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| Fifth Column | |
| The Portland Police Officer Who Killed a Man Is a Former U.S. Army Ranger | |
| 2021-04-19 | |
[WWeek] The police officer who killed a man in Lents Park on Friday morning
DeLong was featured in a 2016 documentary series on the History Channel called The Warfighters. DeLong was one of four main subjects in an episode detailing a specific U.S Army Ranger mission in 2010 in Afghanistan called Task Force Merrill that was meant to find Taliban compounds and strongholds, fortify the strongholds, and draw Taliban members back toward them to attack. Then planes would swoop in to kill the Taliban fighters. DeLong was a sniper for the mission, meaning he and several other rangers would walk ahead of the platoon and chalk out the best route to get to compounds without accidentally stepping on explosives. "We’d take all these inhabitants that were living there and say, ’Hey, you guys know where the Taliban are.’ We want you to go out there and find somewhere safe to be, leave the area, and tell them that we’re right here and we’re here to fight," DeLong says to the cameras. "Sometimes we’d take a big ’ole American flag and throw it up in the roof, and wait for them to start shooting at us." DeLong continues, "We’d get that first burst of machine gun fire that was aimed at us, and then it was on." Ok, let's review. On the one hand, there are the bad guys, who are 100 or so Communist insurrectionists whose night-after-night tactic is to march through downtown Portland -- which is a collection of large buildings some with perfect overlooks and concealment -- making a lot of noise and breaking stuff. On the other hand, in the Portland police force we've got one Ranger-tabbed sniper whose idea of a good time was to get the Taliban to fire machine guns at him by waving an American flag. Is there any possible strategy that would put all those elements together? Nah, I just can't think of any. Totally stumped. | |
| Posted by:Matt |