Shadow Wolves Hunt Bin Laden
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Military, The War On Terrorism
Catching Bin Laden is serious stuff, but honestly, the only reason I’m posting the following story is because it sounded cool.
WASHINGTON: An elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan’s borders.The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units. [...]
The unit has earned international respect for its tracking skills in the Arizona desert. It was founded in the early 1970s to curb the flow of marijuana into the US from Mexico and has since tracked people-smugglers across hundreds of square kilometres of the Tohono O’odham tribal reservation, southwest of Tucson.
Harold Thompson, a Navajo Indian, and Gary Ortega, from the Tohono reservation, are experts at “cutting sign”, the traditional Indian method of finding and following minute clues from a barren landscape. They can detect twigs snapped by passing humans or hair snagged on a branch and tell how long a sliver of food may have lain in the dirt.
And with a name like Shadow Wolves my only other question is, “When’s the movie coming out?”
This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 and is filed under Military, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 12th, 2007 at 11:39 am
As far as the movies go, it took 60 years for one to made about the Navajo Code Talkers. It seems that was because it took that long for those documents to be declassified. Message here, don’t hold you breath.
Real life today is pretty confusing. Why weren’t they brought in after bin Laden had “miraculously escaped” after being surrounded 3 times early in the war? Oh, I forgot. Bush later informed us that bin Laden & Omar were not that important. My belief is the trackers are probably being sent “new information” to mislead them away from where he is most likely to be. After all, why should bin Laden be any more important now than he was a couple years ago?
March 12th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Well, it’s about time they’re making wonderful use of my tribesmen. I am from the Navajo reservation. Although I do not support the war, I jokingly asked my sister a couple years ago why they weren’t recruiting trackers from our reservation to hunt down Bin Laden. Turns out it’s not a joke. Glad to see that people from my tribe are receiving recognition for using century-old techniques, but I think the government should re-focus the Native American Shadow Wolves’ tracking skills for other things such as searching for kidnapped children, or lost hikers, etc.
March 13th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Right on, Cindy!