Stand Watie said:
for the life of me I can't remember whether he was "Force recon" or whether there is a less well known or prestigious Marine unit that also calls themselves something extremely similar like "Marine reconnasainse"
That'd be guys like me.
In the Marines there are two Reconnaissance elements in each Division. One Force Recon Company and one Recon Battalion.
I was in Echo Company, 4th Recon Bn, 4th MARDIV. The 4th Marine Division is the reserve Division, made up of folks who know how to negotiate with their recruiters and like to sleep in beds that don't float 12 months out of the year.
When I went in, 0321 Reconnaissance Man was a secondary MOS, for example I was an 0311 Rifleman when I finished my initial training at SOI, they also have a lot of billet openings for commo guys.
Once you go to recon school, Amphib Rcn Sch is the East Coast iteration, Basic Rn Course is the Hollywood version, or like me get the MOS OTJ after some "recon short course" packages and a year of hard training; you have access to all the cool schools. Airborne School (where it's a few Marine Recon and Anglico guys, some Navy BUDS, SBU and EOD and AF CC's and PJ's - all "high-speed" types who tend to stick together amidst the mass of mooing Army infantry
), Combatant Diver, Pathfinder, SERE, Ranger, HRST, Loadmaster, Jumpmaster, Coxswain's course, and, for guys in a sniper billet Scout/Sniper. One of the ongoing changes in unit organization was whether BN recon would have sniper teams in it. That was fun to live through.
The main difference between the unit types is mission. The Force platoon is a deep recon unit operating hundreds of kilometers forward of the FEBA (Force teams were in the desert chasing Scuds and in Baghdad for Gulf 1 IIRC). They also have a "direct action" mission like the other special forces types which is why they have always trained in door kicking and had the snipers.
The Recon BN mission was "to provide pre-assault and deep post-assault reconnaissance in support of the Division commander". Everything from beach surveys to jumping in 30-40 klicks behind enemy lines (about our doctrinal limit). Each Bn's Recon companies were typically assigned to an infantry Bn or a MEU and then were broken up into their discreet teams as required to support individual units or elements. We uniformly operated well behind the FEBA, typically outside the arty fan and thus emphasized comm and call for fire (especially air). Comm failure is mission failure. Route Recon, point recon on particular targets, locating possible LZ's and HLZ's, demo missions on bridges and the like. All sorts of fun stuff. Usually involving lots of climbing of hills with redundant batterys.
The missions are fluid and as the basic skill set is pretty uniform between Force and Bn guys (lots of cross pollination) it's hard to point out where one unit starts and the other stops. Especially with wartime needs.
Anyway, we delivered the info. Since I managed to miss the wars I spent a lot of time jumping and diving (coxswain, bad eyes) on your tax dollars.
