USNI blogger Force Recon Platoon Commander,”BLUE COLLAR 6″ 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit: Capt. Alex Martin, USMC and his band of brothers aboard the U.S.S. Dubuque (LPD-8)
Force Recon Platoon 15th MEU - August 2010 - USNI Blog
Busy day for Blue Collar yesterday.
“We got word that the pirates wanted to stay on and fight — it was funny b/c when we came alongside and they saw us board and rush the superstructure, you could see the look change in their eyes…they didn’t want to play anymore…you’d be proud of the men today, they represented America with honor. It didn’t need to be a bloodless day (for the pirates) but it was…
The guys executed with the highest violence of action, and yet, highest level of restraint, I’ve ever seen.”
Which he foretold in his July 2010 Proceedings article, “Pirates Beware: Force Recon Has Your Number”
“Hunting pirates with the U.S. Navy is what the 15th MEU—a wide array of ships and aircraft and even more Marines and Sailors—has just set sail to do.
The 15th MEU is a distinctive and historic Marine air-ground task force. This armada steams toward Africa more capable and ready for maritime contingency operations than any MEU in a number of years. It has among its numerous traditional capabilities and missions a trained, validated, capable, and lethal instrument now called the unit’s Maritime Raid Force Capability (MRFC), a fully integrated Navy-Marine Corps team with the capacity to conduct visit-board-search-seizure (VBSS), kinetic strikes on non-compliant targets, maritime infrastructure seizure and reinforcement, host-nation training, and other maritime raid and interdiction operations as directed.
…we have been training to kill pirates for an entire year, which is also not as sexy as it sounds. It’s plain hard. We executed months of surgical shooting, combat conditioning, diving, high-altitude low-opening (HALO) and high-altitude high-opening (HAHO) parachute operations, and training that included rappelling, fast-roping, climbing, hand-to-hand combat, communications, knife fighting, combat trauma, explosives, and intelligence-gathering to prepare us for real-world maritime raid operations. The training was phenomenal, aggressive, and (in a different-from-Swedish sense of the word) fun.”
Looks like you made it Blue Collar. Bravo Zulu!
More from Alex on Piracy: The Reality of Piracy
Helo Casting - Summer 2010
