Your life as every rank in Delta Force. In November of 1977, a career Army officer named Charles Beckwith convinced the Pentagon that the United States needed a new kind of unit. Something that did not yet exist in the American military. A small, ruthlessly selected group of men trained to do the things that regular special forces could not do. Hostage rescue, counterterrorism, direct action raids in countries where America was not officially at war. Beckwith had spent time with the British Special Air Service, the SAS, and he had seen what a truly elite unit could accomplish. He wanted to build an American version. The Pentagon approved his proposal. The unit was designated 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta. The men who served in it would call it by a simpler name, the unit. Everyone else would call it Delta Force. Its existence was classified for decades. The Department of Defense refused to publicly acknowledge it. Its missions were buried in documents with classification markings so high that most generals did not have the clearance to read them. And its operators, the men who made it through selection, survived the operator training course, and earned the right to wear no insignia at all, became the most lethal small unit soldiers in the American military. This is your life as every rank in Delta Force. And you do not join at the top. You earn it. Through years of war, silence, and attrition. From a selection process that breaks most men to missions that never officially happened. Level one, the candidate. You cannot apply to Delta Force. There is no recruiting office. There is no advertisement. There is no online application. The unit does not technically exist. What you can do, what every soldier who eventually earns a place in Delta has to do, is spend years proving yourself in the units that feed into it. You join the Army. You volunteer for Airborne School. You complete the Special Forces Qualification Course or the Ranger Regiment. You deploy. You fight. You are wounded. You fight again. You accumulate the kind of combat experience that most civilians cannot imagine and most soldiers never see. One day, usually when you have at least four years of service and the rank of sergeant or above, you receive an invitation, not an order, an invitation. It arrives in a sealed envelope delivered through your chain of command. It tells you that you are eligible to try out for an unspecified unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It does not name the unit. It does not describe what the unit does. If you accept, you will disappear from your current assignment for several weeks. Your family will be told you are attending a training course. Your friends will not be told anything at all. If you fail, you will return to your old unit and never speak of what happened. If you pass, you will disappear permanently into an organization that most of the Army pretends is not there. You accept. Everyone accepts. Because the men who receive this invitation are the kind of men who cannot resist the chance to find out if they are good enough. Men who have spent their entire adult lives pushing themselves past every limit the Army has put in front of them, and who have finally found something they are not sure they can beat. You arrive at Fort Bragg with a duffel bag, a rucksack, and a physical fitness level that would destroy most professional athletes. You are confident. You are ready. You have been preparing for this for months, maybe years. You have run thousands of miles. You have done thousands of push-ups. You have studied land navigation. You have prepared your body and your mind for everything you think this course can throw at you. And then the selection process begins. And you realize very quickly, within the first 48 hours, that you are not nearly as prepared as you thought you were. Nothing could have prepared you for this. Level two, selection. The selection course is designed to break you, not physically, although it will do that, too. Psychologically. It is designed to find the specific kind of man who can function at peak performance after weeks of sleep deprivation, in terrain that tears apart human joints, carrying loads that would most soldiers, with no encouragement, no teammates, no feedback, and no idea whether he is passing or failing. The selection cadre does not talk to you. They do not tell you your times. They do not tell you your rank order. They do not tell you if you are doing well or if you should quit. They watch. They evaluate. And at the end of every event, some candidates are sent home with no explanation. You spend weeks moving along through the Appalachian Mountains with a rucksack that gets heavier every day. You are given a map, a compass, a set of grid coordinates, and a time limit. Hit the point. Get your next set of coordinates. Move to the next point. Do it again. And again. And again. There is no talking. There are no teammates. There is no encouragement. Just you, the mountains, and a clock you cannot see. The distances increase every day. The weight in your pack increases every day. The time limits shrink every day. Your feet bleed through your boots by day three. Your shoulders are rubbed raw from the rucksack straps by day five. You develop trench foot from wading through creeks in the rain. You develop hypothermia at night because you are too exhausted to build a proper shelter. You sleep two or three hours a night in improvised shelters built from ponchos and paracord that barely keep the rain off your face. You eat cold rations out of plastic bags because you are not allowed to start a fire that might compromise your position. You drink from streams and hope the water is clean enough not to give you dysentery because stopping to boil water will cost you the time you need to make the next checkpoint. The final event is called the stress phase. It is a 40-mile timed march through the mountains carrying a 70-pound rucksack. The time limit is classified, but it is shorter than most candidates can physically achieve. Men collapse. Men quit. Men pull themselves across the finish line on hands and knees vomiting from exhaustion. Men fail to make the time and are sent home. Out of 120 elite soldiers who typically begin the selection course, only 12 to 14 will finish. That is an attrition rate of approximately 90%. 90 out of every 100 candidates, men who were already among the best soldiers in the United States Army, are washout. The ones who remain are invited to the next phase. They are not Delta yet, not even close. They have earned the right to try. Level three, the operator training course. You are now in OTC, the operator training course. Six months of classified instruction at Fort Bragg that will transform you from a highly experienced soldier into something the United States military barely has a word for. OTC is where the real attrition happens. Selection proved that you could endure pain and isolation. OTC proves that you can operate at a level of technical precision that no other unit in the American military demands. You learn close quarters battle in facilities specifically designed to train Delta operators. The Delta compound at Fort Bragg contains multiple purpose-built shoot houses, indoor live fire ranges, mock aircraft cabins for hostage rescue training on airliners, mock hotel rooms, mock embassies, and entire replica building interiors that can be reconfigured to match specific real-world targets. You fire tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition in live fire exercises that would be considered dangerously unrealistic in any conventional military training environment. You do not use paintball rounds. You do not use simulation weapons. You use real ammunition in real rifles and real handguns fired inches from the faces of men playing the role of hostages. You clear rooms with live hostages, actual soldiers, and sometimes even senior Delta officers standing in the rooms you are assaulting. A single mistake, a single round fired a few inches in the wrong direction, would end your career and potentially end a real man's life. Instructors stand behind you watching your every movement. If your muzzle crosses another operator's body, even for a fraction of a second, the exercise stops and you are evaluated. You do this again. And again. And again. Until the sequence of entering a room, identifying the threat, distinguishing it from the hostage, neutralizing the threat, and protecting the hostage becomes a reflex that your body performs faster than your conscious brain can track. Until you can shoot a target 3 inches from a hostage's head without hesitation. Until muscle memory replaces thought. You learn surveillance and reconnaissance. You learn to move through urban environments without being noticed. You learn to blend in anywhere. In a suit in a European capital, in civilian clothing in a Middle Eastern market, in a foreign military uniform on an enemy base. You learn advanced driving, high-speed interdiction, tactical breaching, explosives, and communications. You learn languages. You learn how to operate in denied areas with no support. You learn to kill silently, at close range, with your hands if necessary. The attrition during OTC is brutal. In some classes, 16 candidates survive selection and only eight finish OTC. That is 50% attrition after the 90% attrition you already survived. Do the math. Out of 120 of the best soldiers in the Army, roughly eight become Delta Force operators. Eight. The rest go back to their units carrying the knowledge that they were good enough to be considered and not good enough to be chosen. Level four, the squadron. You graduate. You are now an operator. You do not wear a Delta patch. There is no Delta patch. You do not tell anyone you are in Delta Force. You tell them you work at Fort Bragg. You tell them you do administrative work. You tell them whatever your cover story requires. Your family knows only that you are in a classified unit that you cannot discuss. You are assigned to a saber squadron. Delta Force is organized into squadrons identified by letters. A Squadron, B Squadron, C Squadron, D Squadron. Each Sabre Squadron is a self-contained assault element with approximately 75 to 100 operators. Within each squadron, there are three troops. Two assault troops and one reconnaissance troop. The assault troops execute direct action missions. The reconnaissance troop specializes in surveillance, target acquisition and intelligence gathering. Each troop is commanded by a captain or major. Each squadron is commanded by a lieutenant colonel who reports directly to the commanding officer of the unit. You also learn that Delta has other elements most people outside the unit have never heard of. E Squadron, activated in 1989, is stationed separately from the rest of the unit at Fort Eustis, Virginia, where it is officially referred to as the Aviation Technology Office. E Squadron operates specialized aircraft and vehicles used for covert insertion of operators into denied areas. A combat support squadron handles the logistics, signals intelligence and technical operations that enable the Sabre squadrons to conduct their missions. Together, these elements make up one of the most capable special operations units on Earth. But the men who matter, the ones who kick down doors and pull triggers and bring hostages home alive, are the operators in the Sabre squadrons. And you are now one of them. Your first deployment comes fast. You train constantly. Live fire rehearsals every day. Close quarters battle drills until your body cannot tell the difference between simulation and reality. And then, when the call comes, you deploy. You fly on unmarked aircraft to countries that the American public does not know have American forces operating in them. You conduct missions that will never be discussed in the newspapers. You come home. You tell no one where you have been. You train. You wait for the next call. Level five, the missions that happened. Some of Delta Force's missions have been declassified. Others have not. The ones that have been made public give a glimpse of what the unit does and what it has cost. Delta's first major mission was Operation Eagle Claw in April 1980. The mission was to rescue 52 American hostages being held at the United States Embassy in Tehran after the Iranian Revolution. The hostages had been captured by Iranian students in November of the previous year and diplomatic efforts to secure their release had gone nowhere for 5 months. Delta Force was only 2 and 1/2 years old. It had never conducted a real-world operation and it was being tasked with a mission that required flying helicopters across 600 miles of hostile territory, refueling in the Iranian desert, assaulting an embassy in the capital of a hostile country and extracting 52 American civilians under fire. The plan was extraordinarily complex. Helicopters would fly from an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf to a desert staging area called Desert One, refuel from waiting C-130 transport aircraft and then carry the assault force to a second staging area near Tehran from which Delta would launch the final assault on the embassy. It was the unit's first real-world mission and it ended in disaster before Delta even made it to Tehran. Three of the eight helicopters failed during a sandstorm. The mission was aborted. During the withdrawal, a helicopter collided with a transport plane on the ground killing eight American servicemen. Delta Force never made it to Tehran. The hostages were eventually released through diplomatic channels nearly a year later. Eagle Claw was a catastrophic failure. A humiliation that damaged American prestige around the world, cost the lives of eight American servicemen and ended the political career of a sitting president. But it led directly to the creation of United States Special Operations Command and a complete modernization of American special operations. Every elite unit in the American military today, every SEAL team, every Ranger battalion, every Green Beret A team, every Delta squadron, operates under a command structure that was built because of what went wrong at Desert One. The men who died that night did not die for nothing. In October 1993, Delta Force operators were in Mogadishu, Somalia as part of Task Force Ranger. Their mission was to capture two lieutenants of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid whose militia had been attacking United Nations humanitarian operations and killing American peacekeepers. What was supposed to be a 30-minute daylight raid became one of the longest and most brutal urban combat engagements in modern American military history. The mission became the Battle of Mogadishu. 15 hours of continuous combat in the narrow streets of the Somali capital against thousands of armed militia fighters who poured into the battle area from every direction. Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by rocket-propelled grenades. American forces on the ground had to fight their way to the crash sites to rescue the crews and recover the bodies of the dead. At the second crash site, with militia fighters closing in and no ground forces able to reach the location, two Delta operators volunteered to be inserted from another helicopter to protect the wounded pilot who was still alive inside the wreckage. Their names were Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart. They knew when they volunteered that they would almost certainly not survive. Their commanders knew it, too. They were inserted anyway. Gordon and Shughart fought off waves of attackers for over an hour. They used every weapon they had. They used every magazine of ammunition. When they ran out of their own ammunition, they took rifles from dead militia fighters and kept fighting. They held the crash site until they were both killed. The pilot they were defending, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, was captured alive and later released. Gordon and Shughart were both posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. They were the first soldiers in the United States military to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. Their names are remembered. Their sacrifice is remembered. And every Delta Force operator since has carried the weight of what they did. In December 2003, Delta operators from C Squadron located Saddam Hussein hiding in a small farmhouse near his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq. Operation Red Dawn began on the evening of December 14th when Delta operators and supporting Army units searched two suspected hiding locations based on intelligence developed over months of careful interrogation and source recruitment. The first location produced nothing. At the second location, a rundown farmhouse on a small compound, the operators searched the buildings and came up empty. They were preparing to leave. And then one of the Delta operators kicked aside a piece of flooring near the entrance and exposed a spider hole hidden in the dirt. A hole barely big enough for a man to fit into. Saddam Hussein, the former dictator of Iraq, the man who had ruled the country with absolute brutality for decades, the man the entire United States military had been hunting for 8 months, emerged from that hole. He was disheveled, bearded and armed with a Glock 18C pistol. The Delta operator struck him in the face with the stock of his rifle, disarmed him before he could pull the trigger and took him into custody. No shots were fired. No one on either side was injured in the capture. The most wanted man in the world was taken alive by a Delta Force operator whose name will never be publicly known in an operation that lasted less than 6 hours from start to finish. Level six, the missions that did not. For every Delta mission that has been declassified, there are dozens that have not. Operations in countries where America was not officially at war. Hostage rescues that were never reported in the news. Targeted strikes against terrorist leaders whose deaths were attributed to drone strikes or local forces to maintain deniability. Counter-proliferation missions against weapons programs the public does not know exist. These operations are conducted under classification levels so high that the existence of the missions themselves is secret. You deploy to places whose names you will carry to your grave. You conduct operations that are authorized directly by the President of the United States through classified findings. You work alongside intelligence agency officers in operations that blur the line between military action and espionage. You rescue hostages the public will never learn were taken. You eliminate threats the public will never learn existed. And when the mission is complete, you fly home on an unmarked aircraft, you hug your wife, you play with your children and you never say a word about what you did or where you did it. Not to your spouse, not to your closest friends, not to other soldiers who do not have the clearance to know. The silence is part of the job. It is the hardest part for many operators. Harder than the combat, harder than the selection, harder than OTC. Because you live a life full of moments that matter more than anything most people ever experience. And you cannot share a single one of them with the people you love. The toll on Delta operators is severe in ways that most civilians cannot begin to imagine. Marriages end at rates that are significantly higher than the general population and significantly higher than even conventional combat units. Children grow up seeing their fathers for weeks at a time between deployments. And when their fathers are home, the men are often too exhausted and too haunted to fully be present. Operators develop post-traumatic stress from operations they cannot discuss even with the cleared therapist the unit provides. And the waiting list for a cleared therapist who can hear classified details is often months long. Some operators drink too much to quiet the voices in their heads at night. Some self-destruct quietly over years, slowly, in ways that look like nothing from the outside until it is too late. Some die in training accidents because live fire training at the level Delta conducts is inherently more dangerous than most actual combat. And every operator who has been through OTC knows someone who was killed during a training exercise that went wrong. And some die in classified missions that the Department of Defense will never publicly confirm happened in countries that the American public does not know had American forces operating in them. Their names are added to a memorial wall inside the unit compound at Fort Bragg. Their families are told they died in a helicopter crash, or a vehicle accident, or during a training exercise. The real story of how they died is classified. Sometimes even their families never learn the truth. Delta Force operators are the most highly trained small unit soldiers in the United States military. They are pulled from the best conventional and special operations units in the army. They survive a selection process that washes out 90% of candidates. They complete a training course that washes out half of those who remain. And they conduct missions in some of the most dangerous places on Earth under levels of classification that mean most of their work will never be acknowledged. They are the people you call when there is no other option. When the hostage has hours to live. When the terrorist is in a country nobody is allowed to enter. When the president needs something done that cannot be discussed in any congressional hearing. And when it is done, they come home, they say nothing, and they wait for the next call. If you made it this far, subscribe and drop a comment telling me how far you would make it. And check out our video on every level of an agent for the agency that does not exist. I'll see you in the next one.