Day in the life of delta force Patch#

He mowed the lawn and set up the backyard grill, which come deer season he would use to cook the meat he'd hunted. And yet here was Joshua Wheeler, just last summer, in the middle of his fourteenth deployment, and now going home to meet his boy. There weren't supposed to be any more troops in combat in Iraq. 'The operational tempo gets to a point where it's not tenable.' Special ops were becoming the new way we fight in these places, whether the public knew it or not. 'Post-9/11, it had become something of a mantra for our government: 'Just throw special forces against it,' ' says Jim Reese, a former Delta operative who retired in 2007 after a twenty-five-year military career. In fact, the United States special-operations forces-a handful of elite, highly trained, often clandestine units that make up only a tiny percentage of the total number of troops in the armed forces-were approaching burnout. They went to places where large deployments of 'boots on the ground' would not have made sense-and would not have been popular policy in the United States. They went to places where what we typically think of as warfare has devolved into a frightening morass of enemies who are both ruthless and scrappy, impossible to find and yet adept at social media. military were deployed to 147 countries, the most ever. And yet in 2015, special operators from across the U.S. Officially, the United States government does not acknowledge that Delta Force even exists.

Day in the life of delta force Patch#

A few weeks before he left for Iraq, he and Ashley had moved into a new house in a patch of quiet woods near a small lake, not far from the base at Fort Bragg. But Ashley was about to give birth to their first child, a boy, and Josh was going home, if only for a short while. He was about a month into his four-month tour.

He kept a pocket dictionary in his car so he could look up new words at stoplights.

He especially loved history and anything related to international travel-anything that might help him know the world better.

They were married for two years, and in that time Josh had read more books than she could count. 'He would read whatever he could get his hands on,' she says. It was one of the things his wife, Ashley, loved most about Josh-his appetite for knowledge. As he sat on the plane back to North Carolina, he read a hundred-year-old novel about a struggling London artist. This was his fourteenth deployment to either Iraq or Afghanistan. He was the recipient of eleven Bronze Star medals-four of them with the letter V, signifying valor in combat. Wheeler was a master sergeant in the Army, a former Ranger, and a member of Delta Force since 2004. It was the only book he could find in English at a store where he was stationed, near Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. On his last flight home, three months before his death, Joshua Wheeler tore through a copy of D.H. But with new threats every day and the men stretched thin, can this new strategy last? As the shock-and-awe of conventional warfare has given way to the unpredictable carnage of terrorism, much of the job of keeping America safe has fallen to the military's most elite soldiers.