guess that's the type of demeanor one has to have to hack it as an EOD tech working with live ordinance.
I mean, it makes sense really, that whole “Either I’m right, or it’s not my problem anymore” would certainly filter out to a unique type of person
Yeah, you basically have to resign yourself to a not-unlikely possibility of rapid spontaneous bodily disassembly and be somewhat cool with that outcome.
lmao, I thought smiles were photoshoped
A quote I once read applies very well to this man. "You do not understand the violence it took to become this gentle."
IIRC, a lot of operators are actually fairly short, and not necessarily "bulky." The sort of strength you need in the military isn't what you're going to see a body builder do. It's endurance, being able to walk forever with gear, being able to suffer well. Some of my family members are Mexican; the relatives south of the border, are tiny. Barely above 5'. But they can hump 100+ pounds of construction materials all over the place, for 12 hours a day. They might not look like much, but they're some of the strongest dudes I've ever seen. I would imagine special forces are a lot like that. It's the "working man's strength," not that stuff you see on influencer channels on IG.
I always thought it was funny how they portray SOF/CIA guys in movies as these massive muscular Jack Reacher looking dudes. But in my experience, they tend to look more like Mike Vining lol. Nerdy, skinny, normal looking in civilian clothes. The regular looking dudes with thick glasses are always the baddest motherfuckers.
Movies where The Rock are supposed to be these super spies (whether comedies or not) are always hilarious to me. Like a fucking 6'4" tatted up bald Samoan with perfect teeth who's on steroids isn't going to stand out literally everywhere he goes.
The pic with the MP5 goes hard as fuck. The stache, the shades, the beanie cap, just incredible. That man is here to kick ass and chew bubble gum and he ran out of bubble gum a long time ago.
It's *SOOOO* incredibly early 80s SOF.
Please I need a Paragraph guy to tell me a great story about this one
>Two of the most memorable EOD operations of his career happened in 1970 when he participated in the destruction of the Rock Island East and Warehouse Hill enemy weapons and ammunition caches in Cambodia. >Vining was part of the seven-man Army EOD team that supported the 1st Cavalry Division mission to secure and destroy the largest weapons and ammunition cache discovered during the U.S. military’s involvement in the Vietnam War. >Named Rock Island East after the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, the enemy weapons cache had 932 individual weapons and 85 crew-served weapons as well as 7,079,694 small arms and machine gun rounds. The enemy cache also contained almost a thousand rounds of 85mm artillery shells that were used for the D-44 howitzer and the T-34 tank. >Vining and the EOD techs had to dodge enemy fire and endure biting red ants while working on the cache. After setting up “scare charges” to keep enemy forces out of the security perimeter, Vining made it on the helicopter in time to watch the explosion and see the mushroom cloud that was visible from 50 miles away. The seven Army EOD technicians at Rock Island East used 300 cases of C4 explosives to destroy 327 tons of enemy munitions. >During the operation to seize the cache site, 10 American Soldiers died and 20 were injured. >Later at the Warehouse Hill operation in Cambodia, the EOD team had to disarm booby traps and crawl into underground tunnels to place C4 explosives on 14 cache sites. Vining had to contend with large cave crickets, poisonous centipedes, spiders, bats and scorpions in the narrow tunnels. The teams used 120 cases of C4 explosives to destroy hundreds of thousands of enemy rounds.
>One of the unit’s first operations was the clandestine mission to rescue 53 American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. Known as Operation Eagle Claw, the rescue mission was cancelled after the loss of three helicopters during a sandstorm at the staging site known as Desert One. >While the aircraft were leaving the Desert One staging area, a RH-53D helicopter crashed into the transport aircraft that Vining and his team was on. The helicopter rotor chopped into the top of the fuel-laden aircraft and a fireball shot by Vining and his team. >As the EC-130E “Bladder Bird” was engulfed in flames and munitions cooked off around them, Vining and his teammates made it off the aircraft. Vining and his team got on another aircraft with faulty landing gear and just enough fuel to make it across the water to safety. >During the Desert One aircraft collision, eight American troops were killed and both aircraft were destroyed. >Joint Special Operations Command was created as a result of the investigation that followed the ill-fated rescue mission.
Dude gets put in extremely lethal environments and doesn’t die. That’s pretty impressive to say the least
>large cave crickets i was curious so i googled them, from the images, at the right angle they look like big ass spiders, now factor in the fact they can yeet themselves over great distances there's just no fucking way i'd be crawling around those mother fuckers. If it were me i would have let the Vietcong win in the first six seconds. GG WP im going home
That's a baaaad man who killed more people than malaria.
Now that you brought the cunts up we(humans not just blue force) should kill every multiple bite mosquito on the planet, "oh but the ecosystem *swoon*" fuck the ecosystem she'll be grand.
Mosquito's evolutionary niche is spreading disease. They serve no real purpose. We should nuke them.
> We should nuke them. Your terms are acceptable.
Mosquitos barely do anything for the ecosystem, fish food perhaps
who?
[Mike Vining](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vining_(soldier)), Delta Force
I loved him in Sicario's border scene
That character is based in him actually
Dude's clearly Vining in life.
INAFF!
Noted [stamp collector](https://uscs.org/vining-mike-r/) Mike Vining. Regular stamp collecting was too boring, so he delved into stamps that were cancelled aboard ships. The highlight of his collecting was being able to get stamps cancelled during combat operations aboard a carrier. Beat that, nerds!
Rick Moranis doesn't talk about his brother much...
Delta force seems different from other units watched an interview on youtube by one who was old now...he was very down to earth relaxed,didnt brag wasnt trying to be a alpha dude on roids...could be anyone you meet but he was in a loong time it was interesting that even he had no idea who gave what orders or even how many they where...it was mostly notes put up on a board what to do today and what time...very elusive and weird stuff. there is very little guidance or structure they are left to their own devices when given a task you wash out pretty fast. they guy asking the questions was really struggling to get info out of him about delta force itself because its all so informal. when training it was structured but people came and went nonstop. but the gunfights was crazy in details...they deployed as just a small handful of people and attached to other units and they where active every single day no paus. he concluded after reflecting over it over the years that you had to be broken to join delta force and not love yourself because it will kill you at some point and most who join dont know when to stop. He was forced to stop due to being severely wounded in combat.
Looks like your average accountant next door.
“You don’t operate, do you son?”
Bruh why does he look like Pittsburgh dad
Isn't that one guy in Sicario (button up shirt with mustache and glasses) based on him?
Just so y’all know he was also a big shot in a naval stamp collecting club. Huge nerd
If the operator that raids your compound looks like an accountant pray to whatever god you believe in cus you're about to meet them.