When Delta Force torched down the neighborhood

Jim (the Grinch) had a troublesome day when he caused a fire that drifted out of control and spread to neighboring buildings. We likened the event to the famous Mrs. O’Leary’s cow who, legend has it, kicked over a lantern in a barn and started the fire that destroyed so much of the great city of Chicago in 1871.

“Train as you fight; fight as you train,” is what we in Delta always say. That advice suggests a great endeavor to provide for the essential, realistic training scenarios that effective “fighting as-you train” warrants. As a result, Delta is forever in search of “new floor plans,” that is, fresh real estate to serve as target subjects that are as realistic as practically possible.

Operations personnel from Delta are always in touch with military installations’ Post Locators in effort to learn what buildings might be slated for demolition. Such buildings make for great targets that you can usually damage to a great extent without liability. Even new buildings at times can be used before the new tenants move in – though the option for the same destruction doesn’t exist in such cases, the provide new floor plans for training, nonetheless.

However, there is a margin to be pushed in the quest for realism in training. The more realistic the training is, the greater the propensity for unwanted damage to structures and physical injuries to Soldiers.

In the event I will describe, the damage far exceeded the risk assessment, though the training had been top notch.

The Unit had been able to obtain a cluster of five buildings to serve as target subjects. In the first building Operator Jim started a small fire in a room with a flash bang grenade. Once the building was secure, he dashed outside and grabbed a bucket of “water” to quickly douse the flames before moving on to the next building in the scenario.

(Cartoon courtesy of author)

Poor Jim was not aware that, rather than water, the bucket contained gasoline for the two-stroke motorized Quicky Saws that we used for many breaching solutions. He threw the “water” onto the fire, which erupted into a spirited inferno, one that burned through the building’s dry wooden structure and subsequently jumped to the next one.

The blaze did not stop there: it proceeded to hop from one building to the next, until all five were engulfed in a firestorm that brought the training activities to a screeching halt, and gave way to a total effort in fire fighting. Someone from the vicinity of the burning cluster called 911 and requested fire fighting support be dispatched to respond to the scene.

For just such occasions, the Unit deployed for training with two coiled up fire hoses. These were quickly attached to nearby fire hydrants and were soaking the buildings’ fire the best they could, though at least two of the buildings were not within reach of any of the hydrants in the area.

The building cluster was actually a fenced in, small compound with just one gate unlocked to enter and exit it.

The fire department was rather swift to arrive. But the firemen were “intercepted” at that gate and made to exit their pumper trucks, surrendering them to the Delta boys to bring inside to fight the fires. (Security was the overarching reason that we proceed in this manner.)

Never having faced such a dilemma before, the fight department just allowed our men to proceed. Once the fires were completely out, the trucks were turned back to the firemen.

The saga then was all over except for the merciless ribbing Jim took from the brothers, and the investigation into who left gasoline in the bucket outside target building number one.

And yet it happened!

By Almighty God and with Honor,
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Feature Image: Firefighters fighting a file in Huachuca City, Arizona, March 2010. (Photo by Jarek Tuszyński/Wikimedia Commons)

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