EXPERIENTIAL PERSPECTIVE — About thirty years ago, when I was a CIA station chief in the war-torn Balkans, a US special operations soldier I worked with gave me a special gift in honor of our time together.
He was an elite soldier from a family of elite soldiers. His stepfather served as a Green Beret in Vietnam, while his father was one of the German GSG-9 commanders who freed a plane from terrorists at Mogadishu Airport in 1977. A gift from a WWII German MG-34 machine gun. derived from the weapon his grandfather carried as a Fallschirmjaeger (“paratrooper”) during Operation Eiche (“Oak”) in 1943. the raid freed Benito Mussolini from his mountaintop prison.
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