Peace Corps with Guns

John Falk looks at the successful efforts against Islamo-fascist terrorists in the Philippines. An excerpt from the Outside magazine article:

It was the plan for the next morning's mission, an innocuous-sounding operation called the Upper Tanum Water Source Site Survey. Supposedly, in a hilly patch of jungle called the Tripod, there was a 50-year-old concrete cistern that collected water from a spring that was also Abu Sayyaf's main water source. The marines intended to construct a water system off the cistern to supply about 3,000 villagers downstream, people who had long supported the Muslim insurgents. Sabban wanted to flip their loyalties.

We were taking a spigot?

With a heaviness worthy of Staff Sergeant Barnes in Platoon, Larida described past encounters with Abu Sayyaf in the Tripod, units decimated and corpses mutilated in a jungle death trap of interlocking bunkers, booby traps, and spider holes. With well over a hundred killed or wounded out there in the past three years, the marines always went into the Tripod in large numbers, or at the very least at night. But this time, an undermanned company was going in at midmorning, lightly armed, with no artillery or air support. He handed me a black leather pouch.

"My .45," Larida said. "Take it tomorrow."

Was he kidding? It was hard to imagine being blown to pieces on the set of a Corona ad.

"If we get overrun by Abu Sayyaf," he warned, only half joking, "I put two clips in there, 14 bullets. Save the last one for yourself."

"Come on," I said.

"You're American," he said gravely, all but channeling Tom Berenger. "They'll skin you alive."

[Execupundit note: Robert D. Kaplan in Imperial Grunts - see the link at the right side of this page - examined the "Peace Corps with guns" approach that the Green Berets have adopted.]