Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:49 | "You can't go." Don Feeney was a Green Beret on an A-Team and he had asked his team sergeant about this new unit that was forming, the Delta Force. Well, that just made him more determined to get in on this new unit. After a little recon of the compounds in the area, he located them and inserted himself to become one of the original members.
Keywords : Don Feeney Delta Force counter-terrorism Reconnaissance (RECON) Smoke Bomb Hill Country Grimes Mel Wick physical training (PT) Charles Beckwith Dick Meadows Bucky Burrus Special Air Service (SAS) Mobility Team Steyr-Puch Pinzgauer
The war movies and TV shows of Don Feeney's youth inspired him to join the Army at seventeen in 1970. He started out in the 82nd Airborne but the reformation of the Rangers caused him to go that direction. That was where he was made into a real soldier.
Don Feeney first went to Sudan to train their counter-terrorism unit along with another Delta Force member. They wrapped up their work and came home to Fort Bragg. Then he was told, pack your stuff, you're going back. Why? Five American missionaries had been taken hostage. You need to go get them.
The role for Delta Force in the Grenada operation involved a night assault. They prepped and waited on the runway. And they waited and they waited. Finally, after the State Department was finished messing everything up, they moved out in daylight and their helicopters were badly shot up. Don Feeney's craft had the least damage and they landed to assist the team members who were shot down.
After a career as a paratrooper, a Ranger, a Green Beret and a member of the elite Delta Force, Don Feeney retired from the service and started his own consulting company. Their specialty was training security personnel but they developed another service, recovering children who had been wrongly taken by a foreign parent.
