The story untold about the U.S. Navy's Somali pirate rescue

What really happened in the hostage standoff with Somali pirates? One fact is crystal clear, the three U.S. Navy SEAL snipers are the obvious heroes for their life-saving shots that took out the three pirates who were holding their U.S. citizen hostage, commercial Capt. Richard Phillips.

If you believe the Noo Yawk Times (and all the rest of the unanimous praise chorus being spewed out by the so-called mainstream media) the biggest hero is their glorious leader, President Obama, who bravely showed he is master of the universe and not a raw rookie unable to handle an international crisis.

WASHINGTON — President Obama vowed Monday to “halt the rise of piracy” off the coast of Africa following the dramatic rescue of an American merchant captain, foreshadowing a longer and potentially more treacherous struggle ahead as he weighs a series of problematic options.

Of course, nobody in the MSM even reported that Obama vowed to fight "privacy" when he misread his teleprompter. They just corrected his pronunciation and smiled wisely. (Just like they did when President Bush said "nukulur" for nuclear. Not!)

In permitting members of the Navy Seals to shoot the pirates holding the captain, Richard Phillips, Mr. Obama navigated a crisis that played out in full view of the world.

Note the careful phrasing of the NYT writer, Obama permitted Navy SEALS to shoot. Which is true only in the reverse. Our rookie president first forbid the Navy commander on the scene from shooting at the pirates while he tried to micromanage the situation diplomatically from afar. That's what led to the ridiculous scene when Phillips jumped overboard from the lifeboat the first time and the Navy held its fire while the Somali pirates fired on him and recaptured him.

Jeff Emanuel, a special operations military veteran and now a military writer and blogger, gives the whole story of the incident.

After four days of floating at sea on a raft shared with four Somali gunmen, Richard Phillips took matters into his own hands for a second time. With the small inflatable lifeboat in which he was being held captive being towed by the American missile destroyer USS Bainbridge, and Navy Special Warfare (NSWC) snipers on the fantail in position to take their shots at his captors as soon as the command was given, the captive captain of the M.V. Maersk-Alabama took his second leap in three days into the shark-infested waters of the Indian Ocean.

This diversion gave the Navy Special Warfare operators all the opening they needed. Snipers immediately took down the three Somali pirates still on board the life raft, SEAL operators hustled down the tow line connecting the two craft to confirm the kills, and a Navy RIB plucked Phillips from the water and sped him to safety aboard the Bainbridge, thus ending the four-day-and-counting hostage situation.

Phillips’ first leap into the warm, dark water of the Indian Ocean hadn’t worked out as well. With the Bainbridge in range and a rescue by his country’s Navy possible, Phillips threw himself off of his lifeboat prison, enabling Navy shooters onboard the destroyer a clear shot at his captors — and none was taken. The guidance from National Command Authority — the president of the United States, Barack Obama — had been clear: a peaceful solution was the only acceptable outcome to this standoff unless the hostage’s life was in clear, extreme danger.

The next day, a small Navy boat approaching the floating raft was fired on by the Somali pirates — and again no fire was returned and no pirates killed. This was again due to the cautious stance assumed by Navy personnel thanks to the combination of a lack of clear guidance from Washington and a mandate from the commander in chief’s staff not to act until Obama, a man with no background of dealing with such issues and no track record of decisiveness, decided that any outcome other than a “peaceful solution” would be acceptable.

After taking fire from the Somali kidnappers again Saturday night, the on-scene commander decided he’d had enough. Keeping his authority to act in the case of a clear and present danger to the hostage’s life and having heard nothing from Washington since yet another request to mount a rescue operation had been denied the day before, the Navy officer — unnamed in all media reports to date — decided the AK-47 one captor had leveled at Phillips’ back was a threat to the hostage’s life and ordered the NSWC team to take their shots.

Three rounds downrange later, all three brigands became enemy KIA and Phillips was safe.

Emanuel then recaps the aftermath as Obama boldly steps up to take all the credit.

Almost immediately following word of the rescue, the Obama administration and its supporters claimed victory against pirates in the Indian Ocean and declared that the dramatic end to the standoff put paid to questions of the inexperienced president’s toughness and decisiveness.

Despite the Obama administration’s (and its sycophants’) attempt to spin yesterday’s success as a result of bold, decisive leadership by the inexperienced president, the reality is nothing of the sort.

What should have been a standoff lasting only hours — as long as it took the USS Bainbridge and its team of NSWC operators to steam to the location — became an embarrassing four-day-and-counting standoff between a rag-tag handful of criminals with rifles and a U.S. Navy warship...

However, instead of taking direct, decisive action against the rag-tag group of gunmen, the Obama administration dilly-dallied, dawdled, and eschewed any decisiveness whatsoever, even in the face of enemy fire, in hopes that the situation would somehow resolve itself without violence. Thus, the administration sent a clear message to all who would threaten U.S. interests abroad that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has no idea how to respond to such situations — and no real willingness to use military force to resolve them.

So the real hero here -- in addition to the Navy snipers of course -- is not Obama, but the unnamed Navy commander who decided to ignore the stupidly restrictive no-firing rule from our alleged commander-in-chief and told the snipers to do the right thing. If the situation had turned out badly, that Navy officer would now be facing a court-martial and discharge. But since it turned out well, he will remain nameless and the rookie president will stand in the spotlight.

And how's our rookie president doing on those other international crises currently on the table?

Just this morning, the Noo Yawk Times reports Obama is sending signals to Iran they can go ahead with their uranium enrichment program toward building their first atomic weapons while talks continue. God help the nation of Israel because Obama certainly isn't. He's doing exactly what he promised during the campaign, talking with Iran "with no pre-conditions." So far as I've noticed, this is the first campaign promise Obama made that he's actually keeping.

And the NYT also reports North Korea has also decided the Obama administration is toothless.

North Korea said Tuesday it saw talks on ending its nuclear weapons program as "useless" and it planned to restart a plant that makes arms-grade plutonium, state media quoted its Foreign Ministry as saying.

Never thought I'd agree with anything North Korea says, but it's quite true that the talks are useless. Nutjob Kim in North Korea and the nutjobs in charge in Iran have quite accurately assessed the rookie president. They know he's all talk and no action. God save America and the world. The adults are out of power and the children are running amok.

Heroes "of whom the world was not worthy"

Kevin McCullough writes about two of his military friends and their connections to the S.E.R.E. school at Camp Mackall, which is right here in my home county, Richmond, in North Carolina.

It stands for Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape.

Few in civilian life know much about it because of the intense nature of what it is. Stories have surfaced as to what others experienced in undergoing it, but even these are few as those who do persevere it are expected to not release the details of what happens.

The description as best I could decipher is akin to being caught behind enemy lines. Your objective is to survive for periods without the basics. You are to do so for as long as possible by not being captured (hence the "evade" phase.) When captured you are to react as though those who hold you are in fact the enemy, and as they do things like waterboard you, break fingers, etc., you are to rely upon all your ability as an honorable member of the defense forces of the United States to resist, not give up your information, nor of your mission. The more you resist the more those who run the program are encouraged to hurt you to tempt you to break. The only major caveat they are asked to observe is not to break any major bones.

Comforting.

The S.E.R.E. school was developed and founded by one of the heroes of my war, the Vietnam War, but few outside of the Special Forces (Green Berets) community ever heard of him.

James "Nick" Rowe was a young lieutenant serving as an advisor with South Vietnamese troops early in that war when he was captured and became a Prisoner of War. I met Nick Rowe much later and did a feature story for a local newspaper about his war experiences leading to S.E.R.E.

I also wrote about Nick Rowe in a semi-autobiographical novel I self-published, "The Crossland Shootout." The part about Col. Rowe is not fictional. Here's an excerpt, if I may quote myself.

Nick Rowe learned how to survive, evade, resist and escape the hard way, by surviving five years of captivity in Vietnam, becoming the first American prisoner of war to successfully escape in that long war. He later wrote a book about it, "Five Years to Freedom."
I met the colonel when I did that SERE feature story, and in the interview I did with him he recalled the crucial moment when he was at the end of his rope, beaten and bloody from repeated torture and starvation, about to give in to whatever his captors demanded just to get a little relief, or maybe just to give up and die.
In that moment, the young Green Beret said he recalled just the first five words of the 23rd Psalm, which he had learned as a boy in Sunday School back in Texas. "The Lord is my shepherd."
That was all he could recall in his search for spiritual strength at that defining moment of his life, but he said he held onto that, repeating it over and over until one word stood out.
My. When I saw that word in my mind's eye, I grabbed on to it. I made the Lord my personal shepherd right then and there, and from that point on, I found the strength to keep on resisting."
And he resisted finally to the point of his successful escape.
His resistance had finally marked him for death, when the Viet Cong who had been holding him prisoner for five years finally decided they couldn't break Nick Rowe and were transporting him under guard to a North Vietnamese prison for his execution.
Then the Good Shepherd who gave Nick Rowe strength to survive intervened. The Viet Cong patrol stumbled into a helicopter sweep by U.S. forces and Nick Rowe evaded his captors and escaped.
And for that escape, Nick Rowe knew he was a marked man. The death sentence passed on him by the North Vietnamese kept him from going back to Vietnam, so he spent the rest of that war in the U.S.

I saw the colonel again just before he took an overseas assignment to the Philippines, back when we still had a big military base there. It was closed in recent cutback times.
He had advanced to one rank shy of a general's star and told me he knew he had to take another overseas assignment if he ever expected to make general.
In what I later realized was a prophetic moment, he told me one of his buddies asked him if he was going back over there where the communist guerrillas were still fighting to do some research for another book. He said he replied, "I hope not."
But that's the way it turned out, except Nick Rowe didn't get to write about this research. The communist guerrillas in the Philippines carried out the death contract the North Vietnamese put on Nick Rowe's head for escaping. He was assassinated with his driver one morning on his way to work in Manila in an ambush by the guerrillas.

As the Bible says in Hebrews about the heroes of the faith, "of whom the world was not worthy."

Like the Marine and the Navy pilot McCullough writes about, the world is not worthy of such men and women who have fought and died for our freedom. We owe them everything. And they ask of us nothing. At the bare minimum, we owe them our respect, loyalty and support.